Discrimination in Georgia: Intercultural Education Needed

The recent “Georgian March” raised an important issue and revealed a fear within the country’s population: the fear of replacement and the loss of the culture they are attached to under the influence of external forces. Be the fear irrational or based on fact, the question is significant enough to warrant discussion. Even if the march was mostly targeted at “illegal immigrants” who “increase crime” in Georgia, we believe it worth analyzing the problem of xenophobia through another prism; the one of minorities.

Minorities in Georgia have been a big issue since the independence of the country in 1991. Due to its history, but also to the mechanisms of Soviet ethno-federalism and population displacement, ethnic minorities constituted about 30% of the total population according to the 1989 census. This was a very important part compared to many other post-soviet countries and led to a crystallization on the question in Georgia, facilitating the spread of nationalism among a population which may have felt endangered in its own country. In turn, this nationalism fed secessionist movements, not only in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but also in Adjara and in the regions where Armenian and Azeri populations are concentrated. Fortunately, nowadays, tensions have mostly been defused, but with what results? Ethnic Georgians now represent 86 percent of the total population and the diversity of the Georgian population is decreasing, mainly due to the emigration of ethnic Russians and other small minorities.

Granting rights to minorities was politically problematic in the past, since minorities were considered a threat to territorial integrity due to conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This fear at the same time fed reluctance from the minorities to engage with central government. That’s why, after the war in South Ossetia in 2008, the government strategy changed and minority rights increased to a point where, according to some NGOs, much has been done to integrate communities into Georgian society.

Georgia made a choice to grant citizenship to everyone at its independence, whether they spoke Georgian or not. To get Georgian citizenship, you needed only live on the territory of Georgia, which differs from other post-soviet countries where language was deemed the most important criteria of citizenship, such as in Lithuania. This has created a lot of problems nowadays for those countries, since the non-native-speaking population are still not citizens and are not granted any form of rights by the governments, making them “second class” citizens. Georgia, on the contrary, didn’t make this choice since, as said before, its minority population was around 30 percent of its total population. But the fact that these populations are considered citizens doesn’t automatically integrate them into the political community. The major challenge for a democratic society is to integrate them, and language is the most basic means for this.

The main guideline of government action on this is giving free choice to all. Older generations, for example, don’t express the need to learn Georgian, since they are integrated enough in their communities for their day-to-day lives. Learning Georgian is not a necessity but if they express the will to do so, in order to better integrate in civil life, for example, it is the role of the State to provide them Georgian language lessons. But for younger generations, the need to speak Georgian is more important and, for this, schools provide non-mandatory courses. Progress on this question has been achieved both thanks to the State and NGOs, above all the CCIIR (Center for Civil Integration and Inter-Ethnic Relations), which, for example, set up previously non-existent ‘Georgian as a Second Language’ courses as early as 2005. At the same time, the CCIIR trained teachers to meet the increasing demand. Nowadays, in most cases, educational rights are acknowledged. The main goal here remains the quality of education granted in private non-Georgian schools, which is in some cases lower. The government has yet to introduce a reform in said schools.

The main problem of integration nowadays is a lack of knowledge of Georgian among minorities, since a lot has already been done to improve it. The main problem is, as introduced earlier with the Georgian March, discrimination. Minorities these days are not stuck in their communities due to a lack of language knowledge or culture, but now find discrimination making their integration problematic. Even when comparing populations from Tbilisi, where minorities live in significant number and where social and cultural differences blur, it is observed that people from minorities have more difficulties finding a job, for example. It doesn’t come down to a lack of higher education, nor their knowledge of a foreign language such as English, but to their last name betraying their ethnic origin. Some firms prefer to hire ethnic Georgians, even for no rational reason. According to the CCIIR, discrimination is not only seen in the private sector but can also be observed in administrations and universities, even if huge efforts have been made to change this issue. Minority students in Tbilisi State University have reported facts of discrimination, based on social interaction, coming from administrators and faculty members. This demonstrates that even educated people lack intercultural sensitivity in Georgia.

The effort of integration has been supported mostly by minorities themselves since the country gained independence, but not so much by the society around them, though the process should be mutual. This is why the CCIIR supports this process, not only for minorities, but also for culturally dominant groups, in order to make them more aware of these issues. Cultural trainings are provided for teachers, and the NGO assists higher education institutes to teach cultural diversity more broadly; for example, a mandatory course to teach Georgian diversity for all BA level students is now at the preparatory stage.

It is notable that Georgian society needs more education in intercultural relations and the recent “Georgian March” is a spectacular representation of what is happening within society. If Georgia wants to become a real multicultural society, and that is precisely the way it has decided to head, as well as it being what the majority of people want, it needs to improve its relations with other cultural groups. Politically and legally, much has been done; it is now time to change Georgia socially.

David Mongazon