Models, machine guns mix on runway in Caucasus

? Watching a bevy of fashion models slink and smile in the Pankisi Gorge, where the United States says al-Qaida-linked fighters are hiding, the security forces commander was even happier than a man usually is amid gorgeous women.

“If we can have a fashion show in Pankisi, it shows that everything is under control,” said Interior Minister forces head Georgi Shervashidze.

But watching from the sidelines, local resident Mariam Bilanishvili was disgusted.

“The government is doing nothing. We’re all going to die here,” the 56-year-old said.

The Sunday night show on a freezing field just outside Duisi, at the mouth of the gorge, wasn’t a government program, but when couturier Maka Asatiani proposed the idea, officials eagerly got on board.

Scores of troops surrounded the runway and a crowd of hundreds gathered  some of them, bearing Kalashnikov automatic rifles, accompanying the models as they posed and pouted, others manning machine-gun nests and warily scanning the surrounding hills for signs of attack.

Georgia had come under increasing criticism for ignoring the declining security in Pankisi, where thousands of people over the past two years have taken refuge from the war in Chechnya, on the other side of the gorge’s towering snowy mountains. It long denied Russia’s contention that Chechen fighters were among the refugees, even though residents said their presence was obvious.

“All the time you’d see men in long beards,” unusual in Georgia, said Bilanishvili. “It was obvious they were Wahhabis,” the Muslim sect to which some Chechen separatists adhere.

Recent crackdown

President Eduard Shevardnadze acknowledged last year that rebels were among the refugees. Concerns about security grew after U.S. officials said fighters connected with al-Qaida were in the gorge and authorized the dispatch of U.S. troops to provide anti-terrorist training for the Georgian military.

Georgia meanwhile clamped down on the area, setting up roadblocks along the road to the gorge and allowing in only residents and workers. The show was a rare opportunity for outsiders to get in, but they were firmly kept away from Duisi proper and settlements further up the gorge.

Some area residents plodded along a nearly dry riverbed to see the fashion show and told of how tension and crime, including kidnappings, have spread in the gorge in recent years.

“A few years ago, we were like family, we were eating together,” said Sardo Valishvili. “Now, we don’t know if we will live through the night.”

‘Beauty saves the world’

Although the show did not convince any of the locals that their gorge was truly under control, it did bring some color into their lives. That was partly what Asatiani was after.

“There is a saying that ‘beauty saves the world,”‘ Asatiani said. “And I wanted to show people here that life is normal.”

“Normal” is not a word that likely came to many minds in the crowd. The clothes weren’t designed to be bought and didn’t have any apparent connection to the concerns about fighting in Pankisi  neither ready-to-wear nor ready-for-war.

One of the first models to emerge from the tent that served as the changing room wore what could have passed as a conventional flared-skirt ball gown, except for the dorsal protrusion that represented either a hunchback or a shark. A later one had a dress accenting her six breasts  most of them presumably fake.

“What’s that on her head?” a spectator muttered about another model. “It looks like manure.”

The show may not have convinced anyone that Georgia genuinely has the Pankisi problems under control or that Asatiani’s unusual concept of beauty could save the region. Still, it ended with a long series of applause and cheers and the machine-gun nests didn’t fire a single shot.