The Georgian authorities must swiftly investigate and prosecute those responsible for the July 10 attack on the Tbilisi headquarters of a leading Georgian human rights organization, Human Rights Watch said today.
According to eyewitness accounts, a dozen well-organized men severely beat the director and other staff of Liberty Institute and smashed computers, furniture and other equipment.
"This is one of the most vicious assaults on human rights defenders we have ever seen in the former Soviet Union," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "This attack shows that human rights defenders are at serious risk in Georgia."
Human Rights Watch is calling for a thorough investigation and for the results of the investigation to be made public. It is also asking the Georgian government to take special measures to protect human rights defenders.
The attack left Liberty Institute director Levan Ramishvili hospitalized with multiple contusions, eye injuries and speech problems. Five other Liberty Institute members were beaten, one of whom also remains bedridden. One of the staff beaten was a female secretary. Several other staff and visitors avoided beatings by barricading themselves behind doors. The visitors included David Gladwell, a British government official: one of a three-man fact-finding delegation, representing the Council of Europe.
According to eyewitnesses, at about 2:30 p.m. on July 10, from ten to fifteen men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty entered the Liberty Institute office. Liberty Institute activist David Zurabashvili told Human Rights Watch yesterday:
Our office entrance door was open, as it always is. Several men … walked in slowly and calmly. They were hefty, like athletes . . . I got up and asked them what they wanted. Without a word four or five of them came over and started beating me. The others shot off in different directions in small groups. They seemed to know the layout of our office, and were working to a plan. One of the men attacking me had a short rubber truncheon. I felt lots of blood gushing from my nose and fell down. I saw a different group of men beating Levan Ramishvili. When they left me I tried to ring for help, but they had taken my cell phone, and ripped out the office telephone wires.
Sozar Subeliani, another Liberty Institute associate, told Human Rights Watch that he managed to barricade himself behind a door after sustaining an initial beating from men wielding metal knuckledusters:
Then I heard one tell the others: "Quickly, quickly, destroy everything." They smashed up everything in our main office room and then ran away. The whole attack lasted five to seven minutes. When they were out on the street I saw they did not run. They just walked away at a brisk pace.
Last year, on June 3, unknown persons broke into the Liberty Institute office and took its accumulated computer files. They removed the hard disks from all the old computers, but did not touch two recently purchased machines. Liberty Institute staff reported to Human Rights Watch that the deputy chief military prosecutor informed them in November 2001 that an officer of the state defense security service had been arrested in parliament, while trying to use Levan Ramishvili's identity card, which had gone missing in the burglary.
The July 10 attack followed a hostile demonstration two days earlier outside the Liberty Institute office by supporters of Guram Sharadze, a member of parliament with an ultra-nationalist agenda. In a head-to-head television debate about religion several days earlier, Levan Ramishvili had accused Sharadze of inspiring ethnic and religious intolerance and suggested that during the Soviet era he had KGB links. The demonstrators threw eggs and shouted slogans such as: "This is your final warning."
The Liberty Institute has vigorously opposed the rise in religious mob violence and intolerance which Georgia's law enforcement agencies have facilitated and indulged over the last three years, while Sharadze has acted as one of the main public advocates of religious intolerance. In February 2001, the Supreme Court de-registered the Jehovah's Witnesses in response to a civil lawsuit he had brought protesting their registration. During the case and since, Sharadze has propagated demonizing myths about Jehovah's Witnesses that have contributed to the growing climate of violent intolerance. These include unfounded accusations that Jehovah's Witnesses attempted to poison the Georgian bread supply; undertook a mass suicide jump from the ramparts of Gori castle; or have vandalized Orthodox churches and icons.
Earlier on July 8 hundreds of supporters of Sharadze's "Our Georgia" movement rallied at the Shota Rustaveli monument in Tbilisi together with followers of Father Basili Mkalavishvili, the leader of many violent mob attacks on religious minority groups. The speakers vilified the Liberty Institute. Akhali Taoba newspaper quoted one of Sharadze's associates, Elizbar Javelidze, as saying "What do they look like even physically? Some have big heads and small shoulders, some have dropped jaws, and others roll their eyes." Resonansi newspaper reported that Sharadze himself threatened: "I am going to achieve in the streets whatever I could not achieve in parliament, and I do not mean just demonstrations only."
Human Rights Watch urged the Georgian government to improve the climate for human rights organizations in Georgia. In recent months, the government has made moves that some view as hostile to the community of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
In a speech on April 24, President Eduard Shevardnadze seemed to argue that Georgian NGOs might be financed by international terrorists. The refusal of Finance Minister Zurab Nogadeili to support a law enabling government control and oversight of foreign grants to NGOs is reported to have been a factor in President Shevardnadze's dismissal of him in early May.
