Tskhinvali, South Ossetia - Thank God for the economic
crisis, says the local man in charge of South Ossetia's
reconstruction: it sent Russian investors clamoring to take part in
the rebuilding of this tiny Caucasus region - or so he says.
Information is hard to come by in this isolated breakaway state,
where European ceasefire monitors and international aid workers have
been barred access, but a different picture has leaked in the Russian
press.
The government is growing increasingly queasy over how its
generous aid money is being spent and potential investors are
refusing to fork up to Kremlin pleas as long as its burly separatist
leader remains at the helm.
Russia has pledged 21.5 billion roubles (592 million dollars) in
aid since fighting Georgia over the breakaway region in August,
according to the head of the republic's Committee for Reconstruction,
Zurab Kabisov.
'We will get as much as we need until the last brick is in place.
Russia is fulfilling its role of big brother perfectly,' he said.
South Ossetia has become Moscow's de facto protectorate since
Russia beat back Georgia's attempt to retake the breakaway region in
August, but with millions in reconstruction aid gone missing and
opposition growing to Moscow's puppet president is threatening to
become an embarrassment.
In one of the neighbourhoods most severely hit by the fighting,
along Telmen Street, debris still litters the streets and the houses
looked as they had in August, like crumpled cardboard.
But it is six months later, and winter, and people are trying to
cope in their badly damaged abodes.
'My husband fixed the apartment himself. There was lots of snow,
it doesn't help very much,' said Tama Gasyev, one resident of the
city center complaining of the cold. They heat themselves and cook on
an old electric stove.
There is no central gas in the center since Georgia cut supplies
after the hostilities in August. Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom is
building a new pipeline, but it won't start pumping until the end of
2009, local officials said.
'The amazing thing is that people want to come back,' said one
Russian human rights worker. 'Apartment prices have gone up. It's
like Grozny,' she compared the scene to the Chechen capital, scarred
by two separatist wars against Moscow in the early 1990s.
Kabisov said 606 houses in the capital needed to be rebuilt from
scratch. 'Telmen street will be as beautiful as the Starye Arabat,'
Moscow's oldest pedestrian street, he said, but admitted the
construction work has not started yet.
Still, the hospital and about 10 schools and kindergartens have
been rebuilt.
On the outskirts of the Jewish quarter, one of the neighborhoods
most damaged in the recent fighting, sits one school donated by
Russia's Tyumen region and looking like it was just plucked from a
model neighborhoods brochure and dropped in an apocalypse script.
Two toddlers in their mother's arms struggled over a plastic gun
and Alan Tedeyev, 41, a local defence ministry employee dressed in
army greens, Alan Tedeyev, 41, stopped to pick up his boy and girl.
'Our independence comes at a price, of course - with recognition
comes responsibility for Russia. We are a small country, we can't
stand on our own, people have a lot of expectations now, or call it
hope,' he said. Tedeyev is one of many here, who believe Russia's
recognition of South Ossetia will lead to eventual unification.
The Kremlin is more sensitive than ever about its image to
investors abroad and in the public's eye as it grapples with the
impact of the financial crisis. One image it will seek to avoid is
growing social discontent in South Ossetia while Georgian war
refugees receive new housing on 4.8 billion dollars in US and EU aid.
Two high-ranking former South Ossetian officials accused the
republic's Moscow-backed leader Eduard Kokoity of embezzling funds in
separate interviews with business newspaper Kommersant since
December.
Most unflattering, Kokoity's opponents have accused him of turning
tale and taking shelter far from the front lines of the fighting.
But Kokoity, a former freestyle wrestler, admitted problems in an
interview and suggested Russia was imposing stronger controls over
its aide money.
'Some forces, some builders, unknown people who tried to divert
aide,' Kokoity said from a seat in front of the Russian and South
Ossetian flags in his cabinet.
'We have a responsibility to every Russian citizen that this money
be used in a valuable way ... So we think it is better this money,
what is not yet needed, stay with the finance ministry of the Russian
Federation.'
But standing outside the fire-blackened shell of his former
apartment building in the city center Kazbek Gazayev, 55, said he had
little hope.
'You only get help if your connected,' he said. 'Maybe I would get
compensation if I was the parent of a dead fighter, but my son is a
doctor. Is that any worse?'
USA
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