Latest News #199
May 24, 2002

The following news concerns Georgia and Malawi.

United Bible Societies’ office in Georgia targeted by religious extremists

The Rt Rev Malkhaz Songulashvili, Presiding Bishop of the Baptist Union of Georgia and the General Secretary of the United Bible Societies’ office in Georgia. Photo: UBS/ Maurice Harvey (WAS96C13_31.JPG)

TBILISI, Georgia — The Rt Rev Malkhaz Songulashvili, Presiding Bishop of the Baptist Union of Georgia and the General Secretary of the United Bible Societies’ office in Georgia, was forced to take urgent action after hearing rumours that followers of defrocked Georgian Orthodox priest Vasili Mkalavishvili were planning to attack one of his three offices in Tbilisi. He called on President Eduard Shevardnadze’s Chancellery and an influential university contact for help, and was able to arrange a guard for Bible Society staff, who were determined to remain at work. One staff member, Slava Meshki, said, “How can I leave? I have things here I have worked on for three years“.

Bishop Songulashvili has also called for continued assistance from the international community in the face of threats to religious freedom in Georgia. In an e-mail to supporters abroad, he stated that “your prayerful support for the Republic of Georgia is much needed” as minority religious groups remain vulnerable to attack from Mr Mkalavishvili’s followers.

UBS staff were beaten up and many Scripture books and blankets destroyed in an attack by supporters of Mr Mkalavishvili in March 2001 (see World Report 360), and there have been a number of other attacks on minority religious communities, including an Evangelical church, a Pentecostal church and a warehouse owned by the Baptist Union. The perpetrators have so far managed to remain at large by intimidating those involved in the legal process.

President Shevardnadze, who has come under pressure from international sources including US senators and congressmen to address the issue of religious persecution urgently, has written a newspaper article in which he emphasises that “those who think that by fighting against other religions they are safeguarding the victory of the [Georgian Orthodox Church] are bitterly mistaken”. He goes on to state that such people are in fact “fighting against the dignity of their own country and against the democratic development of their own country”.

Food crisis in Malawi affecting
Bible distribution

BLANTYRE, Malawi — Byson Nakutho, Executive Director of the Bible Society of Malawi, has described the food crisis facing his country as “very alarming”, adding that many people are dying and as much as 70 per cent of the population is facing starvation.

“It appears that the situation will be with us until next year,” he told the UBS World Service Center this week. Many subsistence farmers have already harvested their maize crop for this year, he explained, and Malawi now has to import its staple grain.

“The problem is,” he said, “that the majority of the people, who depend on subsistence farming, do not have money to buy it.”

The European Union announced this week that it is to provide 95,000 tonnes of emergency supplies to Malawi immediately. According to the government, however, as much as 700,000 tonnes of food aid is needed if widespread hunger and the deaths of up to three million people are to be prevented.

Aid agency Save the Children said this week that up to 19 million people in countries from Malawi in the north to Lesotho in the south were facing famine caused by a combination of erratic rainfall and floods followed by drought. It said that a food crisis on such a scale had not been seen since the Ethiopian famine of 1984, which claimed nearly one million lives.

Mr Nakutho said that Malawi’s crisis was now affecting the Bible Society’s distribution efforts.

“I have sent our marketing manager for a fact finding tour in the rural areas,” he said. “The initial reports coming in are very alarming. We will come up with a strategy in due course [outlining] how we can cope with the situation.”