AKHALKALAKI, MARCH 10, ARMENPRESS: A group of Ajarians or Svans (ethnic Georgians) are suspected of attacking and stabbing to death a 23-year-old Armenian man in Tsalka, in southern Georgia and wounding two other young Armenian men.
A-Info news agency that operates in the predominantly Armenian populated region of Javakheti in southern Georgia, said the Armenians were attacked by a 15-member group in Tsalka on March 9 afternoon at a busy section of the town. The killed man was identified as Gevorg Gevorkian, resident of Ghushchi village. The other two, V. Sahakian and G, Baloyan, were rushed to the local hospital with heavy wounds. A-Info quoted the wounded Armenians as saying they did not know what was the reason behind the attack.
A special squad of Georgia’s interior ministry that is deployed in the region under the pretext of preventing inter-ethnic clashes, has arrested three suspects. The attack on Armenians sparked a protest action by local Armenians. A crowd of 300 people demonstrated outside the building of the local police department demanding a fair trial of the suspects. Meantime Georgia’s interior ministry has dispatched extra officers to the region to foil a fresh inter-ethnic clash after the crowd broke the windows of the police station. A-Info said police used truncheons to disperse the crowd.
Tsalka, population 22,000, is predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians and Greeks. Up to 2,000 Azerbaijanis also live there. In the early 1990s, the Georgian government moved a group of ethnic Georgians (about 2,500, mainly Ajarians and Svans), to Tsalka after a devastating landslide in their native mountainous villages.
Tsalka is also close to the predominantly Armenian-populated Samtskhe-Javakheti locality, which is considered a “complex region” because of the presence of a Russian military base and increasing demands for political autonomy by some local Armenian groups. Clashes between ethnic Georgians and the Greek-Armenian community in Tsalka have been reported for several years, nevertheless, Georgian officials continuously argue that the conflicts in Tsalka have no ethnic context and represent mostly “communal violence.”
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