| In the contended land: it's done! |
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 22 July 2010 – Mistrustful glances are investigating us from a distance: taken away from their houses, far away from their real existences, some men stay in front of the checkpoint. Tbilisi is distant: we are in the countryside, the cows and the faces of men deprived of their possibilities command here.Here, the memories of the conflict are more alive than in every other place. Twenty years are too few to erase animosity, suspicions, the fear for the enemy.
The homes have been emptied out by the war, the darken faces are scared by the anger, the marks of the harassments are indelible on this land and on the faces of this people.
Before getting off from the bus, the imperative is not to make abrupt movements. We have only the 50% of possibilities to succeed. It’s the first time that a group of foreign students have crossed the conflict line between Georgia and the self-proclaimed Independent Republic of Abkhazia.
At the Georgian checkpoint, there are huge cows which are mooing, the dogs are wrangling over each other, while we are attracting attention of everybody and the eyes of soldiers are slowly surrounding us. They are observing our cameras and each movement we are making.
Their hostility and mistrust are due to the injustices of the conflict. We are slowly going beyond the barrier on which a ban is placed and someone says: “Italianisce”, “Roberto Baggio!”: they seem to us less frightful.
However, seeing their machine-guns arrayed in a corner of the lodge where they are checking one by one our passports, make us to vacillate.
Dato is speaking with the soldiers who are checking our documents and sometimes one of them reads our name, mangling it just to dilute the tension, but they never smile.
In this place nobody wants to contradict the conflict rituality, the serious and heavy atmosphere of the inspection.
Soon, we get again our passports. Between the Georgian checking-point and the Abkhazian one there is a road which is 1 km long, to be covered only on foot. The only transport allowed to pass through it is a cart covered by duster cloths, led by a wisplike horse which carries suitcases.
Mago and Maga pick our luggage up and then get on the cart, seated with their legs dangling and looking at the covered road.
Along the way, there are some soldiers in a tent: somebody is getting dressed, someone else is looking at us.
I’m wondering to myself who built up here an iron monument in the shape of a gun with the barrel making a kind of knot and scrunched upwards. Inside its magazine, some birds have made the nest.
Three hundred meters on foot to cross the road from where the two parts of conflict look at each other.
At this point, a magnificent land is opening wide before our eyes. The river embankment is a wide expanse of mountains which receives big herds of horses and green lawns. Finally, here the contended land. The land where everyone requires his legitimate proprietorship; actually, at the moment, it belongs only to cows and horses which live free on it.
On the other side of the conflict, there is our friend Kan who erases fear and worries - “We’ll say goodbye after!” - Kan has said and he looks like an experienced man. Here is hard to remember his way to smile, with the spontaneity of a child.
“Now, the most important thing is to go to the other side!” adds Kan.
AZ
Photo by Silvano Monchi
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