GEORGIANS WATCH THEIR FUTURE VANISH IN COURT
By David Nowak and Kevin O’Flynn Staff Writers
Moscow Times, Russia
Oct 12 2006
Chitadze appearing in court Wednesday. He has two weeks to leave
Russia.
Vekhvia Chitadze and his friend Gocha, both engineers, have been in
Moscow for six years — working, sending money home to their families,
making a life for themselves.
On Wednesday, a district court judge told them they had 14 days to
get out and pay 1,500 rubles.
Their crime? Working with forged documents, according to the judge
at the Gagarinsky court.
"We don’t want to go back," Chitadze said in a loud whisper, before
a Federal Migration Service official could stop him from talking to
a reporter.
The two are part of a wave of Georgian nationals being deported as
part of the government’s ongoing conflict with Tbilisi, sparked late
last month after Georgia arrested four Russian officers on charges of
espionage. Since deportations began earlier this month, 480 Georgians
have been sent home, the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights said.
Chitadze appeared unfazed by the verdict. "We knew what was coming,"
he said.
But he insisted his documents were in order. "Listen, do you know how
many times in the last six years I’ve been stopped by the police?" he
said. "Hundreds. And every time the policeman said: ‘Sorry to bother
you. Off you go.’"
Chitadze and Gocha, who wouldn’t give his last name, were detained
in northern Moscow on Sunday and held in custody until the trial
Wednesday, which Chitadze said was his birthday. "What a present,"
he said. "That’s it. We’re not coming back to Russia."
While a majority of Georgians living and working in Russia are thought
to be in the country illegally, authorities have mostly turned a
blind eye — until the recent standoff. Now the larger geopolitical
struggle between two post-Soviet states has been brought home on a
very real and emotional level.
"We don’t care about the politics," Chitadze said. "None of us pays
attention to the news."
Now, it appears that the thinly veiled crackdown on Georgians is
spreading well beyond Moscow, human rights activists said Wednesday.
In the city of Kaluga, police have received orders to run checks on
citizens with names ending in "idze" and "shvili," endings normally
associated with Georgians, said Lyubov Moseeva-Helier, head of the
local branch of For Human Rights.
Moseeva-Helier declined to say where she obtained her information.
The Kaluga police department’s press service did not respond to phone
calls Wednesday.
In St. Petersburg, a senior city police official instructed officers
to redouble their efforts to deport illegal migrants, said a letter
cited on the city’s news web site, Fontanka.ru.
The northern capital has also seen raids on restaurants, casinos and
outdoor stalls owned or manned by Georgians.
In Tatarstan and Krasnoyarsk, there have been raids on Georgian
businesses, said Simon Charny of the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights.
In Nizhny Novgorod, police waited outside a school to ambush the
parents of children from the Caucasus, said Almaz Chaloyan, head
of the Center for Help for Migrants in Nizhny Novgorod, Gazeta.ru
reported. Chaloyan said he had requests from at least 40 people from
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan but added that little could be done.
"We human rights defenders are afraid ourselves to go out onto the
street because if we do that, they’ll start to check our organization,"
he said Tuesday.
Moseeva-Helier noted that all natives of Georgia — who are
not necessarily ethnic Georgians — now face problems with the
authorities. She noted that she had heard complaints from frantic
Azeris and Armenians taken into custody because they were born
in Georgia.
Normally, Moseeva-Helier said, her office hears of three to four
deportation cases per month; this week, there have been at least 10.
Russians voiced mixed feelings about the government’s effort to rein
in illegal Georgian migrants in a poll conducted this week by the
All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion.
In the poll, 71 percent agreed with Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov’s
characterization of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s
administration as a "bandit government." But only 40 percent back
the economic blockade of Georgia imposed earlier this month. And a
slightly smaller figure, 37 percent, supported deporting all illegal
Georgian immigrants.
The poll included 1,600 respondents and had a margin of error of
3.4 percent.
Some Russians have displayed their support for Georgians by sporting
badges declaring: "I am Georgian." A handful of mourners at the funeral
Tuesday of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya were seen with them.
But this is cold comfort to Chitadze and Gocha and the other Georgian
nationals who have carved out a niche for themselves in Russia and
now see that coming to an end.
"We help our families in Georgia by sending them money," Chitadze
said. He said he had no idea what he would do when he returned home.
"There is not much we can do work-wise there, but at least it is our
motherland. It will take care of us."