EVERY DAY, a few metres from the small house he shares with his grandparents, Malkhaz Kurtayev crawls under rolls of razor wire and into another country. Or at least that is what the Russian troops who observe his daily journey, and who created this jagged borderline, would call it.
Kurtayev lives in Bobnevi, a village divided by the boundary between territory controlled by the Georgian government 60km down the road in Tbilisi, and that claimed by the separatist South Ossetians in their capital Tskhinvali, a similar distance the other way.
In August 2008, a conflict that had been “frozen” since the early 1990s erupted into war between Georgia and Russia, as Tbilisi’s military launched an assault to reclaim control of the rebel region and Moscow responded by pouring troops across the Caucasus to drive it back.
Russia won, and recognised South Ossetia as an independent state while stationing thousands of its own soldiers there and exerting ever tighter control on its political and economic life.
The conflict claimed several hundred lives and showed the world how far Russia would go to defend its interests in the former Soviet Union, especially when challenged by a country such as Georgia, which has ambitions to join the EU and Nato.
Kurtayev (22) says he was in South Ossetian territory before the war, but rather than fight for the rebels he fled to the neighbouring Russian region of North Ossetia, where he stayed with relatives.
He came a few months ago to Bobnevi, a village with a mixed population of Georgians and Ossetians who say they get on fine with each other, despite the bitter differences between Georgia and Russia, and the latter’s allies in Tskhinvali.
Those differences shape Kurtayev’s daily life, since the Russian troops that guard South Ossetian territory unfurled razor wire hundreds of metres inside an agreed boundary line that is patrolled by EU monitors, and he must crawl under it to reach the rest of the village.
In some ways, Kurtayev’s predicament encapsulates this conflict. His first name is typically Georgian, his surname Ossetian, and he has a Georgian mother and Ossetian father. He also has birth certificates from both sides, but neither a Georgian nor Russian passport. And he lives in a mixed village split by a border that only Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Tuvalu and Nauru recognise as a frontier between independent states.
“I’m avoiding the Georgian police because they’ll arrest me for coming across,” he said this week, as he talked with a friend and the EU monitors near the glinting wire. Just a few metres away was a camouflaged Russian observation post, similar to those on the hills that rise away from the village towards the snow-capped Caucasus peaks in the distance.
“The Russians see me cross every day and seem not to mind. They’ve caught some others and taken them to Tskhinvali to pay a fine, and then handed them over to Georgia.”
Prisoner releases are brokered by the EU monitors, sometimes with the help of the 56-nation Organisation for Security in Europe, which Ireland chairs this year. Next Friday, Dublin will host a high-level OSCE conference looking at South Ossetia and other protracted conflicts, and lessons that can be learned from Northern Ireland.
Moscow prevented the OSCE from working in Georgia and its rebel provinces after the war, accusing it of pro-Tbilisi bias, but the group does mediate at regular talks on the conflict.
Russia has given passports to residents of South Ossetia and insists it will stay there – and in another separatist Georgian region, Abkhazia – to protect locals from possible attack.
“Russian forces could be in Tbilisi in 30 minutes. We would have almost no warning time of an attack. It is like someone holding a knife to your neck,” said Shota Utiashvili, a spokesman for Georgia’s interior ministry, who believes Moscow now has about 6,500 troops and state-of the-art weaponry in South Ossetia.
Irakli Porchkhidze, Georgia’s deputy minister for reintegration of the breakaway provinces, said Russia was “still the number one threat to Georgia’s existence”.
“Where we are sitting now, in this office in the middle of Tbilisi, is within range of Russian artillery [in South Ossetia],” he added.
“Russia is not an imminent threat, but it is a threat. If Russia thinks there would not be a high price to pay, internationally, for an aggressive move, then it could try something again.”
For Kurtayev and his neighbours, Georgians and Ossetians, a more pressing problem is being unable to tend fields and animals, or visit friends and family, without risking arrest in the fluid boundary area.
“I don’t know who’s fault all this is,” he said. “I’d just like to be able to go where I want.”
