Russia to erect military hospitals in South Ossetia

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is to set up two field hospitals within 24 hours in Georgia's separatist South Ossetia region, the Emergency Minister said on Sunday after television showed the region's hospital all but reduced to ruins.

"We have to erect two hospitals tomorrow in Tskhinvali," Russian news agencies quoted Sergei Shoigu as saying in North Ossetia -- a part of Russia bordering the region in conflict.

Reports from Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's main town, showed the local hospital devastated by the fighting between Russian and Georgian forces, with most of its 200 patients crammed into the basement. Thirty-eight were in a serious condition.

Shoigu, who for more than a decade has overseen a long list of calamities to befall Russia, said many of those wounded in Tskhinvali had now been taken over the border to Russia for treatment.

By Tuesday, he said, a tent city able to house 1,500 people would be set up for residents made homeless by the fighting.

Georgian forces last week tried to retake South Ossetia, which has been outside the control of central authorities since the 1990s, triggering in response a large Russian incursion of men, armour and other heavy equipment.

Russia's NTV television showed beds crammed into the dimly-lit basement of Tskhinvali's main hospital with unfinished walls. Patients, many of them wincing, were receiving treatment on tabletops from clearly harried doctors.

A few bare lightbulbs provided scant illumination and the report said the hospital had no ready supply of water. Pictures showed upper floors with gaping holes blown through the walls and rooms filled with rubble and twisted metal.

"The conditions in which our doctors are working are far from sanitary but I am grateful to our colleagues," said Nugzar Garabayev, a senior South Ossetian health official. "All the goals we have set will be achieved."

(Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Jon Boyle)