Guest Post from a Georgian refugee camp

Ben Judah is in Georgia. Read his post about arriving in Georgia. This is his guest post from a refugee camp.

The Man from Gori

Mirian wears ‘90s Reebok trainers, black badly-cut jeans and a lumberjack shirt of the worst imaginable quality. He is holding a rubbish sack filled with a few books, a family-photo album, more ugly clothes and a lock of his girlfriend’s hair wrapped in a green elastic band. He tries to speak English very quickly, over-annunciates the ‘o’ and spends half the time looking for a blue lighter he claims somebody has ‘stolen’ from him.

His mother died last Tuesday, from bowel-cancer. Over the week-end a group of Ossetian ‘irregulars’ broke down the door of his father’s apartment and informed them that due to the strategic view-point their balcony offered over the town of Gori their presence was now a ‘liability.’ One of them kicked in the glass door-pane of the old display cabinet to get his message across. He broke a china dog and a prized frame of his younger sister (all-in-pink) winning a local ballet contest. Sometime later that afternoon, probably when he passed out of his home-town towards Tibilsi through a check-point manned by inebriated Russians, Mirian realised he had become a refugee.

Three olive-green trucks unload their human cargo under plane trees on the outskirts of the city. He lets his rubbish-sack of belongings drop to the ground, so he can use his hands in this speech. I try to write down everything he says in my note-book, but I can’t record their shouting or draw his face. He stubs out his Yigor Light, looks for another one – but realises there are none left. Then his eyes stay still on mine. I stop note-taking.

“My cousin…was in the base…when they broke in and trashed it…he hid…in the boiler-room…and he heard them shouting…‘They’ve got everything…they’ve got all the equipment they could have dreamed of….and we’ve got nothing...’

“Then the Russians fell into a rage… they started to smash things up…their commander…couldn’t calm them down…and… and…they wouldn’t stop shouting… ‘we’ve got less than refugees…but we’ve won…we’ve won...we’ve won’

Then quite unexpectedly, he finds his blue lighter and begins to laugh.