ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
April 13, 2007 Friday
Georgia’s ethnic Armenians demand regional language status for
Armenian
About 300 residents of the southern Georgian town of Akhalkalaki held
a meeting on the town’s main square Friday with a demand to declare
Armenian the regional language in Georgia’s province of
Samtskhe-Javakheti.
Participants in the meeting, convened by the local ethnic Armenian
organizations Javakh and Virk, said a considerable part of Armenians
living in the province either do not speak the Georgian language at
all or have a poor command of it.
The meeting passed a resolution with a proposal to Georgian
parliament and president give the Armenian communities living in the
Akhalkalaki and Ninotsminda districts the right to use Armenian as
the language for documentation formalities in local agencies of
power.
Member of parliament Van Baiburt, who is also a deputy chairman of
the public organization called the Union of Georgia’s Armenians, made
a comment on this demand.
“There’s no talking about any kind of infringement on the Armenians’
language rights in Samtskhe-Javakheti and in Georgia on the whole,”
Baiburt said. “A total of five MPs are Armenians, several Armenian
newspapers are published in Georgia, the country has 170 schools
where tuition is done in Armenian, and a hundred schools of that
number are located in Samtskhe-Javakheti.”
“It’s Armenians who mostly occupy executive posts in the areas with
big Armenian communities and no one objects to holding local meetings
in the Armenian language, but there’s nothing extraordinary in the
fact you must write documents in Georgian if you submit them to
central agencies of power or to an archive,” Baiburt said.
A census held in 2002 showed that Georgia had a population of 4.4
million, 84% of them ethnic Georgians, 6.5% Azerbaijanis, 5.7%
Armenians and 1.5% Russians.