EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - Post-War, Georgia's Displaced Villagers Start New Life

EURASIA INSIGHT

POST-WAR, GEORGIA’S DISPLACED VILLAGERS START NEW LIFE
Giorgi Lomsadze 11/13/08
This story was amended on November 14 to clarify the types of housing under construction.

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Twenty minutes outside of Tbilisi, farmer Temur Leonidze is maintaining a 24-hour vigil outside a Lego-like town of tiny, red-roofed cottages. With his own village now in South Ossetian hands, Leonidze, like thousands of other Georgians displaced by the August war with Russia, sees the Georgian government’s newly built hamlets as his best bet for a normal life.

"I want to make sure I get a house here," said 42-year-old Leonidze, who sleeps in his car outside of Tserovani, at 2,100 houses, the largest village in the program. "These houses may not be great, but anything beats collective centers."

Since August 8, when he fled his village to escape advancing Russian troops, Leonidze has been living with his family in a Tbilisi kindergarten. South Ossetian militia have since moved into the village, Perevi, in Imereti, and he is afraid to return.

"The kindergarten is crammed with people from all over [Shida Kartli]," Leonidze said. "We’re getting a daily ration of macaroni and rice, some blankets, but that place is anything but home."

The Georgian government is spending some 190 million lari (roughly $134 million) to put an estimated 24,000 people into some 7,000 cottages in three villages and several converted buildings, according to the Ministry of Refugees and Settlement. Each two-bedroom house, constructed at a cost of $20,000, will hold one four-person family each. A construction worker in Tserovani described the buildings as "very basic." Plans for a school and a paper factory are also reportedly in the works.

Minister of Refugees and Settlement Koba Subeliani said that all Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) will move into Tserovani and the new hamlets of Shashvebi and Aghaiani by December. Construction workers are reportedly working day and night shifts to make that deadline. A total of 24 housing sites, a list that includes the renovation of public buildings and construction of additional houses in existing villages, are under development.

"We have already moved 390 families into some of the settlements and collective centers and the moving-in continues gradually," Subeliani said. Each IDP will find in his new house or apartment an assistance kit that includes a frying pan, bedding and 200 lari (about $141) per capita, he added.

But while happy to swap their bleak shelters in public schools or other state-owned facilities for the houses, IDPs like Leonidze are also steeling for a potentially long stay away from home.

Leonidze is among some 30,000 people tagged by aid agencies as "displaced for the long term." While reportedly most of the estimated 190,000 IDPs have now poured back to their villages, such a homecoming remains a distant prospect for those 30,000 individuals from formerly Georgian-controlled villages now under separatist and Russian control.

As construction races to a finish, the village-building strategy has already raised concerns about the durability of the housing, whether or not the villages can accommodate all the IDPs, and, critically, whether this long-term solution will become a permanent one. Georgia already has thousands of IDPs from breakaway Abkhazia who have been living in shelters for almost 20 years.

Subeliani, however, fervently rejected such a possibility. "Everyone has to go back," he insisted. "When the moment comes, they can sell these houses and go back with dignity."

How to decide who gets to live in the new villages and who ends up in a remodeled public building is another potentially divisive concern. According to Subeliani, every attempt will be made to keep together residents from conflict-zone villages. "We will move all residents of one village into one area," he said. "We hope that it will make for an easier psychological assimilation with the new environment."

One source closely involved in the IDP resettlement program noted that ensuring the government’s energetic backing for the process is critical. "It has proven in other international crises that hosting happens organically, but if you don’t support it, it starts to deteriorate," said the aid advisor, who spoke on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to discuss the matter with the press.

Minister Subeliani insisted that the resettlement is only a temporary solution, but as electricity lines are laid in Tserovani and a grid of streets takes shape, some IDPs are growing used to the idea that their pre-war houses may be lost for good.

"Some people are happy to move into a house instead of living in drudgery in a collective center," said Natela, a school teacher from Tamarasheni, a formerly Georgian-controlled village outside of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. "But what I read between the lines here -- and nobody is going to put it straight to us -- is that nobody will make any effort to bring us home."

Editor's Note: Giorgi Lomsadze is a freelance reporter based in Tbilisi.

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