Georgia Religious Leaders Seek Justice for Violence
''How this violence started, how it developed and who organized it has to be known. This is the only way the situation can be changed and the terrible legacy overcome.''
As individual attacks on religious minorities in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia continue in the wake of five years of unchecked large-scale attacks, religious leaders and human rights activists have said that they believe that the instigators of the violence must be uncovered for the situation to change, according to a Norway-based persecution watchdog.
"This issue will have to be dealt with as a matter of justice and of nation-building," Baptist leader Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili told Forum 18 News Service. "If it is not done now, it will still be festering five years on. How this violence started, how it developed and who organized it has to be known. This is the only way the situation can be changed and the terrible legacy overcome."
Human rights activist Giorgi Khutsishvili, a member of the Tbilisi-based International Center on Conflict and Negotiation (ICCN), believes that without punishment for those responsible for the violence, society's intolerance of non-Orthodox faiths will persist and their rights will continue to be restricted. "Society will continue to think that violence in the name of Orthodoxy is more excusable than ordinary crime," he told Forum 18. "Only when all those responsible – including the organisers - are brought to trial and they plead guilty can reconciliation start."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
According to Forum 18, only three other trials have been completed of those responsible for taking part in the violence, with all seven defendants receiving only suspended sentences.
"Justice for the victims of the violence is part of the solution to current religious freedom problems still facing minority faiths," Sozar Subari (Subeliani), a former human rights activist with the Tbilisi-based Liberty Institute. He added that although major violence against religious minorities has ceased, threats continue and minority faiths are still unable to build places of worship.
"The new government ordered this violence to stop, but it doesn't mean problems stopped," he told Forum 18.
However, Zurab Tskhovrebadze, spokesman for the Georgian Orthodox Patriarchate, maintained that the issue of the religious violence is no longer current. "After the government changed the situation changed for the better and there is no violence," he told Forum 18. "The U.S. State Department has recognized this."
On being told of the mob attacks in late 2004 on Baptists in eastern Georgia he conceded there might be "individual cases".
“Maybe there were a few individual cases," Tskhovrebadze said, before blaming "the people" for the violence. "The people were angered that sects were trying to convert them from their traditional faith and acted aggressively. But this violence was not official Patriarchate policy and was not organized by the Patriarchate.”
According to the U.S. State Department’s annual report on international religious freedom, the status of religious freedom in Georgia improved after November 2003. “Attacks on religious minorities, including violence, seizure of religious literature, and disruption of services and meetings decreased,” the report stated.
It did note however that at times local police and security officials failed to protect nontraditional religious minority groups—which in a number of incidents were harassed and attacked by Orthodox extremists.
The report also stated that while the Constitution provides for freedom of religion and the Government generally respects this right in practice, “local authorities sometimes restricted the rights of members of nontraditional religious minority groups.”
