Attacks on Minority Faiths Rise in Post-Soviet Georgia

KASPI, Georgia, Aug. 16 — The Jehovah's Witnesses were planning a summer revival in a field next to a river gully here today, but a mob came the night before.

Two dozen men wearing crosses of the Georgian Orthodox Church arrived on buses and ransacked the home of the host, Ushangi Bunturi. They piled Bibles, religious pamphlets and Mr. Bunturi's belongings in the yard and burned them, he said today. They filled the baptismal pool with diesel fuel.

The police went, too, including the local police chief, Ramazi Gogiashvili, two witnesses said. It is not clear whether the police joined the attack or simply observed it. No one was arrested. What was remarkable about the attack, and another one last night at a Jehovah's Witnesses hall in a village called Otarsheni, was how unremarkable attacks like them have become in this country.

Georgia, the United States' closest ally in the Caucasus, has experienced a wave of religious violence in the last three years that is increasingly calling into question the country's willingness — or ability — to protect democracy and human rights.

"You can see what freedom of faith, what freedom of assembly we have," said Mr. Bunturi, 40, as he stood by the charred remains in the field beside his home this evening. "They say we have these rights, but they do not act on them."

In many of the former republics of the Soviet Union, including Russia, the birth of freedom has brought with it religious tensions, particularly between the predominant Orthodox churches and newly emergent religions and sects.

But Georgia is unique in the intensity of the violence toward religious minorities, and in the evidence of official complicity in the attacks.

Georgia enshrined freedom of religion in its post-Soviet Constitution. But in the rising violence there have been dozens of mob and arson attacks and beatings, especially against the Protestant denominations that established themselves after the fall of Soviet Union, according to the government, church officials and human rights campaigners.

In February a mob looted the offices of the Baptist church in this town 22 miles northwest of the capital, Tbilisi, and burned hundreds of Bibles and other books. Last month a dozen young men beat six staff members of the Liberty Institute, an American-financed advocacy group in Tbilisi that has been an outspoken critic of such attacks.

Gennadi Gudadze, the director of the Union of Jehovah's Witnesses, said today that there had been at least a dozen attacks on the church's believers so far this year, often at the large assemblies that the faith conducts.

He fears that the violence, as well as government and court decisions that denied the church official registration in 1999, may once again force it underground.

"At least in the Soviet Union I would know the K.G.B. was chasing me, and we knew what to do," said Mr. Gudadze, who is 40, referring to the Soviet political police. "Now that we have more freedom, we don't know what to do."

The attacks have prompted repeated denunciations from the United States, even as it deepens its relations with Georgia because of the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism and because of Georgia's position as a route for oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea. The rebukes appear to have had little effect.

The State Department's report on religious freedom, published last October, said the rights of religious groups in Georgia were deteriorating, citing attacks against Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, members of the Assembly of God and members of the Hare Krishna sect.

Indeed, the American ambassador, Richard M. Miles, warned the government of threats before the Witnesses' planned meeting today in Kaspi.

"We had hoped that the Jehovah's Witnesses could gather peacefully and in accordance with Georgian law and international standards that Georgia adheres to," he said today.

A majority of Georgians are, nominally at least, members of the Georgian Orthodox Church, which has sought to reassert its social and political influence after being suppressed during Soviet rule. Although Georgia's Constitution separates church and state, the Orthodox Church has a special status, including tax-exemptions not granted to other faiths.

But other faiths that operated underground in Soviet times have also flourished in recent years in Georgia's halting and sometimes chaotic evolution to a non-Communist system. For many ardent Orthodox followers, the growth of other denominations represents a threat to the traditional dominance of their church.

The Orthodox Church has become increasingly linked to nationalist causes, and some of its followers, and even some of its priests, have been implicated in the attacks on other faiths. Others have been openly critical. In June, Zurab Tskhovrebadze, a spokesman for the Georgian Patriarch, Ilya II, called the Jehovah's Witnesses "a fifth column whose activities are directed against Georgia."

In May, President Eduard A. Shevardnadze issued a decree ordering new measures to ensure the rights of worshipers and strongly condemned religious violence.

"A person who commits violent acts actually discredits the religion he tries to protect," he said.

But Alexander Anderson, a senior researcher at the office in Georgia of Human Rights Watch, which monitors the religious violence, dismissed the decree as disingenuous. "He made a similar decree in March of last year," he said, "and nothing happened."

Many of the attacks have been organized by Basili Mkalavishvili, an excommunicated Orthodox priest who rails against what Georgians call "nonbelievers." He is standing trial in Tbilisi, accused of five attacks between September 2000 and March 2001, but remains free as the case has dragged on.

In a newspaper interview published on Thursday, he foreshadowed the violence at the Jehovah's Witness meeting in Kaspi. "I will not be able to stop my people," he said, "and I lay all responsibility for the expected consequences on the Witnesses."

In fact, the attacks occurred as if scripted. Mr. Bunturi said the first sign of trouble in Kaspi was an arson attack on Wednesday night, which destroyed a stage built for the assembly. A local prosecutor and a nationalist member of Parliament, Guram Sharadze, came on Thursday, but only warned Mr. Bunturi not to let the believers gather.

"They told me, `You will be responsible for what happens,' " he said.

About 800 Jehovah's Witnesses were expected today, but after last night's attack, church officials called off the gathering. This morning a group of young men blocked the only road into Kaspi anyway, refusing to let anyone pass. A police officer with them said, "There's going to be a fight, and they won't let anyone through."

No one was injured in the attack in Kaspi. But in Otarsheni, almost simultaneously on Thursday night, a group of 10 to 20 men broke into the compound of the Jehovah's Witnesses' meeting hall where believers meet two or three times a week.

Shalva Mamporia, who lives in the building, tried to run but was caught and badly beaten. So was a neighbor, Omari Kavelidze.

Today a waist-high pile of charred religious pamphlets and Bibles continued to burn.