Killed in Tskhinvali

Yesterday there was mourning in Russia for those killed in the Caucasus. There, in Ossetia, this mourning continues. Officials have said and will say many more words that are appropriate to say on days like these.

And this is right: the most that the living can do for the departed is to remember them. About everyone and everyone separately. Calling separately and by name.

All the past days this was not enough. Yes, they talked about the “Grad” above the city, about people hiding in the basements who were killed there - but there were no names. These stories were impersonal. There were no reports about individual people who lived and were later killed.

These were the testimonies of refugees who were placed in boarding houses and camps in Alagir and Java.

People, for example, said that the bodies of the dead were lying on the streets. However, it later became clear that they themselves did not see these people, they could not say which of their friends was killed like that on the street, but they heard about the lying bodies from other refugees.

When people were asked how many people died in Tskhinvali, they said: “One thousand four hundred... one thousand six hundred... two thousand...” They repeated what they had just heard on TV.

This is the property of people - to believe, to repeat, to talk not about what they have seen themselves, but about what they “know”, what they have discussed many times with others, what they have heard from an “authoritative source”.

This always happens in “hot spots”.

Yesterday, people gave exactly the same numbers to Human Rights Watch employees on the streets of Tskhinvali. Only the “security officials” shrugged their shoulders: “How do we know? Who counted?

However, there were people who believed. These are doctors from the hospital. The wounded were brought to them, and almost all the dead were also brought here - the doctors insist on this.

The hospital building was badly damaged, and doctors were forced to move to the basement, where they operated on the wounded all these days in inhumane conditions.

The hospital was hit by a Grad shell.

In general, residential areas of the city were heavily damaged - in many places, Human Rights Watch representatives saw damage characteristic of Grad and parts of the unguided missiles themselves.

It was also possible to find confirmation that Georgian tanks shot point-blank into the basements in which civilians were hiding.

Human rights activists carefully document all this evidence of crimes - after all, there will always be Putin who will ask: “Which person’s rights? Last names, addresses, appearances!

Accuracy is needed in everything - and above all in numbers.

So the hospital claims that during all the days of fighting they received two hundred and seventy-three wounded. Mostly those wounded in battle.

And forty-four bodies of dead civilians - locals, Ossetians. The doctors, I repeat, insist that if not all the bodies of the civilians killed in Tskhinvali were delivered to them, then almost all of them.

The bodies of the killed Georgian soldiers lay on the streets until the evening of August 13; only yesterday they began to pack them in bags. They say the prosecutor’s office will “work” with them.

But let's get back to the numbers.

Forty-four dead residents of Tskhinvali.

Several more could have died in hospitals in Java and North Ossetia, where the wounded were successively taken. Let me note that the number of wounded who arrived there corresponds to the figures mentioned in Tskhinvali.

There were some who were not taken to the hospital and were buried in the city itself.

There were people killed in Ossetian villages.

By summing up, we can get the total number of deaths. In the worst case, it will be several times larger. But not tenfold.

Another thing is also important: besides the information from doctors, there was simply no other information on which officials could rely in their statements about the number of civilian deaths. In peacetime, there are also statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but during the days of fighting, the police did not keep such calculations ...

Sometimes authorities use information from these services.

One can recall how the officially announced death toll in Nord-Ost on the morning of October 26, 2002 gradually increased, by the dozens. A formal justification for this can be found: “How many bodies were carried out by the rescuers, how many were taken into account by the doctors - that’s how many we call.”

In South Ossetia, large numbers were immediately named, based on unknown reasons.

Then they were repeated by Russian officials and Russian journalists.

It was these enormous human losses that justified the bombing of targets in Georgia and the deployment of troops to its territory. If every hour of delay cost the lives of one hundred civilians in Tskhinvali, then it was impossible to delay. What is defined by international law as “aggression” became “peace enforcement.”

These justifications and definitions are worth thinking about now that we finally have reliable information about the number of deaths.

...Just God forbid, if one of the journalists and “society” now adds “total...” to these figures. One killed is already too many. And the habit of noticing the dead only when their number is measured in large numbers with many zeros... I don’t even know what to call it.

The time will come when all those killed will be named. In Ossetia, mourning continues. Eternal memory...

The author is a board member of the Memorial Society