Remembering Abkhazia

First we hear the wailing; women crying among the silver-blue leaves of the olive trees. The sound appears to be coming from somewhere behind a ramshackle building made of bits of corrugated iron and clay bricks with bits of straw sticking out of them. Rounding the side of the building, we find a group of perhaps 20 - 30 people gathered around a roughly rectangular pit in the ground.

They are burying a son. He was 19 years old. A freedom fighter or terrorist; a terrorist or a freedom fighter, it doesn't really matter now. He looks hardly more than a boy in the photo clutched by his brother (his lips pressed tightly together, his face grim). What does his mother care of the conflict now? Her son is gone; she knows nothing but this.

His brother speaks to us of his hatred of all Georgians. They used to break bread together; now they try to kill one another. The pain and suffering of these people is all too obvious, but I cannot truly know what it feels like. It is not I who have lost a brother; a son.

Still, I cannot help but think: "What if this boy was also responsible for a scene such as this, 50 miles away over the de facto border? What if somewhere there a mother is weeping too? A mother who also now knows nothing of conflict and hatred, only the pain of losing her child?"

He would surely be hailed as a hero by this poor, war-torn community. And perhaps, 50 miles away, some other son is being hailed as just such a hero by his friends and relatives. But in the heart of a conflict, such paradoxes are often forgotten: ignored by those who control the conflicts, many miles away, sitting in leather armchairs in spacious, well-equipped offices, and pushed to the back of the minds of those immersed in it by the pain of suffering - the anguish of losing those that they love.

What bitter madness. Spilt blood begets more spilt blood, and more mothers are left to weep. The blood mixes with the handfuls of soil that are tossed in on the wooden box. Behind the roughly-constructed lid of that box lies the boy that was once a child, once a baby, once a stirring in a mother's belly.

The earth drops like rain, and tears wet the ground.