Armenpress

ETHNIC GEORGIANS SUSPECTED OF KILLING AN ARMENIAN
YOUTH AND WOUNDING TWO OTHERS IN GEORGIAN TSALKA

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.”