Mzevinari and her husband Guladi have lost all hope of ever returning home. The mountains of Abkhazia, only 5 km (3 miles) away from the tiny border town of Rukhi in the Caucasian nation of Georgia, loom omnipotent in the background. Their snowy peaks serve as constant reminders of an unreachable summit.

The longing to go back to Abkhazia - in the northwest of Georgia, on the Black Sea - is just as unattainable as a job and a proper roof. All are fond memories from another life, before 1992, when then Georgian President Eduard Shevardnazde started a war with Abkhazia to quell talk of separatism.

Both sides committed atrocities in the fighting which followed, and several thousand people are believed to have been killed. The Abkhazians eventually pushed out the Georgian troops the following year, with the help of Chechens and Russians - who simultaneously armed the Georgians.

Following the war, some 270,000 Georgians living in Abkhazia fled to Georgia, according to the United Nations. However, the numbers are contested since they're based on a population census by Tbilisi's authorities, which counted a pre-war community of 540,000.

In 1994, Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) agreed to cooperate on planning the repatriation of people who fled the conflict zone, but it's had limited success so far.

Many of the people displaced within Georgia have blood on their hands from a time when neighbours turned on neighbours. Others, innocent of any crime, simply fled out of fear of violent Abkhaz retribution. "When Tbilisi sent in troops, many Georgians in Abkhazia joined and took up arms against neighbours, sometimes even against relatives via intermarriage," says Dr. Viacheslav Chirikba, president of the Foundation for Independent Expertise in Sokhumi, a non-governmental research institute in the town claimed as the capital of independent Abkhazia.

In Zugdidi, Georgia, a displaced Georgian woman who works for an international organisation and wishes to remain unnamed said Abkhaz militias shot her uncle's wife in front of her children. "You can't forget these kinds of things," she added.

When Georgian partisans tried to liberate the Abkhazian district of Gali in a two-week war in 1998, more than half of homes there were destroyed. Around 40,000 Georgian refugees fled a second time, Belgian-based think tank International Crisis Group says. But people are returning, driven by their families, their property and their memories.

The tension hasn't gone away, and there's been a spate of bombings lately. On July 6 a bomb attack on a cafe in Gali town centre killed four people and injured six, the worst violence in months. Everyone is on edge.

Georgia has dramatically increased its military expenditure. In March, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Georgia had 33,000 serving troops and another 100,000 reservists. Russia is moving in more peacekeeping forces and Abkhazia's military is on alert. Everyone is combat ready.

Abkhazia, once an autonomous soviet socialist republic within Georgia during the time of Josef Stalin - who was himself Georgian - seeks independence and recognition as a people with a distinct culture, heritage, history, and language. Georgia wants Abkhazia back. Neither is willing to concede.

Russia has its own interest, capitalising on controlled instability in a region that complicates Georgia's desired adhesion to NATO and forces Abkhazia to rely on its largest neighbour.

UNHCR estimates that there were still more than 220,000 internally displaced people in Georgia in 2006.

The displaced families are caught in the crossfire, especially tens of thousands of Georgian "returnees" living in the Gali district, a territory in eastern Abkhazia under its de facto jurisdiction. They're estimated at between 45,000 to 50,000 by the Norwegian Refugee Council, but nobody knows exactly as UNHCR has yet to verify numbers in the volatile zone.

Gali is the only region, out of seven in Abkhazia, where refugees from Georgia are allowed to return and settle. They are for the most part ethnic Mingrelian and have experienced human rights abuse from Georgians, Abkhazians, and from an assortment of local militias.

Abkhazians pressure them to join the military and to take Abkhaz citizenship - sometimes through threats and intimidation. "I am not saying we are altruistic to these people," says Abkhazia's de facto deputy minister of foreign affairs. "They can get Abkhazian citizenship and must refrain from getting Georgian. I understand it is ambiguous, but this is our position."

Russian peacekeepers at checkpoints extort money from the hazelnut and citrus fruit farmers transporting their goods to Zugdidi market across the ceasefire line.

While Abkhazia declared its independence in 1994, it remains unrecognised by the international community and its status has never been resolved. Aside from enjoying normal trade and transport relations with Russia, it's struggling under an economic embargo and poverty levels are very high.

In Abkhazia, Guladi was working as a lorry driver and Mzevinari a housewife. They now receive a combined total of 80 Georgian laris ($57) per month, a meagre government stipend for internally displaced people that's meant to supplement an income that neither one has and to feed their two children.

Mzevinari, an outspoken mother in her fifties, wants the roof repaired as she stares at a large pool of water on the floor of her living room which at one time was a small department store. The entire back wall is covered in green mould and webbed in blackened rivulets of rainwater. "The roof starting going about five years ago," she says, "and for the past few months it's gotten really bad."

Mzevinari's story and living conditions are not unlike those of some 40,000 other internally displaced people currently living in Zugdidi and its environs. In Zugdidi proper, 150 families live in an abandoned former public hospital. Some live six or seven to a room and one family I met has no electricity.

The conflict, filtered through the spectrum of Georgia as victim of a bullying Russia, obfuscates Tbilisi's less than stunning performance of democracy, its ill treatment of displaced people, and indeed its aggressive posture against Abkhazia.

As is so often the case, the real victims are those simply trying to get by, not concerned with decision-making in the upper echelons of government, but rather on when and if electricity will return and how to patch a leaking roof.

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