DILI, Timor Leste

WHAT’S HAPPENING in Georgia and South Ossetia is even harder to watch if you have friends there. My husband and I taught journalism in the Caucasus for three years, and we’ve been inundated with e-mails and calls from former students and friends.

They’re coming from both sides of the conflict. It is a long way from resolution. And it’s hard to see how this will ever be fixed.

Imagine what might have happened if Woonsocket had decided to secede and go it alone, or if that didn’t work, hook up with Quebec.

Sure, Woonsocket has a proud French heritage. But it’s in Rhode Island, and Quebec is in Canada. Woonsocket doesn’t have a strong enough economy to stand on its own. Plus, plenty of residents are not French, and over the years the French have intermarried with all sorts of other people.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the drift.

The Caucasus region is one of the most diverse on Earth, home to dozens of ethnically distinct peoples with different histories, religions and languages.

They don’t always get along. One of the region’s best-known conflicts is in Chechnya, which has been fighting Russia off and on for well over a century.

Ossetians are the remnants of a once-large empire that spanned the Greater Caucasus, a line of huge mountains along the southern border of Russia. Some live in North Ossetia, a Russian province; far fewer live in South Ossetia, which is in Georgia. Georgia is about the size of South Carolina, while South Ossetia is — yes — about the size of Rhode Island.

To me, Ossetians look and act a lot like Georgians, and many families have indeed blended over the years. They used to live intermingled in villages and towns. Religion (Orthodox Christian), traditional music and dance are all similar, although the Ossetians admit that Georgians make better wine. But Ossetians speak a different language and see history differently, saying they never wanted to be part of Georgia and were forced into it.

As the Soviet Union was falling apart in the late 1980s and early ’90s, many of its former republics and autonomous regions made bids for independence. In 1991 and 1992, South Ossetia fought a short but bloody war with Georgia that ended with most Georgians being driven out of South Ossetia.

South Ossetia declared itself a nation, but it was never recognized by the rest of the world. Russian soldiers arrived to serve as peacekeepers. Essentially the same thing happened in Abkhazia, another ethnically distinct enclave on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, where Stalin once summered in his favorite dacha. Between the two conflicts, an estimated 250,000 Georgians were displaced to miserable refugee camps throughout Georgia.

And that’s where things stood for 16 years.

The status quo was surreal — imagine having to get permission from the Woonsocket Foreign Ministry to drive from Lincoln to Woonsocket, passing through a military checkpoint. South Ossetia eked out a living by farming and taxing goods coming through the Roki tunnel, one of only a few routes through the mighty mountains. Georgians claimed that the tunnel was a major route for smugglers, and many Georgians shopped at a huge open-air market just south of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinval.

Then Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili took power in the Rose Revolution, in 2003, and vowed to reunite the country. He began by shutting down the smugglers’ market. Skirmishes broke out every summer, as Georgians and South Ossetians traded threats and insults like baseball cards.

This summer, Saakashvili evidently decided to re-take South Ossetia by force, and the whole world has seen what happened next.

This bitter conflict has cost more than blood and treasure. It has corroded human relationships, and infected generations with hopelessness and distrust.

In 2004, we tried to bridge some gaps at the Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management in Tbilisi, a project of the U.S. State Department. The student body that year was like a gathering of warring tribes: Armenians and Azerbaijanis, who have been at war since 1988; Georgians and one Ossetian, Dina Gassieva.

Students were required to check their ethnic conflicts at the door. We told them, “We don’t care what you may think or feel about your fellow students, you will have to work with them like professionals if you want to study here.”

To their credit, after the initial shock, they did it.

We’d persuaded Dina to enroll after meeting her on a journalism training trip to South Ossetia. Even before the current violence, Tskhinval was battered and sad, with buildings still pockmarked by bullets from the fighting in 1992. Men stood and smoked on the street corners all day, and dogs slept in the intersections.

Dina was tiny and intense, smart as a whip with a wicked sense of humor underlying her reserve. She was also a serious journalist, working at a threadbare radio station in Tskhinval.

We wondered if she’d be able to handle the school — she’d be alone, in the heart of enemy territory, and we couldn’t be sure how she would relate to the Georgian students.

Well, she took them by storm. She quickly became a leader in the class, a kind of neutral zone. She could be friends with both the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians, who found it harder to be friends with each other.

True, she had a tougher time with the Georgians, sometimes gritting her teeth when the airier among them would remark that South Ossetia was of course a part of Georgia. But it didn’t come up much, and as the year passed she became a popular team leader.

Her perfect Russian landed her a good summer internship in Moscow, at Echo Moskvy Radio, one of the last remnants of relatively free press in Russia. When they told her she couldn’t speak on the air because of her Ossetian accent, she took it better than I would have. She was looking forward to returning to Tbilisi to finish her final project and the school year.

But 2004 was a bad year in the Caucasus. On Sept. 1, Chechen terrorists took more than 1,100 hostages (including hundreds of children) at a school in Beslan, just over the mountains in North Ossetia. At least 334 people were killed. Two Caucasian suicide bombers blew up airplanes in Russia. Dina’s family wouldn’t let her come back to Tbilisi.

We stayed in touch, and visited her home. She finished her degree work by e-mail. Two weeks ago she e-mailed us that shells had struck her house. Nobody was hurt, she said, noting her two young sons “slept like angels” through it. She wrote that her brother was working as a journalist, too. We later learned he was injured in the fighting.

And then, nothing. The fighting got worse and worse. We saw thousands of Ossetian refugees streaming north toward the Roki tunnel to safety in the North Ossetian city of Vladikavkaz, and we hoped she and her boys were among them. For more than a week, we had no news.

It was Lasha Kvesaladze, one of her Georgian classmates who is now a TV reporter, who spotted the small news item on the Internet on Aug. 12: a short Itar-Tass update on the situation in Tskhinval, filed in Vladikavkaz. Byline: Dina Gassieva.

Jody McPhillips and David Bloss are former Providence Journal journalists who left in 2000 to work overseas. They have taught journalism in Cambodia, Indonesia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Timor Leste (East Timor), where they currently work.