Speaking at the 9th Session of the Human Rights Council which opened in Geneva on September 8 (and will continue till September 23), Russian envoy to the UN Valery Loshchinin condemned Georgia as the aggressor and charged it with ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia. Valery Loshchinin said the Russian intervention had prevented an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.

Visiting Tskhinvali after the five-day war makes one realize that the above is not an overstatement. Only those who have no idea what has happened in South Ossetia this August can demand to be shown a photo with 1,500 dead Ossetians on it (as some bloggers did recently).

The exact death toll is not yet known. 2,000 fatalities were mentioned during and immediately after the war, but the estimates were preliminary. As after any war, a lot of people are reported missing after the hostilities in South Ossetia. Georgians seized and took to unknown whereabouts dozens of people from several Ossetian villages. Oftentimes the dead were buried temporarily in courtyards and vegetable gardens during the Georgian assault as it was impossible to make it to the Tskhinvali cemetery because of the bombardment. Many of the survivors left Tskhinvali during and after the hostilities and it will take time to find out who was thus buried and where. It is known that there are some 20 residents out of 600 and 5 out of 150 left in the Ossetian villages of Khetagurovo and Tbet after the fighting.

The OCSE Mission’s Building was not hit, but its car was destroyed

On August 13 Alexander Bastrykin, chief of the Investigative Committee Under the Prosecution Service which is conducting an investigation in Tskhinvali and the nearby villages, said 134 civilian casualties had been documented. 59 Russian peacekeepers were also killed. The site of the commission responsible for the investigation of the crimes committed against South Ossetia’s population and providing assistance to it has published a list of 311 people who died as a result of the Georgian aggression. The list is based on the data supplied by the South Ossetian Prosecution Service and is being updated continuously. Information is also posted on where the people were killed and buried. In most cases, the places are Tskhinvali, Khetagurovo, and Tbet. The investigation in other Ossetian villages hit by the Georgian military machine – Dmenis, Tsinagar, and Mugut – has not yet reached the final phase. It is already clear that most of the people reported missing lived in these villages.

Already on August 28 South Ossetian Prosecutor Teymuraz Khugaev said the Georgian aggression had left 1,692 people dead and 1,500 wounded. Some 3,500 people whose relatives have been killed or residences destroyed are also recognized as victims. Khugaev says information on new burial sites is obtained daily and carefully verified.

Differences in reported numbers are no reason to play political games. Bastrykin says: “No legislation sets a floor for recognizing an aggression as genocide and a crime against the civilian population. More dead bodies are likely to remain under the ruins which have not yet been cleared. There is ample evidence that Georgian soldiers threw grenades into basements where civilians stayed during the assault. Predictably, the dead bodies over there were mutilated. The bodies of those who were killed when Georgian missiles hit residential quarters were often torn into pieces too”.

Destroyed Georgian armored vehicles in the streets of Tskhinval

These are some of the stories told by those who survived the Georgian aggression in South Ossetia in August, 2008.

“They attacked all of a sudden. We heard shooting and saw tanks rolling across the village. I could hardly believe my eyes. We were inside our house, then we ran to the gardens – where could we hide?” , says 70-year old Edward from the Ossetian village of Khetagurovo. He stayed in South Ossetia to watch over his family’s house and livestock, both of which were lost as a result of the attack. He says he is lucky to be alive, though. His neighbor Amiran Kabanov, another senior citizen from the same village, was shot to death in the back by a Georgian soldier while trying to catch a hen scared by the noises. “Some 400 of them moved into the village. They broke into houses searching for weapons and uniforms and yelled: where are the guerillas? They seemed to expect to see more armed people here than in Tskhinvali, but there were only old people and women left in the village”, says Kabanov.

“Unexpectedly, Georgians moved in and shooting began immediately” says Olga Tuaeva, 70, from Khetagurovo. “Five Georgian tanks were roaming around the village shooting point-blank at houses. People with machineguns followed the tanks. All of my neighbors fled when the shooting began. I lay face down in my vegetable garden, and Georgian soldiers passed by thinking I was dead. I was terrified. When the tanks appeared, I thought they were ours, but they started firing on the houses”.

Khetagurovo school teacher Valentina Valieva, 56, says: “There are 11 funerals in our village today. These are the remnants being taken from graves in vegetable gardens to the cemetery. One of the dead is my student Askhar Tomaev. He was such a nice kid. He and his friend were killed on the village outskirts. Georgian soldiers killed men, women, old people, and children alike. My colleague’s mother-in-law Nastya Dzhioeva decided to stay because she did not want to leave the house. She was killed right at her doorstep. Efim Bekoev was a student supervisor at our school. Georgians came to his place, killed him and destroyed his house. I am not sure how many people were killed… The whole street is devastated – they fired on houses and demolished them with tanks”. Valentina saw her sister-in-law Tamara Mamieva who used to be a teacher of Russian in a Georgian school get killed when a shell ruined her house.

“Their tanks moved into the village”, says Alan, 55, from Tbet. “They were shooting randomly in all directions, killing whoever they could. Nobody knows how many people were killed or wounded when the shooting began as people fled to the forest and then wherever they could. Georgians shot those who were trying to escape and killed the wounded. We heard people crying. We were hiding in the basement, deep inside – we knew they’d kill us if they saw us. We were afraid they would throw a grenade into the basement. Georgians burned down several cars and shot at people on the outskirts of the village”. “You see, there is coagulated blood on the back seat of the car, and grey hair on the back. Here they killed an old lady”, says an officer from the south Ossetian Prosecution Service inspecting a car with a bullet-ridden front window. Several other cars, by which Ossetians attempted to flee from the bombarded village, were crushed flat by Georgian tanks.

One of the basements where Ossetian civilian were hiding

Salimat Gagloeva, 64, from Sarabuk says she literally faced the Georgians who invaded the Ossetian village. “There were quite a few of them with machineguns standing by our fence. They shouted telling us to get out. I said we are simple people and asked to leave us well alone. A woman from the house next to ours also tried to talk to them. They told us to walk out to the courtyard. We did. Then they took us to their chief who was to decide what to do about us. We begged to let us go. I was shaking with fear. They took us upstairs. They said they had a remedy that would cure us real quick. We kept begging… We fled when they were not watching us. Those who did not flee were killed”. Were this elderly lady and her neighbors really a threat to Georgia’s “constitutional order”?

Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, was hit particularly hard by the Georgian missiles and artillery. A city with practically no industrial zones and few administrative buildings, Tskhinvali is almost one total residential area. Georgian military were hammering it, clearly being aware that they were inflicting numerous civilian casualties. “Georgians knew the city very well, they were fully aware they were targeting residential quarters”, says Irina Tedeeva, 24, who survived several days of the bombardment in a basement. “Their spies were picking targets for the strikes”.

There was no mercy for anyone. Eight-months pregnant Malvina Tskhovrebova, 35, was killed by a blast in her courtyard. The blast also killed her unborn child. Her body lay in the courtyard for three days as the bombardment was so intense that her relatives could not burry the woman.

“We stayed in the basement for three days” says Lyudmila Tedeeva, 68. Her address used to be 89 Telman Street, which has been entirely destroyed. “They were firing over open sights and sure knew that they were killing civilians”.

All that remained of Telman Street…

Practically any Ossetian who survived the war has a similar story to tell. Deaths, humiliation, and cruelty were brought to South Ossetia by the Georgian army. Bastrykin says the victims’ accounts – over 5,000 of those have already been recorded – show that the Georgian military deliberately killed the people of the Ossetian nationality.

Flechette shells and other munitions seized from the Georgian army

"It has been fully established that between August 7 and 12, Georgia's armed forces invaded the territory of the unrecognized republic with the aim of fully annihilating the Ossetian ethnic group living in South Ossetia," Bastrykin told Interfax. The chief of the Investigative Committee says they spared nobody and hundreds of houses have been destroyed in Tskhinvali and in a number of villages - the aggressor erased them from the face of the earth to leave no trace of the Ossetians’ having lived in these territories.

The occupants were open about their objectives and the way they felt about the Ossetian people.

“They were damning Ossetians all the time”, says Zaira Tedeeva, 62, who was in the Georgian army’s captivity. “They wished the entire Ossetian kinship to become extinct”.

“They kept shooting non-stop”, says Klaudia Kabulova from the Ossetian village of Sarabuk. “They said we were in their hands and would be like slaves”.

“Swines, I have no other name for them”, says Valentina Valieva. “I would not even call them fascists. It takes a new term, it is something worse than fascism… If it is not recognized as genocide, then the world must be crazy”.

Did they die for the American value system?..

“Frankly speaking, what we have seen is far beyond the scope of human understanding”, says Bastrykin. “I really do not know anything comparable to the crimes committed by Georgia in South Ossetia. Perhaps, the fascist crimes during World War II. The materials of the investigation currently comprise 100 volumes, and this is only the initial phase”.

The investigators looking into the murder of civilians in South Ossetia have already amassed some 5,000 pieces of material evidence which will be used to take the perpetrators to account in criminal and international courts.