MOSCOW — Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report on Friday on the brief August war in Georgia, accusing both Russia and Georgia of using indiscriminate force on civilians. It also said Russia had failed to prevent South Ossetian forces from carrying out “execution-style killings, rape, abductions and countless beatings.”

The war began Aug. 7, when Georgia attacked Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, a separatist enclave. Russia responded by sending columns of armor into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a second breakaway region, and then driving deep into Georgia.

Early in the war, Moscow accused Georgia of “genocide” and said 2,000 people had been killed in the shelling of Tskhinvali. In its report, Human Rights Watch rejects those claims as exaggerated, and calls on Russia to acknowledge the more recent assessments of 162 to 400 dead.

Much of the report is devoted to a meticulous description of Ossetian rampages in ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia, in which houses were systematically looted, set ablaze and bulldozed, sometimes as their inhabitants watched. Human Rights Watch concluded that the militias’ intent was “to ethnically cleanse these villages” and that Russia as an occupying force was responsible for civilians’ safety.

Russian forces “had full knowledge of what was going on,” said Anna Neistat, the organization’s senior emergencies researcher, at a news conference in Moscow. “I think they just didn’t care.”

The report was based on interviews with 460 victims and witnesses. Georgian officials cooperated with the effort. Russian officials did not respond to requests for information sent to the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the president’s office, the report said.

Criticism of the Georgian side focuses on the shelling of Tskhinvali, starting the night of Aug. 7. The report called the Georgian shelling “indiscriminate” and a violation of international humanitarian law, largely because it used Grad multiple-rocket launching systems, which are notoriously inaccurate, in populated civilian areas. A man whose mother and aunt were killed when a rocket struck their yard in Tskhinvali told a researcher that it had left a 10-foot crater.

“When it hit, all the sharp, scorching fragments flew into the house, penetrating the walls as if it was paper,” said the man, Alan Sipols. “When such a fragment hits a person, it just shreds you apart, and I cannot describe what they turned the people I loved most into.”

Human Rights Watch also found that Georgia had used cluster bombs, which eject dozens or hundreds of bomblets over a large area. Weeks after the war, unexploded bomblets were scattered in fields and orchards, and farmers were too frightened to harvest their crops.

The report characterizes some Russian air and artillery strikes as indiscriminate, saying that in some cases weapons struck half a mile away from military targets and even where no military target could be discerned. The report also found that Russia had used cluster bombs — something the authorities vehemently denied during the war. It said Russian forces were responsible for an attack on the main square in Gori on Aug. 12, killing six people, including a Dutch journalist.

A Russian military official said on Friday that the allegations were untrue, the Interfax news service reported. “These are unproven allegations that have been repeatedly voiced by the Georgian authorities,” Interfax quoted the official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, as saying. “They have been denied on numerous occasions.”

Most vivid are accounts of the violence unleashed by South Ossetians after Russia had driven back the Georgian Army. The report documents 159 detentions of ethnic Georgian civilians, two rapes of ethnic Georgian women, the torture and execution of three prisoners of war and the razing of hundreds of houses.

A Georgian soldier, Kakha Zirakishvili, 33, told researchers that he and six other prisoners of war had been beaten by Ossetian civilians and fighters “with gun butts, iron bars, whatever they had: wooden sticks, chairs even.” Upon release, he had a broken rib, two broken fingers, a broken bone in his hand, internal bruising in his chest, a broken eardrum and severe head trauma.

Human Rights Watch urged all sides to conduct independent inquiries and to let more than 20,000 ethnic Georgian refugees return to South Ossetia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world/europe/24georgia.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company