By Eka Gulua

The renovated building meant for refugees at 7 Tashkent Circle in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, is home to 35 families. But it’s the wrong 35 families.

Just ask Lamara Mikia, who lost her own home in the Abkhazian city of Ochamchire in 1993 when Georgians were forced to flee the country’s Abkhazia region during a bloody civil war.

Mikia told a reporter for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that for the past 21 years, she has lived as an internally displaced person (IDP) in a decrepit former kindergarten used for refugee housing in the western Georgia city of Poti.

Mikia and her family are part of a growing global army of IDPs, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), which says there were 28.8 million IDPs around the world in 2012. That number has steadily increased from around 17 million in 1997.

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, speaking at the United Nations on Sept. 22, said his country is still dealing with hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes in the country’s three conflicts since the early 1990s.

According to Georgia’s Ministry for Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees, Georgia has registered 253,392 IDPs, or about five percent of the population. As of March 2014, slightly less than half were still living in collective centers, while 134,068 had moved on into permanent housing.

So Mikia was thrilled in 2011 when her cousin Davari Kvaratskhelia, a fellow Abkhazian refugee, told her that she was in the real estate business in Tbilisi and could help her get a flat.

Mikia’s cousin didn’t help her. She took US$ 5,000 from Mikia for a flat she could never deliver, part of a larger scam that eventually landed Kvaratskhelia in prison for five years, even as she claimed that she handed all the money she collected from refugees to officials in the ministry that is supposed to help refugees.

At least one of those ministry officials was busy organizing a reconstruction kickback scheme that landed him, too, in prison. All of this over 7 Tashkent Circle--a building neither the ministry nor Kvaratskhelia had any right to renovate, for refugees or anybody else.

At first, Mikia thought her cousin was a savior. “She told me she was involved in the trading of flats,” Mikia said. “She told me she worked at the Ministry of Refugees as a building coordinator. I believed her.

“She asked me why I hadn’t already moved to Tbilisi,” Mikia said. “I told her I couldn’t afford a flat. She told me that the ministry had more flats for refugees than they needed. She said they would be fixing up some more flats soon and then refugees could own them.

“She said that 45 families now lived in an old Police Academy building in Tbilisi, and that she had helped every one of them get their flat. She mentioned mutual acquaintances living there. We talked for hours.”

A few months later, Kvaratskhelia called Mikia in Poti and said she had been told to find 24 families to resettle at 7 Tashkent Circle. She said Mikia only needed US$ 5,000 to secure a place.

“She said it was a good project being implemented by the ministry. I didn’t think my cousin would make up such a story,” Mikia recalled.

Mikia travelled to Tbilisi where she met with Kvaratskhelia, who was joined by a mutual acquaintance from  Ochamchire, Violeta Akijbaia. Akijbaia told Makia how one of her relatives returned to Georgia after 20 years as a refugee and had only to mention Kvaratskhelia’s name to solve all their problems.

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