"I was very young when I was told at home that if someone asks you about my mother, asks for her surname, or where she is from... I should not say that she is Ossetian,” Keti Kobiashvili recalls. 

Keti, 32, was born in 1990, the year before hostilities between ethnic Ossetians and ethnic Georgians boiled into an armed conflict in Georgia. 

The first Georgian-Ossetian conflict began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s,  when South Ossetia declared its desire for independence. In response, the Georgian government abolished the status of an autonomous region of South Ossetia on December 11, 1990. The first armed confrontation was recorded in November-December 1989 and fighting broke out in 1991-1992. Over the course of the war, hundreds of people were killed and thousands of families—both Ossetians and Georgians—were forced to flee their homes. 

Keti’s parents decided to stay. But their decision came at a price. "My mother is an educated, decent person, whose potential was not fully realized because she hid herself away,” she says. “It seems that the events of the ‘90s had an impact on a personal level.”

While ethnic Ossetians and Georgians had lived together peacefully for generations, by the 1990s, relations had deteriorated to the point that ethnic Ossetians were forced from their homes in predominantly Georgian-populated communities. They lost their jobs, homes, and faced wide-scale discrimination, according to Paata Zakareishvili, the former State Minister of Georgia for Reconciliation and Civil Equality.

“Ossetians were forced to sell their apartment for pennies… a whole family was forced to leave the house and go to Vladikavkaz. There are hundreds of such cases,” he says. “This is our most shameful page in the recent history of Georgia, about which we remain silent.”

Dimitri Sanakoev, the head of the administration of South Ossetia based in Tbilisi from 2006 to 2022, remembers the period as a time of chaos, where no one—not ethnic Ossetians or ethnic Georgians—felt safe. 

“There was a mess in the whole country and Ossetians did not feel safe at that time. It was the same for Georgians, too,” he says. “[T]here were cases when Ossetians were deprived of money, property, they were intimidated and so on, at the same time the same was happening to Georgians as well.”

Conflictologist Nino Kalandarishvili believes the crimes committed against ethnic Ossetians in the 1990s were due to the wave of aggressive ethnic nationalism that enveloped the country as it emerged from the Soviet Union. 

Kalandarishvili, the chair of the Study of Nationalism and Conflicts (ISNC), notes that as an ethnic minority living in Georgia, they were viewed as a different group that allegedly disagreed with the Georgian national project and were therefore perceived as enemies of Georgia's independence.

"Seeing the enemy in our differences brought us to this point. We were not even interested in why Ossetians thought that we were dangerous for them, why they didn’t want to live in independent Georgia, what dangers they saw… a slightly different point of view was not compatible with the aggressive Georgian nationalism of that time,” she says. “Unfortunately, today we don't even remember that such events happened. The new and older generations should also understand what happened then and why it happened.”

27-year-old Magda Khokhobashvili’s entire life was shaped by those events. Her mother, Lela, is an ethnic Ossetian who was forced to move to Russia when she was pregnant with Magda.

“I was a few months old when my mother returned to Tbilisi. She thought maybe she could live here, but the situation was different and she could not manage to stay," says Magda.

Magda was born and raised in Stavropol in south-western Russia, and graduated from school there. Due to Russian visa requirements, her father could not visit family regularly so Magda used to come to Tbilisi ‘in the summer. Today she is working toward a master’s degree in Political Sciences at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Her thesis is on domestic politics in unrecognized South Ossetia. 

"I have loved Georgia since I was a child,” she says. “Probably, I had so much love for Georgia because of my love for my father. My mother used to say ‘if I didn't love Georgians, I wouldn't marry a Georgian.’”

Unlike her mother, Magda has never experienced any discrimination—classmates have been more interested than hostile when they find out about her heritage. 

Keti also believes attitudes have significantly changed, although she notes that at times of extreme tension—such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—she has seen anti-Ossetian rhetoric bubble up online before subsiding. 

"When I started speaking about my Ossetian mother, I did not feel from anyone what my mother and her family felt and endured,” she says. 

For some members of her family, the feeling of being unwanted has never fully faded away, however.

"When I told my grandmother that I had an Ossetian coursemate girl from Gori, it was a shock for her. Grandmother asked: “What? She was accepted to the university with an Ossetian surname?” She was very surprised.”

This Feature story was prepared with support from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) South Caucasus Regional Office. All opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of FES.