The memories of the short, vicious war Georgia and Russia fought over the tiny breakaway province of South Ossetia keep flooding back to haunt Ana Robertovna: the screams, the noise, the smoke and, most unbearable of all, the terrified pleading eyes of her grandchildren hiding in the basement as barrage after barrage of Georgian Grad missiles slammed into the houses above.

“After the bombardment we heard the rumble of the tanks and heard on the radio that the Georgians had entered the town,” said Robertovna.

The Georgian soldiers were firing into the cellars and ordering everyone to come outside.

“My granddaughter Sasha was screaming loudest of all. She is only 10. I had to clap my hand over her mouth to stop the Georgians hearing her. They were killing people in the street as they came out of the cellars. We stayed hidden but we knew we could not hide for ever. If the Russians troops hadn’t intervened we would be dead.”

Her face ashen with sorrow, Robertovna, an ethnic Ossetian, was walking with other survivors of the August 7 attack through the rubble of the shattered buildings, her world torn apart. All around were battered blocks of houses in the old Jewish quarter of Tskhinvali, the small South Ossetian capital at the heart of the conflict. There was blood on the wall next to the stairs leading up from a cellar, marking the spot where an old man had collapsed and died from his wounds.

With her was a man bent with sorrow. He said he and his wife had spent 15 years trying to have a child. At the end of July his wife gave birth to a girl. Ten days later, on the night of August 7, she was dead, her tiny body perforated by shrapnel from the fierce bombardment.

As she walked, her feet crunching through broken glass, Robertovna vowed that after the death and destruction of the military strike there could never be reconciliation.

She cared nothing for the heavy-handed way Russian forces had responded to Georgia’s surprise attack by intervening with troops from inside the Russian border, forcing the Georgians out of South Ossetia and driving their own tanks deep inside Georgia to positions within 25 miles of Tbilisi, the capital, where they sat for nearly a fortnight until they withdrew the bulk of their forces on Friday.

Equally angry and bitter was Gulnara Militaura, but as an ethnic Georgian victim she had a different perspective on the conflict that tore Georgia apart. Georgia was the victim of the Russian bear. Until a few days ago she was living in the peaceful village of Tkvaivi, a few miles south of the breakaway statelet on the road linking Tskhinvali to the important Georgian crossroads city of Gori, famous as Stalin’s birthplace, just outside the disputed enclave.

She had once lived in Tskhinvali, like Robertovna, but along with many Georgians in Tskhinvali her family fled earlier fighting that broke out in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and settled in Tkvaivi. It was there that the violence finally caught up with them as a wave of looting and ethnic cleansing engulfed the region after Georgia’s initial offensive sparked the war.

Although several houses had been looted and set on fire she and her family were unwilling to flee, but on August 12 a group of armed men barged into her kitchen. They shot dead her husband and brother and stole a tractor and car. She recognised them as Ossetians.

Over the following days Militaura, a language teacher in her seventies, tried to stop their bodies from decomposing by spraying them with vinegar.

Eventually she was rescued by her son, who managed to join a Georgian government convoy that Russian forces allowed into the area. She had eaten nothing for days and was faint with hunger. Together they buried the bodies next to a rose bush in the garden and fled to Tbilisi. Despite the Russian withdrawal on Friday she was still too frightened yesterday to contemplate returning home. “It will take time to heal her sorrow,” said a friend.

The looting has often been carried out behind the backs of Russian soldiers. In another incident an armed Ossetian gang raided the church in the Russian-occupied city of Gori, which Stalin, himself half-Osse-tian and half-Georgian, had once frequented. They stole a priest’s car.

The withdrawal of the majority of Russian forces was greeted with relief in Georgia yesterday, but there was alarm that Russian troops were clearly establishing a long-term presence in the breakaway region, building peacekeeping outposts in a so-called “security zone” around South Ossetia’s border with Georgia that takes them to within a few miles of Gori.

David Barakadze, the president of parliament, accused Russia of making a mockery of the withdrawal pledge by Dmit-ry Medvedev, the Russian president. He suggested the columns of tanks rolling out of Gori and other areas of Georgia did not constitute a genuine pull-out. “It is not a deal,” he said, a view shared by western states, including Britain, which said Russia had still not complied with the ceasefire agreement negotiated by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

Georgia and Russia have been bitter enemies since the collapse of the Soviet Union 17 years ago, their relations bedevilled by complicated border disputes in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s charismatic president, puts a positive spin on the war, but it has been a humanitarian and economic disaster for the little country and made Georgia’s chances of recovering South Ossetia from the Russian grip even more remote.

Each has its own version of the violent events. For Saakashvili, a Columbia University-trained lawyer, Russia bullied, needled and then invaded its small neighbour, burning villages and butchering civilians.

The attack showed the ugly face of a resurgent Russia that could not forgive this country of just 5m people for betting its future on a western-style democracy and wanting to join Nato. He said Georgians were engaged in a national struggle against Russian domination and he had authorised the Georgian attack only after he was told that Russian tanks were crossing into South Ossetia and Georgian military positions began to take mortar fire from Russian peacekeepers and Ossetian separatists in Tskhinvali.

In the Russian version, naturally accepted by the breakaway Ossetians, Russia intervened after Georgia attacked the enclave, killing hundreds of civilians and 15 Russian peacekeepers. Its crushing military victory over Georgia was justified and has moved them much closer to independence and union with Russia.

The Georgian strike was the breaking point, said Eduard Kokoity, the Ossetian separatist leader, who added that the war was the result of Georgian “fascism” that had flourished with the support of the West.

Certainly that was the prevailing mood at the pro-Russian concert on Thursday night in the ruins of Tskhinvali led by Valery Gergiev, the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, an Ossetian and a supporter of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister.

Robertovna wept quietly as she listened. There could be no more potent symbol of the widening gulf separating Ossetians from Georgians than the concert. It would have been particularly apparent to a group of Georgian prisoners huddled in an underground courtyard a few hundred yards away. They could hear the orchestra triumphantly playing Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and sense the nationalistic fervour of the audience. Nobody knows when they will be released.

On Monday the Russian parliament is due to discuss recognising independence not just for Ossetia but also for Abkhazia, the other Georgian enclave that broke away after fierce fighting in the 1990s, and which is now under tacit Russian control.

A senior Russian spokesman hinted that Putin would visit Tskhinvali soon. To emphasise its status, Russia has given passports to the population making them legally citizens of Russia who are certain to vote for union with Russia in a future referendum.

Whatever gloss Saakashvili puts on the war, the price tag of Georgia’s misadventure is considerable. The fighting killed hundreds, not the thousands both sides have claimed, but the sight of Russian tanks in Georgian villages less than 30 miles from Tbilisi has dealt a crushing blow to its fledgling tourist industry and left a big question mark over investment prospects.

Saakashvili insists he retains massive public support, but his last patriotic rally in Tbilisi’s main square attracted only 15,000 people.

Despite the flag-waving and singing of patriotic songs it was said to have been stage-man-aged, with many of its participants on the government pay-roll. Nobody is in a hurry to take up arms again.

PUTIN’S MAESTRO
Valery Gergiev, the conductor of Thursday night’s concert amid the ruins of Tskhinvali, is principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

A fiery 55-year-old, he was born in Moscow but grew up in Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetia capital. He is a friend of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, whose daughter is his godchild.

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