GEORGIA LETTER: MOST OF the passengers on my near empty flight to Tbilisi nine days ago were journalists, which is usually the case when you travel to a country at war.
There were at least three television crews, among them Stan Storimans and Jeroen Akkermans from the Dutch station RTL. Storimans's Bart Simpson-style haircut and mischievous smile were familiar from other reporting trips, but we wouldn't have exchanged more than a nod and hello.
Eighteen hours after I watched him carry his camera off the Georgian Airways flight Storimans was dead, killed by a Russian cluster bomb in Gori. Akkermans and Israeli journalist Zadok Yehezkeli were wounded. Human Rights Watch, which investigated the explosions, found they were caused by cluster bombs, not mortars as originally thought. The same bombing killed at least eight Georgian civilians.
The Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, who knew Storimans, summoned the Russian ambassador to his office in The Hague to demand an explanation. "My thoughts go out to Mr Storimans's family, especially his wife and two children," Verhagen said in a statement, calling him a "hardworking professional and an exceptionally sympathetic man". The Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, said his wife, Sandra Reolofs, who is Dutch, would attend the funeral.
Stan Storimans was a professional, with 20 years' experience in countries like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Congo, Indonesia and Afghanistan. He planned to publish his memoirs this year. He and Akkermans were working in the Georgian government press centre, 200m from Gori's central square, when the cluster bombs exploded. An armoured car belonging to Reuters was pierced by shrapnel in the same bombing. In war, there's no protection from bad luck, but Stan Storimans's death made us all a little more careful.
I met Zaza Gachechiladze, the editor of the English language daily The Messengerand the Russian language newspaper Echo, on the morning they buried two Georgian journalists, Grigol "Giga" Chikhladze (30), and Alexander "Sasha" Klimchuk (28). Giga had freelanced for Gachechiladze for nearly 10 years, and worked for the Russian version of Newsweek. Sasha worked for the Russian agency Itar-Tass.
Giga called by Gachechiladze's office on the morning of August 8th, the first day of the war.
He, Sasha and two staff correspondents for The Messenger, Winston Featherly, who is American, and Temur Kiguradze, set out in Sasha's car for the war zone.
"I didn't send them," Gachechiladze said sadly. "They told me they wanted to go. I said 'please don't do it, and whatever you do, don't go beyond Gori'." Between Gori and Tskhinvali, the four journalists were stopped by gunmen in camouflage fatigues. "It wasn't clear whether they were regular soldiers or mercenaries," Gachechiladze explains. "Giga and Sasha tried to run away, and they killed them. They shot both of my journalists - Winston in the foot, and Temur in the right forearm." Several days passed before the deaths were confirmed. It took nine days to retrieve the bodies of Giga and Sasha, in horrible condition. Featherly's parents and the US embassy made sure he received the best medical care in Moscow.
Russian army doctors did a poor job on Kiguradze's arm. After returning to Tbilisi via a circuitous route, he is about to undergo a second operation.
Gachechiladze insists war correspondents must be properly trained and equipped: "It's like sending lambs to the slaughter. They had no bullet-proof jackets, no 'press' markings on their car." He advocates "embedding," as practised by the US military in Iraq, to provide a modicum of protection for journalists. Frankly, I can't see it working in a war like this.
And, Gachechiladze adds, journalists must be insured, though such coverage is not available in Georgia. Sasha was the sole support of his parents; Giga had a wife and two small children. The Caucasus Images photo agency in Tbilisi is collecting money for their families.
A Turkish television crew that ventured down the same road from Gori to Tskhinvali filmed the attack on themselves. It makes chilling viewing: bullets shatter the windscreen of the four-wheel drive vehicle. Blood splatters on the broken glass. One of the journalists is wounded in the head, another in the arm. The cameraman films his comrades getting out with their hands up, walking towards the gunmen. The Turks miraculously survived, and were sent back to Turkey four days later.
Now the shooting appears to have stopped, but the Russians are deep inside Georgia. The tiny hamlet of Igoeti has become the de facto border, the place where Russian troops in T-72 tanks face down paunchy Georgian policemen in Toyota pick-ups. It's an uneven match; you had only to see the way a tank crushed a police vehicle on Sunday.
Saakashvili has the temerity to call the Russians "the barbarians of the 21st century," with the tanks lurking just 35km up the road at Igoeti.
The first time I drove through Igoeti, on August 12th, there was no military presence, and I learned a local custom. As he sped past the small Orthodox chapel built flush to the highway, my driver, Zura, rolled down his window, crossed himself and threw a few coins at the terracotta brick structure.
"They had to cut the chapel in half when they built the highway," Zura explained. "It's called the Angel of the Road now. Poor people come and gather the coins. It brings protection to those who throw them." Before it was the front line between Russians and Georgians, the hairpin curve abutted by the chapel was the road fatality black spot for Georgia. Last time I went past, I threw a few coins too.
