Giorgi Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
The Minister of Justice of Georgia, Thea Tsulukiani, stated that in the very near future significant amendments would be made to the Criminal Code of the country: participation in military conflicts on the territory of a foreign state for a fee or for any other reasons will be punished by 20 years of imprisonment. However, the Minister added: “It is about participation in illegal armed groups contrary to the constitution of the country of stay.”The flowery phrase means that if a resident of Georgia goes to Syria or Iraq to fight for the Islamic State for some reasons (money or ideology), he will go to jail in his homeland. However, if he joins the official armed forces of any state to fight for the protection of the state and its territorial integrity, then Georgian legislation doesn’t forbid such behavior.
It means those who have been recruited into the Ukrainian squadron Aidar are not criminals, as unlike IS, Aidar and the National Guard of Ukraine are official military forces which are recognized by the Ukrainian authorities. It appears a citizen who goes to Syria to fight not for IS, but for the Democratic Front against “the dictator regime of Bashar Assad”, also can get jailed for half a life, as the Syrian armed opposition is an illegal military formation, from the point of view of Syrian legislation.
For such cases, the Minister of Justice made another proviso: “… and if participation in military activities contradicts the foreign political interests of Georgia.”
It is clear that due to the participation of Georgians in the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Georgian authorities have found themselves in a difficult situation, when they have to tack between various interests. However, the clear attempts by official Tbilisi to distance itself from ISIS maximally, as the participation of Georgian citizens in military activities on the side of the radicals becomes more and more wide-scale.
Not only the number of participants is important, but also the quality of the participation. For example, a native from the Pankiski Gorge of Georgia, an ethnic Chechen Tarkhan Batirashvili (Omar al Shishani) commands the western front of the ISIS army in Syria. According to the mass media, an outflow of young people from the Pankiski Gorge to the war for establishing a caliphate is growing. There are almost no young men in the Chechen villages of the Gorge – they go to the Middle East for so-called “earnings”, but come to fight in Syria and Iraq. 12 of them have already been killed. Their bodies were sent to the Pankiski Gorge and buried in local graveyards. According to the well-known Caucasiologist Mamuka Areshidze, representatives of ISIS recruit militants in other regions of Georgia as well, including in Kvemo Kartli where mostly Azerbaijanis live and Adjaria where the majority of the population are Muslims. Of course, there are propagandists. Thus, the Criminal Code of Georgia stiffened penalties for urging to participation in “illegal wars” and any support for those who want to fight abroad - 10 years of imprisonment.
Why didn’t the authorities manage to control the dangerous process before? The problem is that a person who leaves Georgia to fight on the ISIS side officially states that he is going to Turkey to find a job or any other country of the region. And the authorities have no opportunity to check whether it is truth or not. Moreover, Georgian citizens are not obliged to provide certain documents on goals of their foreign visits, according to European norms, otherwise it would be a violation of human rights. So, the government of Irakli Garibashvili decided to choose another path: everybody who goes to fight for ISIS is at risk of spending the rest of his life in jail.
