A festival scheduled for Saturday in Tbilisi as part of LGBTQ Pride Week has been canceled after several thousand far-right protesters swarmed the venue, organizers and Georgia authorities said.
The outdoor event which was to take place near the Georgian capital was canceled after several far-right assailants destroyed the stage and burned LGBTQ flags, a Pride week organizer told reporters ( Pride week) from Tbilisi, Mariam Kvaratskhelia, pointing out that the police did not stop them.
“The scene was evacuated and no one was injured,” she added.
Organizers of Tbilisi Pride week have accused the government of complicity with violent anti-LGBTQ groups.
They claimed in a statement that the attack had been “pre-coordinated and agreed with the Home Office”.
But the Ministry of the Interior assured that the far-right demonstrators had “managed to bypass the police cordons and reach the scene of the event”.
“We managed to evacuate the organizers” of the Pride festival in Tbilisi, said Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Darakhvelidze.
Several assailants were arrested, Interpress reported.
Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, a pro-Western critic of the Tbilisi government, said the latter must ensure that “the Pride festival is held safely”.
“Freedom of expression and assembly are fundamental rights and their violation is unacceptable,” she said.
Opposition voices accuse the government of tacitly supporting homophobic and nationalist groups that traditionally side with the ruling Georgian Dream party in elections and stage protests against pro-Western opposition parties.
In 2019, hundreds of far-right activists burned rainbow flags in Tbilisi, protesting against the screening of an Oscar-nominated film about homosexuality.
In 2013, thousands of ultra-conservative Orthodox Church supporters disrupted a rally in Tbilisi to mark the International Day Against Homophobia.
The participants in this day had to get into buses made available to them by the police to escape the crowd which was pursuing them, throwing stones at them, breaking windows and threatening to kill them.
The next day, thousands of Georgians signed an online petition calling for legal action against the attackers.
Georgia decriminalized homosexuality in 2000, and passed anti-discrimination laws in 2006 and 2014.
But homosexuality is highly stigmatized in Georgia, where the influential Orthodox Church leads an ideological battle with pro-Western political parties on social issues.