She said local television news doctored videotape to show the Orthodox beating the Witnesses. In the past, local Baptists, Pentecostals and even fellow Georgian Orthodox have accused Father Mkalashvili's parishioners of organized physical attacks, sometimes in tandem with the local police, who have not made any arrests in Sunday's incident. Most recently, on Aug. 28, leaders of the Pentecostal Word of Life Church were denied access to their rented meeting place and physically harassed by Mkalashvili's followers, according to local human rights activists. While Sunday's attack was carried out by an Orthodox fringe group, it highlights frustrations in this ancient nation of 5 million, which, since gaining independence in 1991 has been wracked by two violent secessionist movements that left 300,000 people homeless. Western-style reforms have yielded few economic results.
Unemployment is rampant.
Non-indigenous faiths ranging from Baptists to Hare Krishnas are perceived as Western imports, part and parcel of the flood of Western ideas and products to this former Soviet republic. Although both Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and Patriarch Ilia II, leader of the dominant Georgian Orthodox Church, condemned the attack on the Jehovah's Witnesses, public opinion appears to be strongly against the U.S.-based group. A popular television current affairs show in Tbilisi asked viewers to call in with their views the night after the attack. Next month, the world's attention will focus briefly on Georgia when Pope John Paul II makes a first ever papal visit. In an interview beside the tent set up in a vacant lot used for services, Mkalashvili said damnation awaited those Orthodox who attended a papal mass set to be held in the center of this city of 1 million.