Living in limbo

A year after the war in Georgia, refugees from the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are still living in crumbling buildings – with as many as six people, parents, children and grandparents sharing a single room. Children are sleeping under beds or tables to make space for everybody.

Photographer David Brunetti took these pictures on a recent visit to the country. The region has been plagued with conflict for decades. Some of the people he encountered were victims of another war in the early 1990s and are still in the same places of refuge – former hotels and student accommodation that have remained derelict for almost 20 years.

The rooms serve as living room and communal bedroom, washbasins as sinks, and small stoves and hotplates, located in long, dark corridors just outside the smallest rooms are surrogate kitchens.

There is electricity, but few floors have water so it has to be carried up the stairs.

The residents are poor and there is no work for refugees. They are stuck in limbo – victims of a war everyone else seems to have forgotten.

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