20 January 2004	Tuesday	27 Ziqa'ad 1424

TSKHINVALI (Georgia): Georgia's new leader Mikhail Saakashvili has made returning his country's lost territories the rallying cry of his presidency, but the people in this tiny breakaway region say there will be war if he tries to reunite them with Georgia.

South Ossetia, an enclave of fewer than 100,000 people on the southern slopes of the Caucasus mountains, split from Georgia after a guerrilla war in the early 1990s and since then has functioned as an independent state.

The yellow, red and white flag of the self-declared Republic of South Ossetia flutters over buildings in the capital, Tskhinvali, cars negotiating the snow-lined streets have special license plates and clocks are set an hour behind the rest of Georgia.

People here are determined it will stay that way. If Georgia's new leadership starts rocking the boat, said Teimur, a border guard manning South Ossetia's unofficial frontier with Georgia, "then there will be war."

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, the newly-independent former Soviet republic of Georgia began to disintegrate. At the same time as Ossetians were driving out Georgian troops, Abkhazia, on Georgia's Black Sea coast, was also fighting and winning a separatist war.

Today, the existence of these separatist regimes is an affront to Georgian national pride, especially South Ossetia, which lies just 85 kilometres from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

It also creates a black hole in Georgia's budget. Contraband cigarettes, vodka, beer, petrol and diesel pour into Georgia across South Ossetia's border with Russia, depriving Tbilisi of millions of dollars in desperately-needed customs revenues each year.

Saakashvili, a radical 36-year-old, swept his predecessor Eduard Shevardnadze from power in a bloodless revolution late last year. He is pressing for the start of talks with the separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He has offered them a large degree of autonomy if they accept Georgian sovereignty. "Georgia will be unified," he said this month. But the leadership in Tskhinvali says its independence is not up for negotiation. "To restore territorial integrity is the dream of any Georgian leader. We understand them... But our opinion is completely different," said Stanislav Kochiev, speaker of South Ossetia's parliament.

"The (only) possible subject for negotiation is the relations between two states, two sovereign entities." That view is echoed by ordinary Ossetians. "We do not want to rejoin Georgia," said 55-year-old Slavik, outside the hairdressing salon he owns on Tskhinvali's Stalin street.

"We separated from Georgia and now we live ten times better than the Georgians themselves," he said. "Life is all right here. The wages are not very high but we get by ... on trade with Russia." South Ossetia can afford to be stubborn because, just like Abkhazia, it knows it has the might of Russia behind it.

By some estimates, over half of South Ossetians hold Russian passports, Russian peacekeepers are stationed in the breakaway region and its leaders have been cordially received in Moscow.

"If the Georgians try anything, I do not think that Russia will stand by and watch," said Ruslan, a customs employee in Tskhinvali. Since their separatist war ended in 1992, the two sides have kept a wary peace. Shevardnadze avoided inflaming the issue while Georgian traders flocked to Tskhinvali to pick up bargain Russian goods. But the fear is that by revisiting the question of South Ossetia's status, Shevardnadze's brash young successor will only stir up old hatreds and fears and unleash a new war.

The last war caused hundreds of casualties and forced thousands of families from both sides to flee. If the fighting resumes it is likely to be more bloody.

"I think in the near future it is possible there will be a deterioration of the situation around South Ossetia," said parliamentary speaker Kochiev. "We are better armed than the last time, and so is Georgia. There will be many more victims on both sides."-AFP