3.2 Aerial Bombardments, Shelling, and Artillery Attacks

 

Between August 8 and 12, Russian forces attacked Georgian military targets in Gori city and in ethnic Georgian villages in both South Ossetia and undisputed Georgian territory, often causing civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects such as houses or apartment blocks. The proximity of these targets to civilian objects varied. In several cases, the military targets that were within meters of civilians and civilian homes, and the attacks against them resulted in significant civilian casualties. In other cases the apparent military targets were located as far as a kilometer away from civilian objects, and yet civilian casualties also resulted. In attacking any of these targets the Russian forces had an obligation to strictly observe the principle of proportionality, and to do everything feasible to assess whether the expected civilian damage from the attack would likely be excessive in relation to the direct and concrete military advantage to be gained. In many cases the attacks appear to have violated the principle of proportionality. In yet other cases, Human Rights Watch investigated but was not able to identify any legitimate military targets in the immediate vicinity. The absence of a military target in the vicinity of an attack raises the possibility that Russian forces either failed in their obligation to do everything feasible to verify that the targets were military and not civilian; that they were reckless toward the presence of civilians in their target zone, or that Russian forces deliberately targeted civilian objects.

A man stands in front of an apartment building on Sukhishvili Street in Gori, bombed by Russian forces prior to their advance into Gori district. © 2008 Marcus Bleasdale/VII

In some cases in South Ossetia, civilian casualties and damage to civilian property in Georgian villages were caused by artillery shelling. Because both Russian and South Ossetian forces possessed artillery capacity, Human Rights Watch was not always able to establish with certainty whether responsibility for indiscriminate artillery attacks lay with Russian or South Ossetian forces. In these cases further investigation is required to determine specific responsibility for violations of international humanitarian law.

Attacks on Ethnic Georgian Villages in South Ossetia

Residents of several ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia said their villages had been shelled intermittently by South Ossetian forces in the days leading up to the conflict. From August 8 (after the Georgian assault started) until August 10, the villages were subjected to more intense artillery shelling-by either Russian or South Ossetian forces-and to Russian aerial bombardments. Because of the attacks, many villagers fled in the early stages of the conflict. In most villages, however, some elderly and infirm people remained. Even though Georgian military forces reportedly remained deployed in some of these villages until August 9, the attacks warrant further investigation to determine whether the attacks were indiscriminate and therefore in violation of international humanitarian law.

Kekhvi

Four Kekhvi residents described a mix of artillery shelling and aerial bombing of the village lasting from August 7 to 9.[248] Tamara Mamagulashavili, 41, told Human Rights Watch,

The shelling started on August 7, at 11:30 p.m. There were no gunshots, just the blast. It was from artillery and it blew out the windows. My husband and I lay down on the floor. Then we went with six others to our neighbor's basement [to hide]. The shelling lasted the entire night; it was only artillery. There was about 10-30 minutes between each blast. It came from different directions.

 

At 6 a.m. the aerial bombing started. These bombs made more noise and you could hear them as they were coming in. There was aerial bombing until 3 p.m. Then it stopped until 6 p.m., but the artillery shelling continued. At about 6 p.m. on August 8 we decided to leave the village.[249]

Three other residents of Kekhvi interviewed by Human Rights Watch also described heavy bombing and shelling of the village.[250]One of them, Slava Melanashvili, 32, a construction worker, told Human Rights Watch,

 

On August 9 massive bombing started and the village administration and hospital buildings were destroyed. Bombing took place day and night. It seemed like they were targeting a local school and other large buildings; maybe they thought there were troops hiding there. My house was hit and completely destroyed during the bombing in the afternoon of August 9. My house was next to the village school.[251]

The village school was destroyed. Kekhvi residents named at least three villagers killed by shrapnel during the attacks.[252]

Kvemo Achabeti and Kheiti

The village of Kvemo Achabeti was shelled on August 8 and 9. Vazha Lazagashvili, 58, told Human Rights Watch that four houses were hit:

On August 8 our house was bombed, it left a very big crater. The bomb fell into the yard, about two to three meters away from the house. The windows, doors blew in and the wall partly collapsed. There were shrapnel holes in the house. The pressure blew everything in the house against the back wall. We were hiding in the basement, which is concrete. The concrete on top of the basement protected us. My son was in the yard when the bomb hit. Shrapnel hit him on the back.[253]

In the village of Kheiti, Nugzar Bugianishvili died during a Russian aerial attack on August 9. His brother, Omar Bugianishvili, 65, told Human Rights Watch,

It was about 10 a.m. We put food on the table to eat together. That's when the first bomb exploded. It fell on our neighbor's house. I got up from the table and went to the basement. That's when a bomb hit [our house] and shrapnel hit my brother in the neck and in the head. My 92-year-old mother-in-law stood next to him. She was not injured.

When I checked on my brother, he was already dead. His head was fractured and his eyeballs dropped out. I buried him myself in the yard.

Georgian military units were not present in the village at that time. I could see planes flying, dropping the bombs.[254]

Attacks in Undisputed Georgian Territory

Gori city

Gori city is the administrative center for the Gori district. Gori's military base and Georgian military reservists located in one part of the city became targets of Russian air strikes. Also, as noted in Chapter 1.1, in mid-July 2008 Georgia concentrated its entire artillery brigade in Gori city.[255] As a result of the airstrikes and advancing Russian and Ossetian forces, civilians began to flee Gori around August 11.

Attack on Apartment Buildings on Sukhishvili Street

On the morning on August 9, Russian aircraft targeted and destroyed a military base located on Sukhishvili Street on the outskirts of Gori city.

However, in the attack the forces also hit three five-story apartment buildings also on Sukhishvili Street near the base, killing 14 and wounding dozens.[256] Each of the three apartment buildings was hit directly in the center of the building, suggesting that the Russian aircraft specifically targeted these buildings in addition to the military base.[257] Georgian authorities had a duty to the extent feasible not to place a military base in close proximity to civilian areas. However, Russian forces still had a duty to take into account the effect on the civilian population of their attack and to observe the laws of war in relation to targeting and proportionality. Russian forces therefore had an obligation to do everything feasible to verify whether the apartment buildings, which should be presumed to be civilian objects, were in fact military targets. The circumstances of the attack raise doubts as to whether this determination was made.

Elene Zerekidze, age 85, told Human Rights Watch that the first bomb hit one apartment building at approximately 11:30 a.m:

I was walking down the stairs when I heard a loud explosion. I live in the third entryway [in Russian, podezd] and the bomb hit the first one. I cried, "They are bombing us!" and ran outside. There was a lot of debris, destruction, and blood. People were screaming for help.[258]

A couple identified to us as Zviad, age 28, and his pregnant wife Manana, 27, were killed as they were trying to flee the bombing. Tina Khanishvili, 75, who lived in one of the Sukhishvili Street apartment buildings, and witnessed the incident, told Human Rights Watch,

A young couple was getting into a car to run away after the first bomb hit the apartment. But as they were preparing to flee a second bomb fell and they were hit by shrapnel and died. She was pregnant. Their six-year-old-son was badly wounded, but survived.[259]

Lia Kobesashvili, 45, worked as a nurse for an ambulance dispatch service that was located in one of the apartment buildings. She told Human Rights Watch, "People were thrown out of the windows. There was complete panic. Many people were wounded. One nurse who lived at 10 Sukhishvili Street, Maia Vazagashvili, was killed when the pressure threw her out of the window."[260]

Attack on School No. 7

At about 11 a.m. on August 9, Russian aircraft made several strikes on and near School No. 7 in Gori city. According to one eyewitness, Givi Melanashvili, 60, who was at the school when the bombing took place, about one hundred Georgian military reservists were in the yard of the school when it was attacked. To his knowledge none of the reservists was injured.[261]  The reservists as combatants were a legitimate target, and it is possible that the school was deemed as being used for military purposes. In such circumstances, it would lose its status as a protected civilian object. In the attack, one strike hit an apartment building next to the school, killing at least five civilians and wounding at least 18, and another hit a second building adjacent to the school causing damage, but no civilian casualties.

There were civilians also taking shelter in the school, as Melanashvili, who was looking for temporary shelter in Gori having had fled South Ossetia a day earlier, told Human Rights Watch,

I was told that I could find shelter in School No. 7. My wife and I went there in the morning. I got there around 11 a.m. and saw that there were Georgian reservist forces in the yard. Suddenly a bomb hit the building next to the school. There was a loud explosion and complete chaos. A large part of the building was destroyed. The school building was damaged.[262]

While the reservists' presence in the school yard rendered it a legitimate target for the Russian forces, questions may be raised as to the proportionality of the attack.  Where an object, which is by its nature normally civilian, becomes used for military purposes, it can be attacked, but only by means that will avoid or minimize harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects. All feasible measures should be taken to cancel or suspend an attack if it becomes apparent that the expected civilian casualties would outweigh the importance of the military objective.[263]

Attack on Gori Military Hospital

By August 12, many of Gori's inhabitants had fled the city. Staff at the Gori Military Hospital remained in the city to take care of the hospital's remaining patients.[264]

At around 2 a.m. on August 13 a Russian military helicopter fired a rocket toward a group of hospital staff members who were on break in the hospital yard. The rocket hit Giorgi Abramishvili, an emergency room physician in his forties. Abramisvhili, who had spent the previous four days operating on people wounded during the war, died from head injuries.

Human Rights Watch researchers saw that the roof of the hospital building is clearly marked with a red cross, the "distinctive emblem" indicating medical personnel or facilities and entitled to specific protection under the Geneva Conventions.

This attack was a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Hospitals, even military hospitals such as the one in Gori, are not legitimate military targets. The wounded and sick, and medical personnel, even if they are members of the armed forces, are protected persons and attacks directed against them are war crimes.[265]

Karbi

On the morning of August 9 Russian air and artillery attacks struck the village of Karbi. At about 7 a.m. an airstrike killed one villager.[266] Two hours later, as residents started gathering in one part of the village in preparation to flee, another round of aerial-burst artillery shells killed at least seven and injured at least 10.[267]

Avto Unapkoshvili, 48, was wounded during the first attack, when a bomb struck his house. The bomb killed Unapkoshvili's relative, Dodo Unapkoshvili, age 60, who was asleep in the house. Avto Unapkoshvili told Human Rights Watch, "My brother and I were standing outside the gates [to our house], smoking, around 6:30 a.m. It was completely quiet; then I heard an explosion and saw yellow smoke. The pressure from the explosion was so strong that it lifted me up, and then I fell to the ground."[268]

Tsiala Bidzinashvili, 50, was killed by shrapnel from the artillery attack two hours later. Her husband, Gaioz Bidzinashvili, who was wounded during the attack, told Human Rights Watch,

I was sitting near my house, together with several other villagers. Some residents were gathering [there] to flee. Someone had a small radio and we were trying to listen to the news. We knew that one person died as a result of the morning aerial bombing and we wanted to know what to expect.

All of a sudden I heard numerous large explosions. I was wounded in the stomach. It all happened in a flash. Four people died around me. I ran into the yard, shouting for my wife to help me, but she was already dead in the yard.

Bidzinashvili was treated in hospital for multiple shrapnel wounds.[269]

Tengiz Tevdorashvili, 69, was also wounded during the second attack and corroborated Gaioz Bidzinashvili's story.[270] Eighty-year-old Rusiko Rcheulishvili and her son were also wounded during the attack. She told Human Rights Watch, "I went to buy bread. On the way, I saw men gathered in the neighborhood center, listening to the radio. My son was also there. When I approached them, I heard loud explosions and I was wounded. My arms, stomach and leg were bleeding. My son was also wounded."[271]

Vasiko Tevdorashvili, the village administrator, described to Human Rights Watch the aftermath of the second attack: "There were many wounded. I had to decide who had better chances of survival and stuff them into the ambulance. We buried the dead in the yards of houses and fled the village."[272]

According to Vasiko Tevdorashvili and two other villagers, there was no Georgian military base in the village and there were no Georgian military forces present at the time of the attack. Two other villagers, interviewed separately, told Human Rights Watch that while there were no Georgian troops in the village itself, there was Georgian artillery in fields about three kilometers from the village.[273]

The distance of the village from the Georgian artillery, combined with the fact that the village was hit twice in two separate attacks, suggests that the village may have been deliberately targeted, or at a minimum that the village was hit as part of an indiscriminate attack on the area, and the Russian forces failed to direct the attack solely at the military targets located at some distance from the populated areas. In either event the civilian casualties in Karbi appear to be the result of serious violations of humanitarian law.

Tortiza

Tortiza is a small village situated several kilometers from a main road connecting Gori and Tskhinvali (see map on page 1). Many civilians fleeing bombing and shelling in other villages in the area went to Tortiza. Both Tortiza residents and those arriving from other villages reported to Human Rights Watch that they believed the village's location away from the main road meant that it was of no strategic importance and that it therefore would not be targeted.[274] However, on August 12, at around 9:45 a.m. Russian aircraft fired S-8 rockets at Tortiza, killing three civilians, injuring dozens, and damaging nearly every house in the village.[275]

Among those killed was 15-year-old Nugzar Akhalkatsi, who was at home with his family when the attack started. His grandmother, Natia, told Human Rights Watch,

There were loud explosions from other parts of town. We were sitting in the house, but we ran out when the windows broke. It felt like the house would fall apart so we wanted to get out and get to shelter. A bomb hit the house. He [Nugzar] turned around and shrapnel hit him. He said, "I think I'm wounded," and that's it. He lost consciousness.

We took him to Gori, but Gori was also bombed that day. No one was in the hospital there either. He was taken to Tbilisi but on the way he died.[276]

Natia Akhalkatsi clutching the photo of her grandson, who was killed by a Russian S-8 rocket attack on Tortiza. © 2008 Human Rights Watch

Kristina Merabashvili, 47, was taking her calf to a field when the attack started. Afterwards her son found her unconscious in the field and took her to a hospital in Gori city. She was later taken to Gudushauri hospital in Tbilisi where she underwent a series of operations. She described how the bombing injured her:

It happened in a second. It became dark all of a sudden. Apparently bombs fell somewhere else and it was very smoky. It was like a wave lifted me up and threw me down again. I fell, was not feeling my right leg and it was all torn apart. I had small bits of shrapnel in my arm. I still can't feel my leg. My right thigh is entirely shattered.

Maxim Akopian, 74, was walking nearby and was also hit and wounded.[277]

Raisa Ketiladze's 43-year-old son Zaza was wounded during the bombing. She recounted,

I was sitting in the yard of my house eating ice cream when I heard noise from flying jets. We did not expect them to bomb us as our village is located far from the conflict zone and away from the main road. But rockets started flying, hitting one house after another. I heard my son screaming for help, shouting that he was wounded. I could not see him as the air was full of debris.

When we found him he was wounded in the leg. My neighbors helped me carry him first to the fields to hide. When the bombing stopped we took him to the hospital in Rustavi where they operated on him.[278]

While it has not been possible to establish the total number of rockets Russian forces fired in their attack, villagers told Human Rights Watch that a demining organization had cleared 148 S-8 rockets, many of them unexploded, in Tortiza during the first weeks of October. Lali Masuradze, 45, told Human Rights Watch, "In every house, they cleared stuff."[279] Zina Ketiladze, 72, told Human Rights Watch that four rockets fell in her house alone. She showed Human Rights Watch researchers the remaining craters and described the attack:

I heard jets flying over. I was alone at home and decided to run away, and that's when the first one fell in my yard. It broke the windows and doors. The debris was so thick in the air that nothing was visible. I started screaming for help and ran to the fields. Later I found out that four rockets fell in my yard.[280]

Villagers told Human Rights Watch that there were no Georgian military or police forces in the area. Human Rights Watch examined the damage to many houses in the village which, together with witness accounts, provided compelling evidence that Russian aircraft fired at civilian houses.

This direct attack on what appears to have been a purely civilian target constitutes a serious violation of humanitarian law and a war crime.

Tkviavi and Akhaldaba

On August 11, at approximately 4 p.m., a Russian aircraft bombed a neighborhood in the village of Tkviavi, destroying several homes and wounding two civilians. Residents told Human Rights Watch that the Georgian military had not been in the vicinity, but only in a neighboring village close to the Liakhvi River, approximately two kilometers away. It is not known whether Russian strikes hit these troops.

Zina Merabashvili, 66, was in the village at the time of the bombing and told Human Rights Watch, 

Jets had been flying over the village for some time that day. At about 4 p.m. I went out to the kiosk on the corner to buy some beer. Then one jet flew over and dropped four bombs. One bomb fell on a [nearby] house and a fire started. Some debris fell on me, and I ran home to see my house damaged and my neighbor's house almost completely destroyed.[281]

The top floor of Merebashvili's house was damaged.

Roza Okruashvili, a 58-year-old grandmother of six, was at home alone when a Russian bomb struck her house. Okruashvili told Human Rights Watch what she could remember of the bombing: "I had finished washing the dishes and I went upstairs to turn on the television. The picture hadn't even come up yet, when I heard a jet fly over. Then I felt pain, and I was screaming and I lost consciousness."[282] Okruashvili suffered shrapnel wounds to her left leg and hip, her right foot, and her abdomen. She spent over a month in hospital being treated for her wounds. The bomb completely destroyed Okruashvili's house.

Akhaldaba is a village on one of the two main roads between Gori and Tskhinvali, about six kilometers west of Tortiza. Russian aircraft fired S-8 rockets on Akhaldaba on August 12 at around 10 a.m., injuring five people, at approximately the same time as the attacks on Tortiza took place. The attack on Akhaldaba lasted for about 10 minutes before the aircraft flew towards the river and the fields where Georgian forces were present at the time. Human Rights Watch does not have information about whether Russian airstrikes hit these forces. Villagers told Human Rights Watch that there were no Georgian military forces in the village at the time of the attack.

Ketevan Tanderashvili, 56, was at home when the attack started. She told Human Rights Watch,

I was near my house, in the yard, when one rocket hit the house. Several others fell in my yard. Other houses in the southern part of the village were also hit. Nobody understands how I survived. They were firing from planes, and there were also helicopters near the village, above the river.[283]

As in Tortiza, these attacks on Tkviavi and Akhaldaba may have been a direct attack on what were purely civilian targets. If so, these would be war crimes. At a minimum they appear to have been indiscriminate attacks in that if the attacks were directed at forces outside of either village all feasible measures were not taken so as to target only the military objects, and the attacks were not carried out in such a way as to avoid or minimize civilian casualties.