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08.10.2008 21:20 | A Book-Album "South Ossetia. Chronicle of Contract Killings" Came Out
 The book came out as a result of a joint project of the human rights movement «Resistance» and the Public Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes in South Ossetia and assistance to the affected civilian population.
At the time of the book's publishing, the deaths of 364 people killed in South Ossetia during the Georgian aggression on 7-12 of August 2008 were established and documented.
«The investigation of crimes and the identification of the killed individuals was complicated by the fact that relatives were forced to bury the dead in the courtyards of the houses, sprinkled land near roads and in ravines - where death found people. According to the Prosecutor’s office of RYUO, currently there are 1672 people dead and missing.
War crimes in South Ossetia once again prove that human rights can not be viewed through the prism of geographic and geopolitical conjunctions. Those responsible for the killings of civilians in South Ossetia should suffer just punishment. After all, the law is the rule, that does not yields to exclusion », - says in the book.
The publication of the book is dedicated to the 60-year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The album used pictures of Alina Bestaeva, Lana Parastaeva (IA «Res»), Andrey Kochiev (newspaper «Republic»), Valery Melnikov ( «Kommersant»), etc.
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05.10.2008 16:44 | Testimony of Witnesses: Bestaeva Marina Nikolaevna, 63 years old, Tbet village
 We did not want to believe that some villages of our district are already occupied by the Georgian soldiers. Notwithstanding the fact we lived in a constant anticipation of war, people thought everything would get by with the night shelling again. But when on the night of August, 8, the terrible bombardment began, everybody realized, that the most awful thing has happened. At 4 a.m. the neighbor came and shouted that Georgian tanks have surrounded the neighboring village Khetagurovo and were going to our direction. We wanted to leave to Vladikavkaz together with my 73-year-old husband, little granddaughters of 4 and 7 years old and my daughter-in-law. We got in the car, but didn`t manage to pass even hundred meters when two rockets have fallen in front of us. We and some other women from Tskhinval took cover in a basement of the two-storey building, where the other people were already hidden. Georgians have already been in village. Probably, when they noticed the movement of people they surrounded the building (it`s situated at the road to Tskhinval) and began to sing the songs, shouted: “guamarjos Sakartvelo “, that means “Long live Georgia”, and shouted us: “Get out!”
Children are crying, we are, the women, are crying. There is a roar in the basement. Then I thought: “It`s the end”. There were civil guardsmen, standing in a passage of a cellar. They had got the submachine-guns only. What could they do contrary to the tanks! Georgians looked in a window and shouted “Get out!” The children have climbed in old boxes. At last, civil guardsmen managed to run out from a door of an entrance in the other hand (not where the Georgian tanks had been).
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28.09.2008 12:10 | Tshinval tragedy: eyewitness testimonies
 South Ossetians who survived the bombing in August, 2008 will never forget the terrible days they had to go through. And the children who saw the death of their loved ones will not remain children, they were forced to grow up too quickly.
Liana Zasseeva, 47 years old, tskhinval resident
Our house was located on the southern outskirts of the city, almost on the border. On August 7, in the evening everybody who lived in the house gathered in the basement. The elderly, women and children, they were all there. We had to put chairs in the passage as seventeen people were sitting there. Some have already spent four days in the basement.
There was a terrible bombing during the night. The morning was a bit calmer so some went into the yard to see what had happened to their flats. There, the barn was hit by a sell and caught fire, which could spill over to the building. We began to extinguish it. The entire south wall of our house was destroyed.
After 9 pm the shelling resumed and we returned to the basement. At 10-15 one of our neighbors looked out through a crack in the basement and said that there tanks with writing in Georgian on them follow by infantry all dressed in black - apparently, Special Forces. We heard Georgian speech.
The first Georgian column was passing near us until 2 am. They moved towards the centre of Tskhinval. The tanks at the streets turned around and fired at apartment blocks. The neighbor looked outside again and saw that a large number of Georgian troops had gathered near the Home for the Disabled. Then they started to search the flats.
In the nearby house an old man lived. His name was Kabulov and he was 70. The Georgian troops broke into his flat. A man for our basement went out and asked the Georgian troops not to kill Kabulov. But a Georgian soldier said that it was too late. The old man was already dead – killed after a tank fired at the building.
Larisa Gabueva, 40 years old, Tskhinval resident
On August 8, at 11-30 pm the shelling of the city with heavy weaponry began. My body is shaking when I recall these events. We thoughts it was going to be O.K. We were told that South Ossetia can cope with the aggression on its own. But we were not ready for such type of war, any Tskhinval resident will tell you this. We could not imagine that they would aim at peaceful citizens.
The shelling went on and on. It got quiet only in the morning and every body went out of the shelter to grab food, water and blankets. But then everything repeated. The massive shelling began again, and Grad " rocket systems were used. We saw how the sells hit the nearby buildings, where our neighbours – Murat Byazarov and Lerika Tedeeva – lived. After a strike by “Grad” the house burned to the ground in 20 minutes. We could not help them with buckets and rockets were flying in the air. Besides, we had no water to put out the fire. There was no water in the city. Even drinking water.
I’ve been to the burial of Kachmazov sisters. They had no basement and they were hiding on the first floor. Then a rocket hit their house and they were burnt alive. The people of Tskhinval were not ready for this war. We were left completely alone. It seems we like we were sacrificed.
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25.09.2008 20:00 | IT WAS A NICE BLOOMING SITY
TSKHINVAL BEFORE ...
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24.09.2008 23:53 | Algis Mikulskis: They burned some people even without killing them first
 At the entrance to Dzhava we stopped near a small shop. Then a plane arrived. The assault plane Su-25. The bomb dropped about 50 meters from the cameraman Zhora (Georgi L'vov, the second operator of the channel “Zvezda”, from Moscow. - Red.), and a huge stone fraction flew into his back. They thought, his kidney was ripped off. But he turned out to be lucky. Only his back would still be black in color for a long time...
…In Tskhinval, after the artillery preparation, Georgian infantry and tanks have appeared... It looked as if they had an order to destroy everyone who managed to survive the shelling. In city morgue a young woman was lying since the 11th, pressing her baby to her chest. Both were killed by a single round. Our colleagues saw beheaded family 1.5 babies burnt alive... Many Georgians knew well the Ossetian language. They were the ones who knocked on the basement doors under the guise of being “Ossetians””. And when people opened their basements-they threw grenades in there... The wounded, including our peacekeepers, were finished off. They burned some people even without killing them first. Refugees who were trying to escape on the only road to Roki pass with a tunnel, were exterminated from the planes...»
One more eye-witness of the war in South Ossetia is a TV cameraman Algis Mikulskis working in Moscow for the channel “Zvezda”, - told about what he has seen in his Internet-diary.
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