Levan Ramashvili is the kind of person you immediately like.
Tall, trim with short black hair and a laugh that comes even more quickly than his smile, he doesn’t give the impression of a man who lives with the tension of death threats. But he does, and it’s because he’s a reporter in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Editor Nato Gubeladze, left, and reporter Tinatin Dvalishvili, are two of eight journalists from the former Soviet republic of Georgia who were in Brevard County as part of a State Department visit. Image copyright 2001, Michael R. Brown, FLORIDA TODAY.
Georgia is now an independent state, but it’s far from a democracy. The term “free press” is alien to most of its citizens, and it can make anyone who attempts to practice it a marked man or woman.
“In Georgia, you really have to be brave,” says Ramashvili. “Sometimes, I even have to hide after I publish something because it’s not only the government that’s dangerous but people you write about in regions that have been isolated for centuries.”
Ramashvili was among a group of eight Georgian journalists who recently visited our newsroom through a State Department program that brings reporters and editors from developing nations to the U.S. to expose them to democratic principles.
Among those principles is an independent press, a concept that has never existed in Georgia, the birthplace of Josef Stalin and a land that mirrors the deep troubles in former Soviet republics a decade after communism collapsed.
The journalists spent a morning in a wide-ranging discussion with some of our staff, quizzing them on issues that included ethical standards, freedom of information laws, and tension between government officials and reporters.
If the day was informative for them — and they said it was — it was perhaps more so for us because of what we learned about the risks they face in running their newspapers, magazines and Internet sites under a constant state of siege.
It also showed us the courage of journalists who accept fear as part of their beats, along with the knowledge that new press laws in the works are certain to make their position even more precarious.
“They say we have freedom of the press, but in reality we don’t,” says Ramashvili, who writes for the newspaper Resonance. Nonetheless, he says, “I believe a country needs freedom of speech, otherwise it can’t survive.”
Surviving in Georgia
In Georgia, survival is the operative word.
The country is wedged between Russia and Central Asia, and shares a border with war-ravaged Chechnya, which Russian troops continue to brutally occupy. That puts it in a highly unstable region that shows no signs of calming down.
An article in the August edition of the foreign affairs journal The National Interest describes Georgia’s situation as “particularly dire,” and questions “whether a state called ‘Georgia’ even exists today in any meaningful sense.”
Nearly 20 percent of the nation’s territory is either totally outside the control of the recognized government or is only tenuously connected to it because of secessionist wars in the early 1990s.
The economy has continued to slide downward, and the increasingly authoritarian government — which stuffed ballot boxes and used police to intimidate voters in recent elections — cannot even keep water and electrical supplies running in the capital of Tbilisi.
Recent reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also have chronicled a host of abuses, including murders, police torture and state-condoned violence against religious minorities.
Corruption on all levels is rampant, with payoffs to police and police involvement in crime a given. Banditry, kidnapping and extortion are on the rise.
“In Georgia, flouting the law has become a hedge against being cheated by it,” writes Charles King in The National Interest.
It is amid this chaos that Georgian journalists find themselves, challenging government officials, regional strongmen, organized criminals and others with stories that can make them targets for retribution.
“It’s very disturbing and the trends there are very bad,” says Olga Tarasov of the Committee to Protect Journalists in Washington, D.C., an organization that defends press freedom worldwide.
“You go from corrupt communism to a corrupt wild east, and there are a lot of people who have a lot of money and a lot of influence who don’t want the press. But that’s what they (reporters) do, and they get threatened for it.”
In sharp contrast to the Russian media, the Georgian press has been harsh in its criticism of Moscow for the Chechen war, which places Georgian reporters covering the conflict in peril from Russian forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Attacks on journalists regularly come from other quarters as well.
Last year, two radio reporters were beaten while covering the trial of members of an ultranationalist Georgian group known for its virulent intolerance of all faiths except Georgian Orthodox Christianity.
Another reporter had his fingers slashed after publishing an article about high-level government corruption, while a prominent TV investigative journalist was threatened by a group that included family members of Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze.
The journalists who visited our newsroom told similar tales of danger.
“Very frequently, we have people come into our newspaper and threaten us with bodily harm. This happens so often you get used to it. If we let fear control us, we couldn’t do our job,” says Jimsher Rekhviashili, who also reports for Resonance.
Using unnamed sources
With the possibility of violence so real, reporters rely on unnamed sources for many of their stories because if they are identified “they could lose their heads,” Rekhviashili says.
Physical intimidation is not the only tool used to try to muzzle reporters. Libel and defamation laws are favorite weapons to attempt to intimidate, stop publication and shut down publications.
Georgian newspapers are especially vulnerable to such tactics because they are not commercially viable. Their circulations are small and advertising revenue low. There also are no established laws to protect them.
Tinatin Dvalishvili, a reporter for the newspaper Imereli Moambe, felt the pressure when she was sued by the vice mayor of a city after she wrote a story detailing how he illegally controlled the city’s gas distribution network.
But instead of backing down, she immediately wrote a follow-up story, providing more information on the corruption.
As a journalist, Dvalishvili says, it’s her duty to “say what we see and think, and a lot of people can’t do that.”
Still, the possible consequences for such stories are understood by everyone.
“Some things are considered a crime and you can go to jail for them,” says Sozar Surbeliani, a reporter for Radio Free Europe.
In 1999, the Georgian government adopted a Freedom of Information Act that ostensibly would open the doors of government. But it has not been effective, and now Parliament is looking at new laws to regulate information and the media.
No one knows what will result, but repressive measures are expected.
“We anticipate a fight between the press and the government on this,” says John Kalandadze, editor of the newspaper Ajara P.S.
Despite such extraordinarily difficult circumstances, Georgian journalists keep reporting more stories, putting out more editions, and trying to create a free press in the hope their efforts will somehow take hold.
“It’s like smoking,” says Rekhviashili. “It gets in your blood.”
