Nikolaj Nielsen
Nikolaj Nielsen's work has appeared on opendemocracy and Pambazuka News websites and in the New Internationalist. Based in France, he has a Master's in Journalism and specialises in war and conflict reporting.
Broken Georgian promises to refugees
When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili traveled to the Georgian-Abkhaz ceasefire line last year, he promised a crowd of Georgian refugees their return to Abkhazia within a year. But Saakashvili's promises to Georgian refugees rang hollow, even before the current crisis. A combined total of some 250,000 Georgians fled Abkhazia following the 1992-1994 war and the two-week war in 1998. Any prospect of their return has now been lost. Instead, Tbilisi's military venture and Russia's disproportionate response in South Ossetia has augmented the number of internally displaced people in and around Georgia's breakaway states by 100,000, according to the U.N. refugee agency, UNCHR. ...
Abkhazia's civilians, caught between two machine guns
Mzevinari and her husband Guladi have lost all hope of ever returning home. The mountains of Abkhazia, only 5 km (3 miles) away from the tiny border town of Rukhi in the Caucasian nation of Georgia, loom omnipotent in the background. Their snowy peaks serve as constant reminders of an unreachable summit. The longing to go back to Abkhazia - in the northwest of Georgia, on the Black Sea - is just as unattainable as a job and a proper roof. All are fond memories from another life, before 1992, when then Georgian President Eduard Shevardnazde started a war with Abkhazia to quell talk of separatism. ...
