Humanitarians facing crisis

GORI, GEORGIA // Alexander Lomaia, the national security adviser for the Georgian president, found himself surrounded by panicked aid groups and journalists yesterday. He had travelled to the central Georgian town of Gori, which has been the scene of fighting for the past week, to help aid convoys trying to reach trapped civilians in the surrounding villages and hills upwards into South Ossetia, just a few kilometres to the north.

With thousands of civilians - both Georgian and Ossetian - trapped behind the Russian offensive that took much of central Georgia last week, there has been increasing fears on the part of the government and aid groups that a humanitarian crisis could be brewing as trapped villages run low on the most basic supplies. Mr Lomaia and a small personal security detail joined by officials from the World Food Programme and Doctors Without Borders, Doctors without Borders, entered Gori to work out details of aid shipments, even as dozens of desperate pensioners assaulted local bakeries demanding food just a few hundred metres away. But the problem is that Mr Lomaia has no authority with either Russian troops or the South Ossetian irregulars that control checkpoints around Gori.

In South Ossetia, few if any neutral observers have been able to get in to villages and towns that bore the brunt of the fighting, and then faced a wave of looting and possible ethnic cleansing. Russia's separatist allies are a motley bunch of undisciplined militias, who have enthusiastically stolen as much as possible from civilians, aid workers and journalists over the course of the conflict. Within an hour of his arrival into Gori, Mr Lomaia was besieged by requests for help. One convoy of humanitarian aid organised by Merci Corps was stuck in a scene out of Kafka: after being allowed to pass one Russian checkpoint to the north of Gori, another check point just a few hundred metres to the north refuses them access to South Ossetia. Soldiers from the first checkpoint have orders not to allow anyone back into Gori, so the workers are stuck, appealing to a Georgian government that has not controlled this part of the country for more than a week.

Mr Lomaia, wearing a red baseball cap, stands out among the crowd of journalists and aid workers in Gori's Stalin Square. Suddenly, reports come in of arrests and halted aid convoys. Bandits thought to be South Ossetian irregulars have robbed two Israeli journalists, and Russian troops at another checkpoint have arrested four American photographers, instead of simply turning them away. "I am not sure how much we can help," said one official in Tbilisi, when reached by phone to assist the journalists. "I am not sure if you've seen CNN lately but we don't exactly control much of Georgia these days."

The arrested journalists - who have asked not to be named for safety reasons as they continue to work in Georgia - have been told they will be sent to Moscow and charged with entering the conflict zone without proper Russian accreditation, despite having been caught in clearly defined Georgian territory. "They have no leadership," one said of his captors. "None think they have the authority just to let us drive back to our hotel."

Mr Lomaia has formed a band of officials to try to reason with the conscripts occupying his country, while the US Embassy has badgered the Russians for help with the aid convoy and captured journalists. Mr Lomaia's arrival at the checkpoint starts a small riot as his security men try to free the journalists. The policy appears to be that as a Georgian official, he is allowed to cross Russian checkpoints but cannot take journalists lacking the Moscow-issued card with him.

Eventually, after a round of calls from Washington and a visiting US Senate delegation led by Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, the Russians received a call ordering them to release the journalists. But the policy remains in effect that any reporter caught in Gori without a Moscow-issued press card must be arrested, though car after car of journalists slipped past Russian checkpoints headed for Tbilisi.

"Are you journalists?" stammered one soldier as he searched the car, looking at four professional cameras, two laptops, three flak jackets and a satellite phone. "No," one passenger answered in Russian. The soldier shrugged and let the car pass. @Email:mprothero@thenational.ae