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Makvala Margoshvili, 76, from Duisi says that during the war about 12 000 Chechens came to Georgia.<\/p>\nFor the last 14 years, Kariata Tsimirbulatova has lived with her husband and four children in Duisi, a village in a valley in the northeastern part of Georgia near the border to Chechnya called Pankisi Gorge.<\/p>\n
The members of her family have recently received Georgian citizenship, and although they thereby lost some benefits granted to refugees, they have no regrets, but are rather grateful. \u201cThis country helped us so much,\u201d Kariata says. \u201cIt provided us with what we needed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family moved from Grozny in 1999, after the breakout of the second Russian-Chechen war, fearing the infamous carpet bombing by the Russian air force and other dangers of warfare as other twelve thousand refugees from Chechnya that flooded Pankisi with about seven thousand Kists, who share language and religion, Islam, with Chechens.<\/p>\n
Kariata and her husband Musa Dadaev, a former engineer from Grozny, and their four children, together with ten other families, now live in the old hospital building in Duisi, the largest village in Pankisi Gorge.<\/p>\n
There is no natural gas here in the village and people rely on electricity and mostly wood for heating. There is a water tap in Kariata\u2019s flat, but it has too low pressure, she says.<\/p>\n
Kariata tells us that most of the men who are refugees do not work. The family used to receive a refugee allowance of 28 lari (USD 16), but in January 2013, she, her husband and three children became Georgian citizens and stopped receiving refuge allowance. One daughter who was born in Tbilisi could not get citizenship due to problems with certain documents.<\/p>\n
Kariata says she hopes to be able to apply for citizenship again in six months, as they were told by the Ministry of Justice, and finally overcome this problem.<\/p>\n
Some Chechen refugees opt for Georgian citizenship, but others choose to retain their existing status as refugees which grants them a choice between returning to Chechnya or emigrate to Europe or the Americas, where they will easily receive political asylum.<\/p>\n
When the war started in 1999, about six thousand refugees came to Georgia, according to official information, and many of them were relatives of the Kists living in Pankisi Gorge. The situation was tense as Russia accused Georgia of harboring Chechen insurgents. That tension led to several Russian airstrikes in Pankisi and elsewhere in Eastern Georgia.<\/p>\n
That time, Pankisi really became a quite dangerous place, where kidnappings, drug dealing and robberies were rife.<\/p>\n
That ceased only in 2005, when the Georgian government restored its authority in the valley.<\/p>\n
Makvala Margoshvili, 76, from Duisi says that during the war about 12 000 Chechens came to Georgia.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnofficially, about 2 500 combatants sheltered in Pankisi,\u201d she tells us. \u201cEach of the families here had Chechen refugees at their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, tourists come to Duisi and usually stay at the house of Makvala, who has her own tourism business<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is peace in the Pankisi villages now. When we visited Duisi, the snow covered everything in white. Children were skiing and skating on the ice in the streets. In almost every house there is firewood in the yard and smoke rising up from the heaters. Elderly people are sitting on the benches chatting.<\/p>\n The majority of the refugees have either returned to Chechnya or moved to European countries.<\/p>\n According to Irakli Kokaia, head of the department of refugee and repatriation at the Refuge Ministry, about 300 people from the Republic of Chechnya have status as refugees in Georgia. More than 600 have received Georgian citizenship and have had their status as refugees revoked.<\/p>\n Refugee families nowadays live in Tbilisi, Akhmeta and a few other villages in Georgia.<\/p>\n Georgia provided special status for Chechen refugees that granted them a basic allowance 28 lari (USD 16) and some social benefits such as basic health insurance.<\/p>\n After getting Georgian citizenship Kariata and her family no longer are eligible for refugee allowance. Some of those Chechen refugees who were granted Georgian citizenship get a monthly social allowance in addition to the refugee allowance. It amounts to 60 lari (USD 34) for each family. However this allowance along with some social benefits is designated for the extremely poor, therefore Kariata\u2019s family does not receive social allowance because both she and her husband are working.<\/p>\n
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Kariata says she was aware that when she and her family became citizens of Georgia they wouldn\u2019t receive social allowance, utility wouldn\u2019t be free for them anymore, but still they wanted citizenship.<\/p>\n