We are on the banks of the Enguri, on Shamgona island. On the other side of the river is Abkhazia. Sviadi and Lexo, two Georgian soldiers, crawl towards the river bank and check that everything is as it should be. It says ‘police’ on their uniforms, but also ‘special forces’ in English. The grenades and automatic rifles suggest that they belong to the latter. At their signal we walk cautiously to a copse where we have a good view of the river. We look out at Abkhazia’s Gali region and smoke a cigarette. Sviadi then gestures that we should be quiet. Very faintly we hear talking and the sound of an engine on the other side of the river. ‘Russians,’ he warns. I look through one of the soldier’s binoculars. On the other bank is a small guardhouse. Perhaps someone inside is looking back at us. It is strange to look at a country so covertly and conspiratorially where a just short time ago we were wandering around. From the island an old bridge crosses the river. A Halfway across, the bridge seems to have sunk to its knees, the arched parts almost touching the water. A little further up an improvised rope bridge has replaced the railway bridge. The railway bridge is often depicted in press photos from the war. ‘In two days 200,000 people crossed the river here,’ exaggerates a refugee who made the crossing himself. Although in reality there were fewer, the images of groups of people being corralled onto the bridge and forced into the water are dramatic.
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‘We experienced the strangest things here,’ says soldier Sviadi. ‘Whole families crossed the river, on horseback or via the footbridge. One time we even saw a piano crossing the river.’ In the dry season places like this are passable, and the border between Abkhazia and Georgia becomes almost meaningless. After signing a treaty of cooperation with Abkhazia, Russia has now taken over the border patrol. All along the Georgian border, the Russians are building army camps and shelters. That explains all the hammering and sawing we can hear. With the two soldiers we walk back to their fort, a platform of sandbags, barbed wire and foxholes a little deeper onto the island. They show us an old Russian fortress, a bunker complex at the foot of the embankment. ‘From here they advanced - as so-called peacekeeping troops - in 2008 towards the port city of Poti,’ says Sviadi. ‘Now the Russians aren’t in Georgia itself. Everything has been moved back to the other side of the river.’ A Russian uniform has been
All hope has gone
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