Georgia: Far-right protesters trash LGBTQ festival

As part of that, a festival is planned for Saturday in Tbilisi LGBTQ Pride Week The cancellation came after several thousand far-right protesters thronged the venue, organizers and officials said From Georgia.

The stage was destroyed, flags were burnt

An outdoor event near the Georgian capital was canceled after several far-right attackers vandalized the stage and burned LGBTQ flags, a Pride Week organizer told reporters from Tbilisi, Mariam Kvaratskelia (Pride Week). The police did not stop them. “The place was evacuated and no one was injured,” he added.

Organizers of Tbilisi Pride week have accused the government of complicity with violent anti-LGBTQ groups. The attack was “pre-coordinated and agreed with the Home Office”, they said in a statement.

But the Interior Ministry assured that the far-right demonstrators “managed to avoid the police cordon and reach the venue”. “We managed to evict the organizers” of the Pride festival in Tbilisi, said Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Tarakvelitze. Interpress reported that several attackers were arrested.

“unacceptable”

Georgian President Salome Jurapishvili, a pro-Western critic of the Tbilisi government, said he needed to ensure “the safe conduct of the Pride festival”. “Freedom of expression and assembly are fundamental rights and their violation is unacceptable,” he said.

Opposition voices accuse the government of tacitly supporting homophobic and nationalist groups that have traditionally sided with the ruling Georgian Dream party in elections. In 2019, hundreds of far-right activists burned rainbow flags in Tbilisi to protest the screening of an Oscar-nominated film about homosexuality.

Ideological battle

In 2013, ultra-conservative supporters of the Orthodox Church disrupted a rally in Tbilisi during the International Day Against Homosexuality. On this day the participants had to get into the buses available to them to escape the mobs that were chasing them and the police pelting them with stones, breaking windows and threatening to kill them. The next day, thousands of Georgians signed an online petition calling for legal action against the attackers.

Georgia decriminalized homosexuality in 2000, and passed anti-discrimination laws in 2006 and 2014. But homosexuality remains highly stigmatized in Georgia, where the influential Orthodox Church is waging an ideological war with pro-Western political parties over social issues.

(AFP)