Email 
Print 
Georgia's displaced top 150,000, U.N. says
Written by: Ruth Gidley
U.N. agencies say almost 160,000 people have been forced out of their homes in Georgia and the breakaway region of South Ossetia by fighting between Georgia and Russia. After reaching the town of Gori in central Georgia on Sunday - the first time U.N. organisations had got into the city since it was captured by Russian forces as they fanned out from South Ossetia into the Georgian heartland - staff from the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, estimated that 30,000 people had fled within South Ossetia, plus almost 99,000 in the rest of Georgia. Another 30,000 were estimated to be displaced to Russia. The convoy from UNHCR and World Food Programme found Gori deserted apart form 50 to 60 people waiting in the town centre for assistance. They said both shops and private homes showed signs of wide-scale looting. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which compiles estimates from a range of agencies and government sources, said 40,000 people had been displaced from Gori alone. IDMC's own estimates put the number of displaced in the tens of thousands. The group says at least 80,000 ethnic Georgians and Ossetians have fled their homes, on top of 220,000 to 240,000 already displaced by conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s. Security around the region remains unpredictable. Earlier on the same day the UNHCR/WFP convoy made it to Gori, a UNHCR security mission was unble to get through via the same route. UNHCR said it couldn't verify media reports of thousands of Georgians fleeing to northwestern Turkey. Its staff in Ankara said they hadn't so far registered unusual movement across the Georgian-Turkish borders. With Georgia practically cut in two, UNHCR said it was planning to airlift aid to some 15,000 displaced people trapped in the western part of the country. And although summer temperatures in the disputed territories are now in the 30s Celsius (high 80s Fahrenheit), the U.N. agencies said they were already starting to plan for winter.
Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.
We welcome argument but AlertNet will not publish comments that are racist, abusive or libellous.
Leave a Reply
When you submit a comment to us we request your name, e-mail address and optionally a link to a website. Please note where you submit a website address, we may link to it via your name. By sending us a comment, you accept that we have the right to show the comment and your name to users. Although we require your email address, this will not be published on the site, and is only required to enable us to check facts with you, e.g. if you are making a claim we can not confirm easily. Additionally, if you would like your comment removed at anytime, you'll have to use this e-mail address when you contact us. To remove a comment at any time please e-mail us at blogs-(at)-reuters-(dot)-com (address obscured to avoid spam) specifying who you are and what you would like removed. We moderate all comments and will publish everything that advances the post directly or with relevant tangential information. We reserve the right to edit comments in order to maintain the quality of the comments, and may not include links to irrelevant material. We try not to publish comments that we think are offensive or appear to pass you off as another person, and we will be conservative if comments may be considered libelous. Reuters will use your data in accordance with Reuters privacy policy. Reuters Group is primarily responsible for managing your data. As Reuters is a global company your data will be transferred and available internationally, including in countries which do not have privacy laws but Reuters seeks to comply with its privacy policy.
Unlike some other content on this website, the written content in this article may be republished or redistributed by any means free of charge. Any use of photographs and graphics on this website is expressly prohibited. You must check whether written content contained in other articles on this website may be republished or redistributed without the express permission of Reuters or the relevant third party provider.
Ruth Gidley has been on the AlertNet team since late 1999. Before that, she lived in Guatemala, working first with a small local NGO and then as a journalist for a Central American news service. Ruth, who has a Masters in Latin American Studies, has edited a book on human rights in Guatemala, and written chapters for books on truth monuments and on Native American traditions.
