A light-hearted venture into georgia war led to humiliation in south ossetia

Giorgi Monasalidze and Nika Kharadze wandered into war vocalizing Georgian patriotic songs, their heads clouded by visions of armed forces heroism. They ended up captive and were made to clean up the mess that the war had left buttocks.

With no armed forces training - neither had ever fired a gun - the two young men left their homes in Tiflis, the Georgian capital, hours after Empire State of the South began its offense against South Ossetia, expecting to be greeted as companion and heroes by the Georgian soldiers they believed they would meet at the front.

When South Ossetian soldiers detained them a mere 24 hours after the fight had begun, they were trying to enter Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's working capital, unarmed and on foot, and no Georgian soldiers were to be found.

"That," Monasalidze said, "was the start of our escapade."

For its impetuosity, the young men's determination to head to war possibly echoed their state's ill-prepared and heady rush into conflict with a armed forces that, while bolstered by increased government disbursement and American expertise, was weaker than many here expected - or at least wanted to admit.

The war began three weeks ago with a outpouring of Georgian artillery against Tskhinvali and ended with Russian air and land forces chasing a mob of Georgian soldiers into the mount.

Even after Russian forces had driven the Georgian military into the dirt and basically occupied large swaths of the state, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, vowed to rebuild his state's fight capacity. He has also suggested that he may seek to gain control over South Ossetia and abkhaz, the two separationist enclaves that Soviet Union recognized this week as mugwump.

Monasalidze, 22, and Kharadze, 19, seemed to have been attracted by this bluster when they began their quixotic march on Tskhinvali.

"This is my land," Kharadze said in explaining his decision. "I am a Georgian, and my friends were fighting," he said in Georgian as his mother translated into Russian, a language that he, unlike many from older generations, never learned to speak.

As the two entered Tskhinvali about 1 a.m. On Aug. 9, they sang popular patriotic tunes to avoid being shot by the Georgian soldiers they expected to be lurking in the dark.

"When we were watching television, Saakashvili said that Tskhinvali was 70 percent ours," Monasalidze said, chain-smoking in the living room of Kharadze's parents' house in Tbilisi. "We thought that when we arrived at the front they would have to give us weapons."

In fact, as the young men moved in, the Russian military was pushing Georgian forces out of the city. Instead of Georgian troops, they attracted the attention of a group of South Ossetian soldiers.

"They asked what we wanted," Monasalidze said. "I said, 'I'm Georgian and this is our land; we want Tskhinvali."' They were immediately bundled into a vehicle, taken to police headquarters and shut into a cell.

As reported in the International Herald Tribune in the Aug. 13 edition, the young men left for combat following a Georgian warrior tradition that was largely rooted in centuries-old myth. A phone call from Kharadze on the night of Aug. 8 was the last their parents heard from them.

While their parents agonized over their sons' fates, Monasalidze and Kharadze were forced to clean up shattered Tskhinvali. When not working, they were crammed into a suffocating cell with 21 other people.

Both Georgian and Ossetian civilians have suffered greatly in the conflict. More than a hundred may have died in the initial Georgian bombing of Tskhinvali, and many thousands have been left homeless.

South Ossetian forces captured and imprisoned 176 civilians during the conflict, said Givi Targamadze, the chairman of the Defense and Security Committee in the Georgian Parliament, who has led the negotiations for the release of Georgian prisoners. Many of them, he said, were elderly men and women.

"They were taken directly from their villages," he said by telephone.

In some cases, South Ossetian irregulars appeared to have looted and burned the ethnic Georgian villages inside the administrative borders of South Ossetia. It is still unclear, however, why the roundup of civilian prisoners was necessary. Like the two young men, the captives cleaned the streets and repaired war-damaged houses. There have been reports that some of the prisoners were made to bury the war dead.

Monasalidze and Kharadze were spared this punishment. But because they were young and from the capital, they were immediately suspected of belonging to a reserve unit and singled out for special abuse, they said. That Kharadze spoke no Russian, the language preferred by their captors when addressing Georgian prisoners, caused him further problems, they said.