Mountain Resettlement Not Going to Plan in Georgia

Efforts to resettle Georgians from mountain villages threatened by landslides are proving slow and ineffective, since many of the people offered new housing elsewhere have found it so inadequate that they have gone back home.

The worst affected villages are those in mountainous parts of Ajaria, a region of southwest Georgia bordering on Turkey. Frequent landslides caused by deforestation have killed more than 400 people since the late 1980s. More than 11,000 people across Georgia are registered as living in housing damaged by landslips.

The government has succeeded in resettling only a few dozen families in recent years, and there is still a long waiting list.

Nodar Kartsivadze lives in the Ajarian village of Zemokhevi with his six children and 16 grandchildren. His house is now beyond repair, but he is unhappy with the alternatives on offer from the government.

“There are so many people in our family that if we do move, we need to have decent conditions. The children have to eat. We can’t just go anywhere. Eighty per cent of those who moved to Marneuli have come back again, they can’t adapt to their new place,” he said. “I fear I wouldn’t be able to live there, either. There’s no water there, so how would we grow crops?”

Marneuli, in eastern Georgia, is where the government has tried to resettle people for whom mountain life is no longer tenable. The authorities have resettled 15 families from Zemokhevi, and 40 more have moved out under their own steam. Many of the highland villages in this part of Georgia suffer similar problems, with residents living in constant fear of landslides.

Geological experts are alarmed at the slow progress being made.

“Apart from the last two years, there have been deaths every year,” Tariel Tuskia, who heads Georgia’s geological agency, said. “These [landslip] processes became particularly active at the end of the 1980s, and there isn’t a single village left that doesn’t have damaged houses, roads and factories. In 1989 and 1991 alone, some 5,000 families had to be moved out of the highland villages in Ajaria.”

Tuskia favours what he calls “demographic easing”.

“By ‘easing’, I mean a reduction in population density. Because of the number of residents, and the lack of [piped in] gas, residents have cut down trees, and this has led to these landslides,” he explained.

Badri Kobaladze, head of the refugees and settlement department in the Ajarian regional government, the province now has 4,000 families who are awaiting resettlement. One of the biggest problems that officials face, he said, is that families do not want to go to the new homes made available to them.

Badri Kamashidze, head of the administration in the village of Tkhilvani, close to Zemokhevi, said 53 families there had been resettled, but 46 had returned because they preferred to live in damaged buildings and risk further landslides than remain in the new areas the government had directed them to.

Ilia Guchmanidze heads Borjgalo, a charity that assists people forced by natural disaster to leave their homes, and he says people are fearful of moving somewhere new, as well as of remaining at risk where they are.

“More than 9,000 families have been moved from mountainous parts of Ajaria to other regions of Georgian. According to the Ajarian health and welfare ministry, there are 4,144 families in the region who are recorded as vulnerable to landslides. From 2004 to 2010, more than 700 families were moved, and this migration is a constant process,” he said.

Part of the problem, Guchmanidze said, was a deficient regulatory framework in which people made homeless by natural disasters were not accorded any special legal status.

“That means they are not able to take advantage of legal defence mechanisms,” he explained. “The state doesn’t have a long-term plan or political strategy to deal with this at the moment. And without a strategy, all the measures the state undertakes are spontaneous and ad hoc, meaning that the money doesn’t get spent effectively.”

This year’s government budget, like the one for 2010, does not earmark funds for resettling people from mountain villages.

A new body called the Georgian Coalition on Migration was set up this year by a number of non-government organisations, and is now working with state institutions and international organisations to improve things. Despite this increased attention, no solution is in sight.

Anzor Bolkvadze, who is deputy speaker of the Georgian parliament and was elected from Khulo district in Ajaria, insisted the authorities were doing all they could to solve the problem.

“I’m personally involved in these processes,” he said. “But you must understand that resolving this problem will require serious money. I can promise that we will take all the steps we can to make things better for the migrants.”

Lasha Zarginava is editor of the Resume newspaper in Poti, western Georgia.