Monday, Aug. 19, 2002.

By Steven Lee Myers
New York Times Service

KASPI, Georgia — The Jehovah’s Witnesses were planning a summer revival in a field next to a river gully here Friday, 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 Bunturi’s belongings in the yard and burned them, he said Friday. 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 Thursday night at a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall in a village called Otarsheni, was how unremarkable attacks like them have become in Georgia.

Georgia 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 Bunturi, 40, as he stood by the charred remains beside his home Friday evening. “They say we have these rights, but they do not act on them.”

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 the Soviet Union, say the government, church officials and human rights campaigners.

In February, a mob looted the offices of the Baptist church in this town 35 kilometers northwest of 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 criticized such attacks.

Gennadi Gudadze, the director of the Union of Jehovah’s Witnesses, said Friday 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 KGB was chasing me, and we knew what to do,” said Gudadze, 40. “Now that we have more freedom, we don’t know what to do.”

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. But other faiths that operated underground in Soviet times have also flourished in recent years.

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 Shevardnadze issued a decree ordering new measures to ensure the rights of worshipers and strongly condemned religious violence. 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 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. 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 Thursday, but only warned 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 Friday, but after Thursday night’s attack, church officials called off the gathering. Friday 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.

On Friday, a waist-high pile of charred religious pamphlets and Bibles continued to burn.