Humiliated by Russia in August�s five-day war, Georgians are asking, �where now for our country?� from Rob Parsons in Tbilisi

FROM a distance, the Georgian villages of Shida Kartli are a picture of charm: The apple trees are heavy with fruit, the autumn leaves glow russet red in the warm October sunshine, carts laden with hay block the narrow roadways, and in the mid-distance the snow caps of the Caucasus mountains stretch as far as the eye can see.

But move a little closer and you quickly feel the poison in the air. As we pass through a succession of villages - Karaleti, Tqviavi, Dzvera, Shindisi - the proportion of burnt-out houses increases. A few dazed peasants stagger among the charred beams and detritus of their former lives, but mostly these rural lanes are empty of habitation.

Until a few days ago, this strip of land along the southern border of Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia was patrolled by Russian troops - the victors of Moscow's five-day war with Georgia in early August. It was what they called their security zone, needed, they said, to prevent the Georgian army launching new attacks against South Ossetia. Its existence was one of the Kremlin's conditions for signing up to French president Nicolas Sarkozy's six-point peace plan.

A more honest name might have been "killing zone". Under the indifferent gaze of the Russian army - the sole source of security after it had routed the Georgians - gangs of armed Ossetian militia marauded through these villages with impunity, killing, raping, burning and stealing. Most of the villagers, it is true, fled in wild panic as the Russians advanced - but there was little mercy for those left behind.

Only now that the Russians are withdrawing - according to the terms of the Sarkozy plan they should have returned to the positions they occupied before the start of the conflict by October 10 - is it becoming clear just what happened in the zone over those weeks of occupation. What is still happening to the hundreds of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia itself can only be guessed at, as the Russians are denying access to independent observers As the Russians leave, they are being replaced by the Georgian police and observers from the European Union and the OSCE. It was police that stopped us on the edge of Ergneti - pulling us off the road and warning that vehicles could go no further. We walked into the aftermath of an inferno. I counted just four houses left untouched - the others burnt and looted. Bunches of roasted grapes hung from blackened pergolas, collapsed walls leant into the street and clothes considered too worn and mean by the marauders lay scattered in the courtyards. In the garden of one house, I stooped to pick up a discarded photo album - and with a sense of guilt flicked through pictures of a smiling young couple on holiday.

There is no sign of them. But people are returning. There are even some, like Ana Chkhlaidze, who never left. What saved her, she doesn't know. Perhaps it was her age. She curses everyone - the Russians, the Ossetians and the Georgian government - in a never-ending stream of profanity. A widower, she had bought all her provisions for the winter. Now her house has gone and the Ossetians have taken the rest.

She warns me not to walk too far down her street because, she says, there are Ossetians just beyond and they are kidnapping people for ransom. A short stroll reveals how difficult it will be to keep the Georgians and Ossetians apart. As I turn a corner, the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, springs into view, its proximity exaggerated perhaps by the sharp autumn light, but certainly no more than a kilometre away.

Even those displaced people with houses to return to have good reason not to hurry back - the fields and orchards are littered with unexploded ordnance. We joined a police bomb disposal squad in an unnerving hunt through a cornfield for cluster bombs - the result of a tip-off from a local farmer - and later watched as they exploded four bombs dropped from Russian aircraft.

August's defeat does not seem to have dented the morale of the Georgian police, which, unlike the army, has emerged with its reputation enhanced by the events of the last few weeks. Police reform has been one of the big achievements of Mikhail Saakashvili's government. While the state's structures creaked in August, it carried on as if nothing had happened. Outside of the areas occupied by the Russians, there was never even a hint of a breakdown of public order.

As part of the peace agreement, the Georgian army is prevented from entering the former security zone around south Ossetia, so it is the police who have responsibility for security now. They have been joined too by 200 unarmed security monitors from the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM), whose responsibility it is to ensure that the peace plan is being fulfilled.

It's an unenviable task. The Russians say they have fulfilled the terms of the deal but the evidence on the ground indicates otherwise. The Russians still occupy Akhalgori, a district 40 km from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. It was unquestionably under Georgian administration before the fighting began.

And, as a patrol with EU monitors revealed this week, they are still inside other parts of Georgia too. A Russian military checkpoint stopped them as they attempted to monitor observance of the peace deal near the Georgian village of Perevi, up in the mountains along the western edge of South Ossetia. The Russians had no right to be there. The incident reveals the limits of what the EUMM (European Union Monitoring Mission) can do. The French commander spoke to the Russians, genial words were exchanged and the two blue EUMM armoured vehicles turned round and went back the way they had come. A protest was no doubt lodged, but the Russians are making a point. They'll leave only when they are ready.

Which inevitably alarms those Georgians who want to return. In Karbi, just a couple of kilometres from South Ossetia, villagers told me that they could never feel safe while the Russian army was still there, because the Russians gave the Ossetians a sense of impunity. Ossetians had attempted to kidnap two people that day and at night, the Russians terrified people on the Georgian side of the border by sweeping their villages with a spotlight.

I arrived in nearby Koshka on Thursday with the smoke rising from the timbers of three houses torched that morning by Ossetian raiders. The EUMM logs events like this and raises them with the Russians but claim to have no control over the Ossetians. The Georgians dismiss this - and, indeed, the notion that several thousand Russian troops cannot control the movements of a few hundred armed Ossetian militia is risible.

Moscow, no doubt, wants to keep the pressure on Georgia - and pressure on the Georgian people, it hopes, will in turn destabilise Saakashvili's control. But if that is Moscow's calculation, there is precious little sign so far that it is working. Misha, as the Georgians call him, may yet survive the consequences of his disastrous August war. These are early days and most people are so dazed by the catastrophe that has befallen their country that the outlook for the future remains inevitably obscure. There is much pent-up negative energy and a false move by the government could yet provoke a popular backlash.

But Saakashvili shows signs of learning from his mistakes - the summer war and last November's disastrous decision to use force against an opposition demonstration in Tbilisi. He has promised a quantum leap in reform, acknowledging that the media have to be freer and that Georgia needs an independent judiciary. Some of his proposals have gone further than his critics demands. But many question his sincerity.

Saakashvili would be unwise to miss his chance. Even the most radical opposition parties seem to accept that now is not the time to demand his resignation. But the mood is brittle. Saakashvili's best chance may be to curtail his own powers and, by doing so, enhance his authority. If he spurns this opportunity, the popular mood could yet turn ugly.

There is a growing consensus that Georgia under Saakashvili has become too authoritarian, that the concentration of power in the presidency owes more to Putin's Russia than the West Saakashvili says he aspires to.

Sozar Subari, Georgia's Ombudsman or Public Defender of Human Rights, is among his most outspoken critics. By an ironic twist that nevertheless underlines Georgia's determination to break with some of the more gruesome moments in its past, his office is in the former Tbilisi mansion of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's chief henchman and executioner.

He says his key demands are genuinely free and fair elections, an independent judiciary and a free media and he acknowledges that "Misha" is calling for much the same. But he is not convinced he has the will to carry the reforms through.

One of the keys, he says, may lie in building a political consensus. But while he insists the ball is firmly in Saakashvili's court, he acknowledges the need for the opposition must also play a less confrontational role.

It's a view shared by Petre Mamradze, former head of administration to both ex-president Shevardnadze and Saakashvili. Today, he is just an MP - but one with strong views about the need to get Georgia back on the track of reform. Recalling last November's demonstrations, he says that while most of the slogans at the time seemed reasonable enough, everyone understood that the real aim of the demonstration was to oust Saakashvili from power. "One of the problems of Georgian democracy', he tells me, is its immaturity. For Georgians it's a zero-sum game. If I win, you lose. It's up to Saakashvili to prove to the opposition that Georgian democracy can rise above that."

He may be encouraged by the weakness of the opposition and its abject failure over the last year to capitalise on popular discontent with the government. Georgians, it seems, have had their fill of confrontation.

And he may be encouraged too by signs of the emergence of new opposition forces - among them his former ally, Nino Burjanadze. She accepts that Georgia needs a presidential style of democracy but argues that it has gone too far down the authoritarian road. But she is not demanding fresh elections tomorrow. Her style is more consensual - and she may bring on board other heavy-weights, like former Prime Minister, Zurab Noghaideli, and the popular ambassador to the United Nations, Irakli Alasania, tipped as a rising star of the future.

The first test of the new mood will likely come in November, with the anniversary on the seventh of the police assault on demonstrators and Imedi television station. Niki Rurua, who forms part of Saakashvili's inner circle of trusted allies, insists the government has learnt its lessons. "We lacked experience then," he says, "but we won't make the same mistakes again. You have to remember how young our democracy is."

It's a fair point. Georgian democracy lacks human resources - it's a small country with a population just short of five million. When Shevardnadze left power, many of the leading lights of the civil society that emerged under his reign joined the new government.

A vacuum was left that has not yet been filled. The same goes for the opposition. Georgia lacks the resources for an effective political counter-balance. The problem though is that rather than encourage the emergence of an effective opposition, the Saakashvili government's instinct has been to stifle it.

The US and the European Union now have a unique chance to push him into making the reforms he has himself acknowledged need to be made. Privately, the EU is telling the Georgians that the massive injection of money promised in the wake of the Russian invasion is conditional on real evidence of reform. That means, in particular, genuine media freedom, an end to the shake-downs of private business and judges that have complete independence of any government.

A second test may come with the investigation into the August war. Heads will have to roll - some of them close to Saakashvili himself. There are many unanswered questions. Why did Georgia allow itself to be drawn into a war it could not win, what were the aims of the Georgian authorities when it entered into hostilities and why was it so badly conducted? Why, for instance, did the Tbilisi city mayor, Gigi Ugulava take on so much responsibility for military operations and why was Davit Kezerashvili, appointed defence minister when he is 29 and has no military experience.

Mamradze though is looking for the silver lining to the clouds over Georgia. The loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia for the foreseeable future, he says, could force Georgians to look more closely at themselves: "If it makes us more realistic, something good will have come of this."