Georgia: Opposition Protest Marks 20th Anniversary of Soviet Crackdown

Despite its historical significance, the government has no plans to mark the anniversary, a public holiday, with an official commemoration. "Everybody will be commemorating this day personally," remarked Parliamentary Deputy Speaker Gigi Tsereteli.

Yet the past will still be present. A memorial to the victims of April 9, 1989, lies in front of parliament, where protestors will gather. Pundits have argued that the government runs the risk of being compared with its Soviet predecessor if it opts to disperse the April 9, 2009, protesters using force. Officials have stressed that they have no such intention.

The Soviet-era rally, however, showed how quickly demonstrations can change. The protest started on April 4 with a demand that Moscow rebuff Abkhazia's request to be named a separate republic from Georgia. Within a day, however, slogans had changed to "Down with the Soviet Empire!" and calls for Georgia's sovereignty, demonstration organizers recall.

"If we had stuck to the Abkhaz issue, [the Soviet government] would present it to the whole world as just an ethnic conflict between Georgians and Abkhazians," recounted Irakli Batiashvili, one of the demonstration's leaders and a current senior member of the opposition Republican Party. "Nobody would care about us then. So, we decided to shoot the works."

To Moscow, the call for Georgia's separation from the Soviet Union was like waving a red cape at a bull. "The territorial integrity of the USSR was a sacred thing for [Moscow], the red line nobody should cross," said historian Bondo Kupatadze.

As the number of protesters grew, the Soviet Georgian government decided to bring in the military to disperse demonstrators.

Sixty-year-old pharmacist Lali Bezhanishvili recalls that she never imagined that "a massacre" would take place. Around daybreak on April 9, she went to search for her 15-year-old daughter among the demonstrators in central Tbilisi. Bezhanishvili said she knew that there were soldiers and armored machines stationed nearby, but did not worry.

"I thought they were there just to scare the protesters, nothing more," recalled Bezhanishvili. "I vaguely remember I found Eka among the crowd and took her by her hand . . . Then I saw approaching soldiers. That's the last thing I remember."

Bezhanishvili's daughter Eka, her neck reportedly broken by a truncheon, was among the 16 people who died on April 9 when soldiers moved in. Bezhanishvili herself suffered a broken shoulder blade, and had all her front teeth knocked out, and experienced gas poisoning. She spent 60 days hospitalized and lost her memory for some six months.

Overall, 20 civilians, mostly women, died from wounds received during the crackdown, according to then Healthcare Minister Irakli Menagarishvili. More than 200 were injured or gas-poisoned.

Eduard Shevardnadze, in 1989 the Soviet Union's foreign affairs minister, observed that, given the protestors' determination, Moscow could only have avoided bloodshed by yielding to their demands, which was quite unimaginable for that time.

"If Georgia gained independence according to the demonstrators' demands, then what about Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and others? Everybody wanted to be independent," recounted Shevardnadze in a recent interview with EurasiaNet. "But Georgia surely initiated this process . . . Back then, I felt that the Soviet Union will sooner or later collapse, though I expected it to happen not before 10 to 12 years."

Irakli Tsereteli, a former leader of the independence movement and head of the National Independence Party, said that he might have told people to go home if he had known that anybody would be killed. At the time, however, he added, protestors were ready to stand until the end "in the name of freedom."

April 9 had another outcome, even more significant than Georgia's independence itself, thinks historian Kupatadze. It marked a transformation in Georgians' mentality, which unified the nation, he said. "It showed people that the Soviet Union wasn't a homeland, but an empire, and that the Soviet army was not a liberation army, since it killed its own citizens," said Kupatadze. "Many of those who never thought about independence from the Soviet Union started at least considering it after this. Georgian sovereignty could not be declared by just a group of people without the will of the whole nation."

But this emotion-fired unity, according to Kupatadze, proved to be "ephemeral" and was lost as soon as the emotional background changed. "The masses like whoever plays on their emotions," he argued.

For many people, like Bezhanishvili, who lost their relatives that night, it was only the unity of the nation that could justify the deaths of April 9. But the subsequent civil wars in Georgia and the "loss of its territories" have wiped that reason out, they say.

"A mother brings up a child for the motherland," commented Bezhanishvili. "And if [no confrontation] had happened after April 9, we would've been the happiest nation."