Lira Tskhovrebova – Los Angeles Times – Monday 17 Nov, 2008
Peacemaking is my profession. For more than a decade, I have been arranging meetings between South Ossetians and Georgians — schoolchildren, mothers, teachers and even soldiers — to discuss the values we shared and the misunderstandings and hatred that have driven us apart. Child by child, person by person, village by village, we worked to defuse the historic and complex tensions in South Ossetia, a region of diverse ethnicities and national identities.
Yet even I am no longer confident that peaceful coexistence is possible.
We in the peace movement have never blamed Georgians for the actions of their government. I feel no hatred toward Georgians. They, like us, were victims of Saakashvili, a so-called democratic leader who has repressed the media and kept his own people in the dark about what really happened that awful night. . .
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