c. 1999 Religion News Service

TBILISI, Georgia _ Lying in a hospital ward here with blurred vision and a bruised body, Fati Tabagari described in calm, level tones how she and her 13-year-old son were beaten Oct. 17 by a mob of renegade Orthodox Christians.

Tabagari, a 40-year-old housewife, was among 20 Jehovah’s Witnesses hospitalized following a 30-minute melee inside a theater rented for Sunday services by the Witnesses. The group claims about 15,000 members in this mountainous country and is infamous here as elsewhere for its dogged proselytizing.

According to witnesses and television footage, about 200 Orthodox Christians arrived Sunday on foot and in two buses, blocked exits to the three-story building and attacked the 124 Witnesses inside with wooden clubs and foot-long iron crucifixes.

Tabagari said she initially went unnoticed but after a teen-age boy grabbed her purse and discovered a copy of the Witnesses’ Watchtower magazine in it, he set about punching and kicking her.”Even today, I love that boy,”said Tabagari, propped up on a pillow in her hospital bed.”I don’t have a drop of animosity in me. I don’t hate him. I hate what he did. He probably doesn’t know that.” In fact, he and other members of defrocked Father Basili Mkalashvili’s St. George’s Open-Air Church are claiming they were the victims. According to spokeswoman Marina Khonelidze, the priest’s followers visited the Witnesses”not to fight with them but to talk to them, to explain how they were mistaken.” Khonelidze claimed the Orthodox suffered precisely as many wounded as the Witnesses claim _ 20 people. She said local television news doctored videotape to show the Orthodox beating the Witnesses.

In the past, local Baptists, Pentecostals and even fellow Georgian Orthodox have accused Mkalashvili’s parishioners of organized physical attacks, sometimes in tandem with the local police, who have not made any arrests in the Oct. 17 incident. Next to the tent that serves as Mkalashvili’s makeshift church, a bulletin board is covered with snapshots of past demonstrations, including photos of bloodied parishioners.

Most recently, on Aug. 28, leaders of the Pentecostal Word of Life Church were denied access to their rented meeting place and physically harassed by Mkalashvili’s followers, according to local human rights activists.

While the Oct. 17 attack was carried out by an Orthodox fringe group, it highlights frustrations in this ancient nation of 5 million. Since gaining independence in 1991, Georgia has been wracked by two violent secessionist movements that left 300,000 people homeless. Western-style reforms have yielded few economic results. Unemployment is rampant. Pensioners receive the monthly equivalent of $6.40 from the government.

Non-indigenous faiths ranging from Baptists to Hare Krishnas are perceived as Western imports, part and parcel of the flood of Western ideas and products entering this former Soviet republic.

Although both Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and Patriarch Ilia II, leader of the dominant Georgian Orthodox Church, condemned the attack on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, public opinion appears to be strongly against the U.S.-based group. A popular television current affairs show in Tbilisi asked viewers to call in with their views the night after the attack. Of more than 20,000 callers, 59 percent supported breaking up and banning the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Next month the world’s attention will focus briefly on Georgia when Pope John Paul II makes a first-ever papal visit. In an interview beside the tent set up in a vacant lot used for services, Mkalashvili said damnation awaited those Orthodox who attended a papal Mass to be held in the center of this city of 1 million.”We don’t have the right to host the pope,”said Mkalashvili, a stout man with a thick, untamed beard, who was defrocked by the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1995 for disobedience.”It is against God’s law.” All the same, Mkalashvili said he had no plans to protest the pope’s two-day visit or attack those attending the Mass, which is expected to draw 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Leaders of the Georgian Orthodox Church are decidedly lacking in enthusiasm for the visit by the man known in Georgia as the”Roman Pope.”Ecumenism generally is a sore topic in Georgia’s Orthodox Church, which withdrew from the World Council of Churches in 1997 following a near schism over the issue.

The head of the church’s department of foreign affairs, Archbishop Abraham, condemned Mkalashvili’s radicalism, but said the church also considered the Jehovah’s Witnesses a”dangerous, totalitarian sect”that must be regulated by the government.

To that end, the Georgian Orthodox Church supports proposed legislation that would divide religious groups into three categories with Orthodoxy occupying the privileged first tier; Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and the Armenian Apostolic Church in a second, lesser category; and all other faiths in a strictly regulated third tier. Aside from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Archbishop Abraham termed Pentecostal groups and the Salvation Army as totalitarian, destructive sects.

The Roman Catholic Church in Georgia, for one, has no problem with the creation of different levels of religious freedom. The Rev. Ambrose Madtha, counselor at the Vatican Embassy in Tbilisi, said Catholic leaders would oppose legislation grouping Roman Catholicism and Jehovah’s Witnesses together.

Such activities as door-to-door proselytizing and offering material inducements for taking part in religious activities would be forbidden under the bill supported by the Orthodox Church, said Archbishop Abraham.

The U.S. model of wide-open religious freedom, he said, is not for Georgia, a land believed visited by the Apostles Andrew and Simon the Canaanite and which, he said,”has trees older than America.”

DEA END BROWN