ments again, still overflowing with refugees. ‘The emergency relief for refugees is luckily better organised now,’ he says. The current refugees from Kodori - there are only a few hundred - have been accommodated in old Greek villages. After the Cold War, the ethnic Greek minority was invited to re-emigrate to Greece. With money from the World Bank, the houses were bought up and renovated. The Georgian government is doing everything in its power to make the refugees feel at home in Georgia. Abkhazia may well make a good impression on the Svans in Kodori, but keeps its borders closed for the hundreds of thousands of Georgian refugees. It is not in Georgia’s strategic interest that the refugees return to Kodori. Not for nothing is the former mayor so certain that no one will return. From the snowy valleys and mountains of the Caucasus to the sweltering steppes of South Georgia, the transition for the refugees from Kodori is significant. The warm air quivers above an endless landscape with few trees. The roads are dusty and water is scarce. It bears no resemblance at all to the lush Caucasus around Kodori. ‘No, we’re not happy here,’ Madona Chkhvimiani F (36) makes clear to us. ‘It’s spring but it’s already too hot. We belong in the mountains.’ In house after house we have to report on the state of the houses and livestock in Kodori. They are curious to hear about the nut trees and the snow. ‘We actually didn’t see any livestock,’ we say. ‘Ah, you see,’ someone says, ‘it’s now in Sukhumi.’ Everyone we speak to wants to go back to Kodori. ‘I’d like to go back now, I hate being a victim,’ says Daeroghan Guyeyiani G, another refugee from Kodori. ‘I don’t know how people can live here without water nearby. But if you go back, you have to hand over half your income to Sukhumi. I’ll only go back if Georgia can guarantee my safety.’
F G
‘We can only return when Russia leaves Abkhazia,’ Madona echoes the government’s position. ‘We don’t blame our government. Saakashvili can’t do anything about it. The Russians are unreliable.’
Kodori Gorge
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