Veterans of the victory over fascism could face arrest if they wear their medals in public
Submitted by georgiamedia on Mon, 11/10/2010 – 14:52
Gia Tortladze, leader of the Georgian Democratic Party is to propose a law in parliament that could apprently lead to the arrest of veterans of the Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 45 if they displayed their campaign medals.
Tortladze proposes that anyone publicly displaying a Soviet symbol would be guilty of a criminal offence.
Yet Soviet medals from the Second World War – such as the Order of Victory shown here – are built around just such symbols.
Totladze, who began his political career as an opposition politican but who has since become a fanatical supporter of Mikheil Saakashvili, has little popular support and it is not clear if the ruling party intend to pass all or any of his proposed legislation.
The official policy of the Tbilisi government is to regard the Soviet armed forces as occupiers, following the crushing of the democratic and independent Georgian state in 1922. But such hostility has not been extended to memories of the second world war where Georgians, like other Soviet citizens, paid a huge price to defeat the Nazi invasion of the USSR.
Victory Day – 8 May – is still marked publicly in Tbilisi and the war memorial in Vake Park has been repainted in the colours of independent Georgia but still is clearly dedicated to those who fought fascism.
Mikheil Saakashvili, some have called him NATO’s favorite despot: here.
At least two dead and dozens hospitalised – protesters in Georgia have found out the hard way why they shouldn’t speak out against their leadership. Police showed little restraint in a crackdown on crowds who’d turned out for what’s been called Georgia’s ‘Day Of Rage’ – demanding that President Saakashvili resign.
“Whereabouts of several dozen of persons remain unknown” after the protest rally was dispersed by the riot police outside the Parliament shortly after midnight on May 26, Giorgi Tugushi, the Georgian public defender, said on Friday.
Some media reports on May 26 said that there were about fifty persons missing. The Interior Ministry released late on Friday evening list of those, who have been arrested during the break up of the rally. At least ten men from that list were earlier regarded to be missing.
The Georgian Public Defender’s Office (PDO) has published on its website on Saturday [a] list of those arrested by the police during the break up of the protest rally outside the Parliament.
The list includes names of 162 individuals.
The Georgian Interior Ministry released on May 27 its list of arrested persons, which included 105 names.
The Public Defender’s Office said that the list had been compiled after its monitoring teams visited temporary detention centers throughout Georgia in a period between May 26 and May 28.
Detention centers in Tbilisi, Rustavi, Gardabani, Marneuli, Bolnisi, Kaspi, Mtskheta, Telavi, Signagi, Kvareli, Zestaponi, Samtredia, Bagdati, Ozurgeti, Chokhatauri and Lanchkhuti were monitored, according to PDO.
Most of the list is compiled based on data collected on May 27; information from the detention centers in Kaspi and Mtskheta (total of 17 detainees) are dated with May 26.
“It has been found out as a result of the monitoring, that most of the detainees have more or less serious injuries. Several detainees have injuries of serious degree,” PDO said in a statement.
“Detainees say in a conversation that they have sustained injuries both during the dispersal of the rally and after the arrest,” the Public Defender’s Office said, adding that many of the detainees have refused to give a formal testimony to the representatives of the Public Defender’s Office.
The list, released by PDO, includes the names of at least eight protesters, who previously were among those several dozen of people, who were reported as missing.
An opposition lawmaker was slapped by a ruling party MP in the Parliament chamber, after the former said it was Saakashvili’s “military adventure” that led to August war and subsequently to recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by Moscow: here.
Ongoing anti-government protests in the country of Georgia, located in the southern Caucasus mountains and astride the Black Sea, have resulted in confrontations with police and the arrest of oppositionists. Opponents of President Mikheil Saakashvili have promised to stage a “day of rage” on Thursday and disrupt a military parade planned for Friday to mark Georgian independence day.
Last Saturday, 10,000 people gathered in the capital city Tbilisi, demanding the resignation of Saakashvili. The event was organized by the “People’s Assembly,” formed from a coalition of opposition groups. Nino Burdzhanadze, former speaker of the parliament from 2001 to 2008 and a previous ally of Georgia’s president, made populist denunciations of the government, pointing to widespread social misery in the country.
“Two thirds of the population of Georgia lives below the poverty line, and Georgia occupies the first place among European states in terms of the level of child mortality,” she said.
Burdzhanadze said that the event was just the beginning of a “revolution” that would result in the overturn of Saakashvili’s government. There is a clear attempt to cast these events as part of the mass popular upheavals taking place in the Middle East and North Africa.
Saturday’s protests in Tbilisi were accompanied by smaller demonstrations in the port city of Batumi, where 2,000 gathered as part of a coordinated action.
This video is called McCain ‘s Protégé Georgian Dictator Saakashvili Continues Policy of Political Repressions.
From the Georgian International Media Centre:
Situation in Tbilisi tense as Okruashvili pledges to return to Georgia this week
Submitted by georgiamedia on Sun, 22/05/2011 – 15:13
A second day of public protest in Tbilisi, Georgia‘s capital, has seen the number of demonstrators sharply down on yesterday, when tens of thousands thronged in the central Freedom Square, but has also seen growing tension between the demonstrators and the police with both sides accusing the other of provoking violence.
Yesterday’s demonstrations were the first of the scheduled protests by the “People’s Assembly”, an umbrella group closely associated with Nino Burjanadze, the leader of the Democratic Movement and a former parliamentary speaker, and acting Georgian president.
This week a rival opposition grouping, the Georgian Party, is also to take to streets and one of its most prominent leaders, former defence minister Irakli Okruashvili, has pledged to return to the country for the first of their rallies on 25 May.
Okrusashvili is in exile, with assylum granted, in France and has been sentenced to prison in absentia by the Georgian courts. If he managed to get into the country – and plainly turning up at the airport in Tbilisi does not seem like a viable option – then he could turn into a rallying point, as he was once seen as a rival to Saakashvili in looks, vigour and rhetorical power.
However he also is tainted by his role in the most brutal period of Saakashvili’s presidency and was seen to be a leading advocate of even more harsh policies towards South Ossetia and Abkhazia and is unlikely to appeal to many of Saakashvili’s more liberal critics.
It is not the first time he has pledged to come back to Georgia, or named a time frame. But it is the first time he has given a specific date.
This video from Georgia is called Saakashvili should go to jail. Protests in Tbilisi.
From the Georgian International Media Centre:
The Wall Street Journal‘s “revolting index” on the risk of revolution in Georgia
Submitted by georgiamedia on Fri, 25/02/2011 – 18:48
Asked a month ago no one but the political wild men or women of the most die hard opposition parties would have suggested that there was the remotest possibility of a popular revolt in Georgia.
Asked today most would still agree that the prospects of a “day of rage” were low, but, even as Gadaffi appears to be about to drown in the blood he has shed, no one could quite rule it out any more.
Georgia has many of the symptoms if not yet the disease that infected Tunisia and Egypt – high inflation, widespread poverty and unemployment, authoritarian politics with some but limited toleration of the opposition and a mass media that no one trusts to tell the truth.
Therefore it should be no surprise that the Wall Street Journal‘s online “Source” blog puts Georgia at 18th in its “revolting index” of countries most likely to see a popular revolution. Egypt is 16th and Libya 13th. But Tunisia was 21st, some way below Georgia.
Of course, as the WSJ themselves say the “revolting index” is not scientific or predictive, just an interesting toy. It’s placement of the world’s biggest – and argumably most robust given the circumstances of mass poverty – democracy, India, at 14th illustrates the weakness: no one at all expects any mass revolt in India …. .
But it ought to give the government in Tbilisi some pause for thought. Government actions – utility bills, transport fares, crack downs on informal traders and importers – and inactions – the failure to break up powerful economic monopolies – have all contributed to inflation and made life more difficult for those seeking to make a living at the margins of the economy. Perhaps now would be the time to ease off repression and have a more honest debate in society about the slow progress to modernisation.
As events in the Arab world are daily showing, offering concessions when you are already on the rack is no way to stop a revolt.
If the people of Georgia in a grassroots movement from below would manage to topple their “Mubarak”, strongman Saakashvili, that would be a genuine revolution. Contrary to the so called “rose revolution” which brought Saakashvili to power, and which happened because of a mixture of real grievances about the pre-Saakashvili administration and money and coaching by the CIA and similar not really democratic sides.
Georgian government refuses any compromise with opposition over economy, justice or elections: here.
USA: Let’s bring Cairo & Madison 2 our own state capitols, Feb 26! Here.
But it is also a reminder why all the Saakashvili regime’s attempts to re-engineer Georgian unity – by bullet and fist or by persuasion and incentive – have so far failed and are likely to go on failing.
Alan Khachirov, Alan Khugaev and Soltan Pliev are three Georgians who happen to be ethnic Ossetians. who were, say the Council of Europe, detained by Georgian police on 13 October 2008.
Some time after that date they were tortured and the torture was videoed – at least in part.
The video is almost certainly genuine – though [it] may have been altered in some way – as the Council of Europe report[s]:
Four Georgian soldiers -Col. Ramaz Gogiashvili, Sergeant Davit Tsetskhladze, Corporal Giorgi Kolkhitashvili and Corporal Nugzar Kalandadze- were killed during performing the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan.
Yeah right …. “peacekeeping mission“. George Orwell already in his novel 1984 said cynically: “War is peace”.
The Georgian soldiers exploded on the mine in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, the Georgian Defense Ministry told Trend. The soldiers were on patrol when the explosion occurred.
…
The Georgian contingent of 900 people has been performing the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan in since late summer. During this period, one officer was killed and one corporal was wounded.
In Georgia says Islamic radical fighters from Afghanistan are now active in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. The revelation increases the pressure on the Georgian government to reestablish its authority in the crime-ridden region. The disclosure also indicates that the United States is laying the groundwork for possible anti-terrorism operations in the Caucasian republic: here.
As of Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010, at least 1,207 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.
USA: Report: Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan wars could top $4 trillion: here.
The authors of the book “The $3 Trillion War” noted in a conference call on Wednesday that when they first released their findings two years ago, the estimates were widely criticized as being too high. Now, the researchers believe they may have been too low: here.
UK defence chiefs silent on Afghan civilian deaths revealed by WikiLeaks. Freedom of information request into 21 incidents where UK forces shot Afghan civilians rejected by MoD officials: here.
Category: Religion
Posted on: September 22, 2010 12:46 PM, by PZ Myers
Something like, “The probability that a religious leader is a sex offender is directly proportional to the the virulence of his homophobia.” It’s happened again.
“Two young men in Georgia said Tuesday that the pastor of a 33,000-person Baptist megachurch, Bishop Eddie L. Long, had repeatedly coerced them into having sex with him.
In two lawsuits filed in DeKalb County, the men said that Bishop Long, a prominent minister and television personality, had used his position as a spiritual counselor to take them on trips out of state and perform sexual acts on them.”
It’s gotten so I can’t see any of these crazy god-wallopers and not assume they’re going to leave the podium and run off to a back room to do exactly what they’ve been railing against. It’s sort of like a Dorian Gray scheme: they’ve got a lilly-white sanctimonious face for the public, and what they reveal when off-camera and out of sight is something sickeningly depraved. What Pope Ratzi does behind closed doors must be nightmarish.
Embattled bishop Eddie Long cancels planned interview on sexual coercion allegations: here.
a film the British Government deemed too grisly for release after World War II – has received its public debut on British television. Fifteen minutes of the black-and- white film, which was shot by the armed forces after the war, were televised Tuesday night by the Independent Television News.
Lado Sadgobelashvili, who claims on his facebook page to be an employee of Freedom (“tavisupleba”) party – which is led by Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, son of Georgia’s first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia – has been distributing pro-Nazi propaganda on his Facebook page …
Amongst the various materials he has posted to his web page is a video that highlights the collaborationist “Georgien Legion“.
For every one Georgian who served with the Germans during the Second World War around twenty-five fought against the Nazis, who invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Georgian and other Caucasian troops were essential in halting the German advance on Grozny and Baku in late summer and autumn 1942, so helping create the conditions that led to the Nazi’s catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad. It is generally believed that no Nazi troops made it to Georgia, staying on the other side of the Caucasus ridge.
Susa, directed by Rusudan Pirveli and written by Giorgi Chalauri, comes from Georgia, the former Soviet Republic. The title character (played by Avtandil Tetradze) is an 11- or 12-year-old boy living in bad conditions, somewhere outside the capital city of Tbilisi: here.
Georgia wouldn’t be on quite as many people’s minds these days as it was when its demented leadership, with Mikheil Saakashvili at the helm, tried to provoke Nato and Russia into a direct military conflagration in 2008: here.
Austria’s Social Democratic president easily secured a second term on Sunday, deflecting a challenge by a nazi sympathiser who criticised the criminalisation of Holocaust denial: here.
Elections are meant to be the chance for the people to express their views without fear.
But elections can also be a time of heightened fear and threat: especially for those in a minority in a society in crisis, argues Paata Sabelashvili, president of the Inclusive Foundation – Georgia’s lesbian and gay rights campaign and the only open gay rights organisation in the Caucasus.
He says that the drugs charge was a cover for an attack on the Inclusive Foundation that was designed to appease nationalist and conservative forces aligned with the Georgian Orthodox Church’s campaign against gay rights. With the government under pressure in the backwash of the Tea Tutberidze affair and a visible break down of relations with the Patriarch, it may well be that such actions help shore up the government’s support with more conservative voters.
But while the government seems to play both sides in this debate – President Saakashvili has recently been citing his government’s legalisation of homosexuality as a positive step forward, but only to audiences outside Georgia – others see “gay bashing” as a way of winning votes.
In parliament the Christian Democrats have called for homosexuality to be recriminalised (a move that would see Georgia expelled from the Council of Europe) and, as Sabelashvili recounts in the video here, have promoted a scare campaign about gay marriage. Others – such as Malkhaz Gulashvili, publisher of the Daily Georgian Times and founder of the People’s Orthodox Movement – are campaigning for the same outcome outside parliament.
At the root of much of this, argues Sabelashvili, is the population crisis in Georgia. Using arguments completely discredited in the west, anti-gay campaigners, either out of prejudice or ignorance, claim that homosexuality is like some infection that spreads through the population and so cuts the birth rate. For them it needs to be suppressed.
“Pride” parade story “a lie” says leading gay rights campaigner
Submitted by georgiamedia on Mon, 23/08/2010 – 15:01
Stories that a gay “Pride” demonstration is planned in Georgia are “a lie” says one of the country’s leading gay rights campaigners.
In recent days there has been much speculation in the Georgian media about a “Pride” event in the country – and the Georgian Orthodox Patriarchy even went so far as to condemn plans to recreate “Sodom and Gomorrah” in Georgia’s streets.
Socially conservative opposition parties have raised this idea before – usually with the claim that the government are behind it. This seems to be the case this time too.
Paata Sabelishvili, president of the Inclusive Foundation, Georgia’s premier gay rights campaigning body, says the stories are “a lie” and the result of “lazy” journalism. What is more he says they are being spread by Sandro Bregadze of the Zviadist “Freedom” party.
In the past members of the Freedom party have pledged to make Tbilisi’s streets run with the blood of gay people and have also promoted Nazi symbolism online.
The demonstration was a warm-up for a day of protest on April 9 [2009] planned by opposition groups who blame Saakashvili for the disastrous war with Russia last August and for failing to insulate Georgia against the deepening economic crisis.
One of Georgia’s best known singers, Georgy Gachechiladze, performed protest songs he said he had last sung under Eduard Shevardnadze, who was brought down by the 2003 “Rose Revolution” that brought Saakashvili to power. “These songs I sang when Shevardnadze ruled Georgia. I would never have believed these songs could be sung today,” said Gachechiladze, singing from a mocked-up prison cell on stage.
From Radio 1 in the Netherlands, including a sound file in Dutch; text on the page translated here:
Since the last few months, large numbers of Georgians are asking for asylum in the Netherlands. The figures from January 2010 on even put them at the third spot on the list of countries where asylum seekers are from.
