I started recording the stories of the war in Abkhazia a few years ago. I was mainly interested in the cases of femicide committed in the conflict zone, because I was working on this issue at the time.

Femicide is the deliberate killing of girls and women because of their gender. This crime is the most radical form of violence against women and manifests itself in different ways in different environments. However, the common basis of all these manifestations is gender inequality and systemic discrimination.

Among the forms of violence committed against women, violence committed during armed conflict is special because of one important aspect - it must be seen in a much wider context. To clarify, violence against women and girls during war is seen not only as violence against the female individual, but as a battle strategy to oppress and intimidate a certain society as a whole.

My first respondent was a childhood friend of the victim. She told me how her pregnant friend was raped, how she was beheaded and how her own mother buried her in her own yard. This is Georgia, the 90s of the twentieth century.

The next respondent told me about the children who were raped and shot in front of their mother, grandmother and aunt, and the mother, grandmother and aunt were also killed on the spot. This is also Georgia, the time is the same.

The third respondent told me the story of a classmate who was raped and mortally wounded at the railway station. Place and time are unchanged. Georgia, 90s.

Against the background of the current events in Ukraine, old wounds were remembered by many and many started talking about the atrocities committed in the war in Abkhazia.

Why did I start a few years earlier? Because the threat of this all happening again never went away, the wound remained constantly in an active phase. Silence meant non-recognition.

War is cruel, we all know that. Cruelty in war is heroism for ones, survival for others, but in every case and at the center of every war stands a person for whom everything ends in tragedy, be it a 14-year-old girl who will never see her mother who went to war as a nurse, or a mad mother who drags the body of her dead baby with a big bag on the "Golgotha Road".

How to talk to people about unseen, unheard, unspoken pain? Or how to make them talk? Or how should you endure so much compassion, without which, you know, nothing will come out?

Often the process itself gives you clues and shows you the ways you can improve it. As I worked on the stories, I realized how important it was to break the silence of those who shared their memories with me. Soon, I felt very clearly that the time was right to break the soul-crushing silence.

I think the media is a powerful tool that should play a much more important role than it does today in shaping the conversation about the violence of war, raising public awareness, and promoting pressure for political action.

It is necessary to create and cover war stories not to put society in a state of despair, but so that both the storyteller and the listener participate thoughtfully in the process that serves to change something for the better. It can be something, at least, to understand the recent past of the war-torn country.

One of the biggest crimes we humans commit is that we don't talk about what hurts us. If there is no conversation, there is no recognition and therefore no responsibility. No one is held accountable for human suffering, historical injustice, great mistakes and immeasurable sacrifices.

No one is held responsible for untimely interrupted biographies, unfulfilled dreams, and most importantly, with this irresponsibility, both life and death of the victims are taken away. In one of the villages of Abkhazia, a woman with her son was impaled on a pole of her own house, her breast was cut with a knife and then the house was set on fire.

Have you heard what the "Columbian tie" is? I learned from these stories. From the stories of the war in Abkhazia in the 90s of the twentieth century.

Above all, oral histories help us understand the broader social and political contexts and frameworks within which individual memories operate.

An essential and frightening feature of oral accounts of war events is transience. So, parallel to the flow of years, with the age of living witnesses, there is a need to pass on the memories of the war to future generations.

Years pass and we increasingly lose the opportunity to process the memory of the war. The development of war memory is inextricably linked to the socio-psychological processes of developing the meaning of violent episodes of war and sharing these episodes and their meaning with new individuals emerging in society. Here it is clear that the construction of the future by the new generation is impossible without a thorough knowledge and recognition of the past.