The Lines That Divide: A Story of Borders and Broken Bonds in Georgia
When a border slices through Kurvaleti in Georgia, what vanishes is more than land: trust, kinship, and belonging unravel across a simple division.
The small village of Kurvaleti sits on the Administrative Border Line (ABL), that separates the territories controlled by Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, from the territories of Tskhivali occupied by Russia since 2008.
On the other side, they call that same line a “border”, and the region of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia. The line, or border, was unilaterally defined after the last Georgian-Ossetian war, in 2008. As a result, Kurvaleti, like many other villages along the line, was literally cut in half.
The landscape is grim, filled with a sense of desolation. Most houses are empty, abandoned, and some are in ruins: after years of struggling to remain on their land once the ABL was forcefully established, the majority of residents left and moved to larger cities.
For those who remain, life is far from easy.
On the border: the fence that destroyed a community
The borderline itself is little more than a fence, with a touch of barbed wire on top – in what seems like a mockery to the grand mainstream imagery of national frontiers. The only indication that is in fact a borderline are the four Kalashnikov-armed soldiers politely asking not to get too close. Houses on the other side are so close you could almost touch them.
Some 50 meters along the fence, Russian militaries on duty sit inside a tiny wooden lookout post. A small puppy dog tries to play catch jumping across the fence, looking confused when humans are not following him to the other side. Once a lively place of transit and exchange, today Kurvaleti looks almost like a ghost town. Together with the abandoned buildings, the local community has also been slowly falling apart.
For those who are not residents, a special permit is required to reach the village. The government considers it too dangerously close to the ABL for people to circulate freely. At the village entrance, visitors are met by a checkpoint. After showing the government permits, they also need to be escorted by an armed patrol for the entire stay. In this kind of climate, businesses were the first to be driven away: there is not even a grocery store or minimarket left, nor is there a pharmacy – a considerable issue, given that most of the population are elderly.
Luda, a Kurvaleti resident who decided to remain in the village when almost everybody had left, looked around and noticed the problem: most people who were still in Kurvaleti simply did not leave because they were not able to. For them, life was even harder. So, she decided to step up and opened a nursing home, where older people can live together and help each other out: “I realized somebody had to stay and take care of them,” she says. Luda’s house is one of the closest to the ABL. Far from being an abstract concept, here, the border takes on its most tangible form.
“At the beginning we used to talk to each other, to pass each other bread, cheese and wine across the fence, to remain in some kind of contact” says Luda. Her neighbors’ house, a mere 20 meters away, is now in South Ossetia. She looks sadly outside the window: “but then,” she says, “time passed, and we stopped talking.”
After the ABL was established, in 2008, a process called borderization – a word used to describe the creation of a border – started. While the Ossetian side is unilaterally building the border infrastructure, communities get separated, identities, relationships and complexities lost. Georgia is one of the few countries in the word where such a process is under way, showing what happens to a country’s social fabric when a new border is created. The foundations of this particular border lay in complex and long-time tensions.
Georgia and South Ossetia: between wars and tensions
The conflict between South Ossetia and Georgia that brought to the situation as it is today started in 1989, when the Ossetian nationalist party Adamon Nikhas (Voice of the People) asked the then Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic for independence. Not only was the request denied, but it sparked anti-separatist demonstrations in Tbilisi, further heightening the tension.
In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, tensions escalated, leading to the 1991-1992 Ossetian war, after Georgians had entered the city of Tskhinvali – now South Ossetia’s capital – to restore order. An agreement was reached in 1992, but while it established a ceasefire, it did not deal with the independence status of South Ossetia – leaving a precarious situation, bound to escalate anew.
“There was a lot of violence at that time,” recalls Lia, speaking about 1990s Tskhinvali. Today, Lia lives in Ergneti, another village close to the ABL, but she is originally from Tskhinvali: “for me,” she says, “the war started back in 1991, when I remained a widow at the age of 38, among all that violence. Separatists were kidnapping Georgians, blocking the roads, destroying villages, there are entire villages that do not exist anymore,” raising concerns for ethnic cleansing.
It was not just about territorial control. Entire families ended up in pieces, unraveling a centuries-strong social fabric: “Ossetian-Georgian mixed families then made up for 37 percent of the population back then,” explains Lia, “most of these families got divided, or collapsed; that sort of deep ethnic division is still ongoing today.” An irreversible process had started.
After years of relative peace – or rather of stall – during which separatist forces gained more and more control over the territory and established a de facto government, a new war broke out in 2008. “I remember when Russian soldiers stormed the village, they arrived with tanks, and we hid in a basement,” recalls Giorgi, originally from Ergneti, who was just a kid at the time: “Most of the village was burned to the ground, more than 160 houses were lost.” Russian troops, supporting Ossetians, took the city of Tskhinvali, now South Ossetia’s capital, in five days, ultimately leading to South Ossetia’s separation – or occupation – and the situation as it is today.
Borderisation, more than just infrastructure
After the 2008 war, the construction of the border infrastructure started – unilaterally stipulated and carried out. “From their perspective, they [Ossetians] are building their state border,” explains Klaas Maes, spokesperson for the European Monitoring Mission (EUMM), an unarmed civilian monitoring body established by the European Union in 2008. Yet, after more than 16 years of forced separation, “Georgia and the entire international community say that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are still integral parts of Georgia.” This is why words play such an important role in avoiding the normalization of the current setting: “that’s why we talk about Administrative Boundary Line and not border, because these are not separate countries, so we cannot call them borders. And we talk about Tbilisi administrative territory to indicate the part of Georgia without South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the territory that is still actually administered by Tbilisi and then South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”
Since 2008, borderization has been proceeding in hiccups. In some places, like Kurvaleti, the borderline is signaled by a fence only. In others, like Ergneti, the complete infrastructure, with metal walls, signs and check towers, is already there. In others still, especially on the mountain sides, where construction is more difficult, there is nothing yet. Which does not mean it is ok to cross: “The other side will see that as illegally trespassing the state border, so you might be detained […] Some people are released very quickly, others might end up in jail for a couple of years, depending on the accusations by the de facto authority. Of course, all these detentions should not happen because we are still talking about Georgia’s integral territory,” explains Maes.
The EUMM also works to prevent or solve these incidents, thanks to a hotline that can be activated from both sides of the ABL to report on any issue relating to the infrastructure of separation and the problems it causes for local communities on both sides. But it is not just about illegal trespassing or arrests. The hotline has proved to be a valuable tool, for instance, when cattle cross the line in an area where there is no separation infrastructure, and thus owners are not able to follow it to take it back themselves. When this happens, they call the hotline, and someone from the EUMM then contacts the other side to push the animals back.
EUMM also hosts regular meetings with communities on both sides, to encourage dialogue and discuss practical matters that can regard all aspects of life – or death: it is in fact common for many Georgians to have relatives buried on the other side of the ABL. Visiting got ever more difficult, creating a further sense of separation which, Maes argues, ended up becoming a security issue of its own: “In the last 16 years, communities have become alienated from each other. And alienation between people becomes a security risk in itself when you don’t consider those on the other side your friends, family or relatives anymore. They just become the ‘other’.”
Losing ground to Russia’s influence?
Ossetia is not the only region that parted from Tbilisi-controlled territories. Twenty percent of Georgia’s national territories are currently unofficially occupied, or separatist – unrecognized by most of the world except Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Nauru.
The other separatist region is Abkhazia, in the north. This territory got separated after a bloody war in 1992-1993, which remains a painful memory for Georgian citizens today. According to the UN Human Rights Office, the war displaced more than 360,000 ethnic Georgians previously living in Abkhazia to become internally displaced people in their own country.
Luda now lives in Kurvaleti, but, she explains, “I was born in Abkhazia. I left when I was very young. I was displaced with my family during the war in the early 90s and arrived in Tbilisi, then I got married and we moved back here to Kurvaleti, where my husband is from, but then the Russians reached me here too.”
The border with Abkhazia, although more permeable, still created a strong feeling of separation. Most Georgians still mourn the loss of that land – a topic that always comes up in most of the conversations about the country. The IDPs first found shelter in the small town of Tskhaltubo, originally a USSR thermal station, transformed into a refuge city. For years, the IDPs lived inside the abandoned thermal facilities, creating a complex social climate for the whole region. By now, almost all of them have been successfully relocated, but their wounds remain very much open.
The loss of the territories, despite the international community still refusing to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, is slowly becoming permanent, with the complicity of the current government. After the much-criticized 2024 elections, ruling party Georgian Dream publicly showed for the first time a map of Georgia that did not include Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgian Dream’s founder is Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made his fortune in Russia in the 90s and whose assets are worth roughly 20% of the country’s GDP. In this context, both the opposition and Georgia’s civil society accuse Georgian Dream of bringing the country further under Russian influence.
The discourse around Abkhazia and Ossetia is an essential part of the debate on Georgia’s identity and independence. And yet, in the midst of all this, residents of the villages on the borderline, are left with little to no hope, neglected by their governments for years, refusing or unable to leave: “We are abandoned, and left on our own, with no support or any way to make ends meet” says Lia, a void look in her eyes, “and to think that without local communities here and the dialogue and protection they create so close to the ABL, there is nothing in between a potential invasion and the rest of the country.”
Photo: Matilde Moro.
| Themes |
| • Accompanying social processes • Armed / ethnic conflict • Cultural Heritage • Destruction of habitat • Local • People under occupation • Public policies • Regional |
