"Who Will Not Fill, Will Not Work”

Shorena Kakabadze, Kutaisi

Last week the Georgian Trade Union of teachers and scientists opposed the Ministry of Education. The reason was a demand of the Kutaisi resource center –public school teachers soon should fill out an information form. Delivering the information forms was so scandalous because in it the teacher had to indicate membership in any political party. One of the spaces of the form requested information about members of the family.

“Today teachers have to attend to their duties in a difficult situation. And now they have to fill out some forms and they try to get some information from them in this way. It is not right and now it is discovered that the Ministry of Education does not know about it. Minister Gvaramia mentioned in conversation with me that the Ministry was going to establish an information bank but not in such a way. I promise teachers that we will take action about this issue. International Labor and Human Rights organizations will know about it”, - Manana Gurchumelidze, head of the Georgian Trade Union of teachers and scientists, promised the teachers.

This promise was not enough to stop the gathering of information in Kutaisi. On the contrary, after the promise the employees of the local hospitals had to fill out these forms.

“Some forms were brought and we were told that we had to fill them out very soon. We were warned if we did not fill them out, we would not work. We asked who ordered us to do it but nobody answered. They explained, if you had to fill it out, then it was necessary. Nobody wants to be dismissed from work or to have problems. So we prefer to fill them out. The country will not be destroyed by out filling it out”, -said one of the employees of the Kutaisi Chkhobadze hospital who did not want to say the name.

“The government and heads of other civil services try to threaten people. We have information that representatives of security services brought these forms to schools, hospitals and other state institutions. When the Trade Union of teachers protested this fact, it was told that it was a mistake and that this process would be stopped. Later it was found out that the process was not stopped. I tried to find out who ordered this and when I talked with heads of the local services I was told that their boss ordered it. To the question of who was boss, of course, I did not get an answer”, - said Vladimir Nakashidze, chairman of the Kutaisi civil organization of the Republican Party.

The Head of the Kutaisi resource center explained the facts in this way: “Nothing is alarming about it. It is an attempt to make an information base. We just took some old registration paper of the staff and we sent it to schools. In this paper was the space for the indication of membership in political parties which caused this chaos”. According to Lado Pataridze, if anybody does not want to fill out these forms, they cannot fill them out.

In spite of the calm of the head of the resource center, citizens connected this being asked to fill out these forms to the upcoming local elections. “In such a way they find out which party we support. If it does not satisfy their demands and wills then they would work on us. That is bad.. Finally, it should end in our country”, - said some people.

Local leaders of the Republican Parties connected these facts with the upcoming elections. Vladimir Nakashidze stated: “They pay special attention to those people who are members of the opposition parties. They are working on threatening them”.

Two versions of the information forms (about which heads of the local services avoid to speak): printed and e-mail versions will be sent to the budget institutions