Orthodox Easter was celebrated on April 15 in Georgia. This year, Misha Tabatadze could not join in the traditional pilgrimage to visit the graves of loved ones. He could not light a candle in the cemetery where his daughter, Etuna, is buried, or place a brightly dyed red egg on her grave.
Tabatadze was among the thousands of ethnic Georgians who were caught up in the 2008 Georgian-Russian war, a conflict that revolved around the breakaway region of South Ossetia. The defeat suffered by Georgian forces in that conflict means that Tabatadze cannot visit his family’s graves in the hamlet of Avnevi, just inside South Ossetian territory, due to travel limitations on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Instead, for most of the past four years, he has traveled to Istanbul to give candles to a South Ossetian friend to light in memory of his daughter, who died at the age of six from eye surgery complications.
The restriction on visits by Georgian passport holders, imposed by South Ossetia’s de-facto government, has been in place since the end of the 2008 war. It has hampered not only graveyard visits, but trips to see relatives, engage in trade or, even, to tend crops. “Very basic things,” said Zurab Bendiashvili, an activist working on Georgian-South Ossetian issues with the Coalition for the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, a Tbilisi-based non-governmental organization.
The difficulties even concern access to water. In Odzisi, the closest Georgian-controlled village to separatist-held South Ossetia, villagers have lived without running water for almost four years. When Russian and South Ossetian forces seized the surrounding area in 2008, Odzisi lost access to the region’s Soviet-era water system. The pumping station is situated based two kilometers away in Akhalgori, a formerly Georgian-controlled village in South Ossetia.
Only Georgians who are registered to live in Akhalgori can cross the separatist-manned checkpoint to keep an eye on their houses and land.
In the past, some have tried to dodge checkpoints to gather firewood or to track down stray cattle. But after several Georgians were detained, including three men in 2011, few in Odzisi now appear interested in taking the risk.
Risks or no risks, there’s still the tradition of honoring ancestors. Attempts to cross the border tend to increase during holidays like Easter, noted Medea Turashvili, an analyst for the International Crisis Group (IGG) in Tbilisi. “[T]hey want to check the graveyards,” Turashvili said. “The graveyard is something very traditional. … In our society, it means a lot. It is kind of your link to your family, your link to the past.”
There are no official figures on how many families have been separated from family members by the conflict. Bendiashvili, an IDP from Tskhinvali, estimates that “several dozen or 100” families ended up being split apart by the war. Even more are separated from their ancestors’ graves. “[People] should be able to go there,” he said, in reference to South Ossetia, where his mother is buried. “We say, looking at that, eventually these issues have to be resolved.”
Resolution, however, appears hard to come by.
South Ossetians do cross into Georgian-controlled territory; sometimes for medical help, sometimes for shopping. While Tbilisi imposes no restrictions on such crossings, Ossetians are often worried about how they will be treated there, and what negative repercussions they could face for their trip once they return back home.
A 2010 ICG report noted that the “ tough regulations limiting freedom of movement” are proving as large an obstacle as “post-war trauma and perceptions of wrongdoing” for restoring communication between the two sides.
Meanwhile, Georgian, South Ossetian and Russian negotiators have met in Ergneti, outside of Tskhinvali, 21 times since the 2008 war, but have yet to agree on procedures that would allow families on both sides of the contested border to reunite.
The latest meeting, on March 20, focused on the need to travel to cemeteries, according to a brief statement from the European Union Monitoring Mission. The meeting was reportedly held in a “business-like atmosphere,” but it did not produce an agreement that could enable Tabatadze spend Easter at the gravesite of his daughter.
Instead, the Tabatadzes mourned their daughter from their makeshift IDP home in a deserted preschool in Tbilisi. “I could be [at the cemetery] in an hour in my car,” Misha Tabatadze related, with a grimace. “[Each Easter,] my wife seems to die since she cannot go and cry at the gravesite,” he said. “I would not wish that on an enemy.”
Using materials of the site the reference on GINSC with the indication of the author is obligatory The Portal GINSC is supported by the Kvinna til Kvinna Foundation
