Thousands of people, from mere potheads to former government officials, went to prison for offenses that, a short time before, many Georgians hadn’t even considered crimes. He sacked the entire Shevardnadze-era police force. In 2003, a peaceful revolution, sparked by a fraudulent election, brought to power a team of young libertarian politicians led by the Columbia-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. At the time, then President Eduard Shevardnadze had lost control of his corrupt family, his ministers, and even parts of the country. When they come out, that’s when we attack them.” He also said that he was thankful to the Georgian police force for their support.įather Basili may have been a particularly brazen thug but he was not an isolated misfit. “We find out where they gather, and then we wait for them outside. But, when I asked, he denied raiding their homes. Hitting Jehovah’s Witnesses with iron crucifixes, he said, was an effective way of fighting them. He told me he was proud to be cleansing Georgia of “satanic forces.” He wasn’t shy about discussing the techniques he used in his crusade against religious minorities. A dozen years ago, when I was reporting for the BBC from Georgia, Father Basili, as he is known among his supporters, invited me for a cup of tea in his little church on the outskirts of Tbilisi.
But those who opposed the priests and those who cheered them agree that gay rights-an issue, until now, seen as marginal by most Georgians-has become a proxy for a larger conflict.Īs I looked through videos and photographs of the attack, I spotted a familiar bearded face in the crowd of angry anti-gay protesters: the excommunicated Orthodox priest Basili Mkalavishvili. Some changed their location settings to Iran. “A Georgian Taliban has been born,” read status updates of other Georgians on Facebook.