By Elizabeth Piper
TBILISI (Reuters) - Dragging herself up from her tiny bed, Tata Akhazaya-Dioskureli says she arrived in Georgia with only the clothes she stood up in.
She left all the rest, her pots and pans and her husband in the Black Sea territory Abkhazia, fleeing the region's ferocious war of secession that left at least 10,000 people dead and thousands more without homes.
A playwright who had a large home just over the towering Caucasus mountains in Abkhazia, Dioskureli thought she would return in a couple of weeks.
But almost 10 years on she has yet to go home.
"I had a house there, now I have nothing. I have lost my health, I have lost my father and my husband who they killed," she said.
"I have lost my country, I have lost my hope. I have nothing left to lose," she added, rearranging a yellow turban to hide her home-made method for combating recurrent headaches -- yards of plastic food wrap swathed around her head.
"I came with one dress and nothing else. The children had only the clothes they stood up in. For weeks, I had to wash their clothes every night so they could wear them again the next day...I thought we would be here for a month and then return."
Instead, she and about 1,000 other refugees -- ethnic Georgians who have become hate figures in Abkhazia -- have made their homes in Tbilisi's crumbling Hotel Iveria and from their customised rooms they wait for the chance to go home.
GEORGIA'S HOPES
Georgia wants to restore its territorial integrity but fears Abkhaz troops, who easily repulsed Georgia's ragtag army in the 1992-93 secessionist war with the help of Russian weapons and Chechen guerrillas.
Both sides now maintain a shaky and chilly peace, but accusations of raids across the border and fears of new military intervention by Georgia have thwarted peace talks.
"I have lost all faith in what the government can do. There have been talks, resolutions, more talks, more resolutions...how many more can there be?" Dioskureli asked.
President Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's longest-serving post-independence leader, has made it clear that he wants to solve the Abkhaz problem in his last years in office.
The veteran leader says he hopes to resolve the situation by diplomatic means, with force only a last resort.
But the arrival in Tbilisi of U.S. military instructors to train Georgian troops for anti-terrorist operations has raised suspicions among Abkhaz officials that this could be the start of a new military attempt to retake the territory.
Georgian defence officials have brushed off these fears.
"The first point is the Abkhaz problem must be resolved....but there are different ways of solving it. First there is a peaceful solution and we support such a peaceful solution," said Deputy Defence Minister Gela Bezhuashvili.
"Suggestions of a solution by using force arise from time to time. Sometimes we think we could use force, but we have made a commitment to the international community not to use trained forces in Abkhazia."
NO MORE WAR
For the refugees, the idea of further conflict in their much-loved homeland is unpalatable.
"We've had enough war to last us a lifetime," said 70-year-old Natela, who has lived in about 20 different places in and around Tbilisi since she arrived more than nine years ago.
"We are all people from the Caucasus, we can sort it out ourselves if other countries, like Russia, stop getting involved....Then we could all leave this hell."
She and hundreds of others sleep either in tents or in decaying rooms of an old sanatorium on the outskirts of Tbilisi.
An earthquake in late April left huge cracks, like welts, across the ceiling. Rain water drips through the roof into rows of steel buckets lined up on the floor of the corridor, where children scream with delight as they jump into the puddles.
"We get bottled water now because of the earthquake...but before it was bad. Some people drank the water from the toilet bowl," Natela said.
"How can we live like this?" she asks, giving a tour of her flat where cardboard covers the damp floor and mould decorates the ceilings.
"The government must help more. We have no money."
Jobs are hard to come by in impoverished Georgia. Dozens of men line the main road out of the capital Tbilisi, standing behind signs offering anything from painting services to car mechanics.
Competition is fierce and many refugees left their tools behind in homes now inhabited by Abkhaz.
THE ENEMY
"Abkhaz are living in my house now. When I phone, they just shout abuse at me. They tell me I am the enemy and will never reclaim the house," Dioskureli said, throwing her arms around and cursing as she mimics her Abkhaz squatters.
"This is no home," she said of the hotel.
Once the city's best hotel, the building is now draped in half-dried laundry and covered with television antennas. Wallpaper long ago peeled off the walls and most of the lifts and lights no longer work.
A policeman wandering around in the foyer calls the building a fire trap, refugees have customised their hotel rooms, all about 10 metres square, cramming small mementoes on crowded shelves.
They say you can get used to sleeping on the floor, cooking on stoves -- one-ring camping-type stoves -- in the bathroom next to the toilet, but it is more difficult to get used to the idea that you will never be allowed to go home.
"For two-and-a-half years I lived in one of the hotel's stockrooms with my children. That's how I lost my health. No windows, no furniture, just the hard ground and a few blankets," Dioskureli said.
"Of course it is my dream to go back...but for the moment I will write about my land's tragedy to make sure no one forgets."