Students Trapped in Employment Programme

“The entrance was your prerogative but you will not be able to leave this place until the event is over,” the deceived students were told.

The students of Kutaisi Akaki Tsereteli State University appealed to the Human Rights Centre’s Kutaisi Office. On December 23rd, 2007 they were invited to Kutaisi Lado Meskhishvili Theatre and were not allowed to leave the theatre hall for about an hour.

The frightened students who preferred to stay anonymous said that, “On December 22nd  the representatives of the National Movement  got in touch with us and asked to go to Kutaisi Quality House ( they call it the Office of Victory) in order to be registered in Students’ Employment Programme. They asked to bring IDs of our parents too. We went to Kutaisi Quality House; they wrote down our data and told us to go to Kutaisi Lado Meskhishvili Theatre because the process of taking our signatures was to be held there. We were taken to the theatre by two buses; we had to wait there for a while and finally were able to enter the building. We found pre-election materials and flags of presidential candidate Mikheil Saakashvili. Several activists were running in the theatre hall waving flags and shouting “Misha-Misha”.”   

Later the students discovered later they were on the forum of the National Movement’s Youth Union. The forum was attended by local young Nationalists together with their “colleagues” from Tbilisi. When the girls realised that the registration for employment programme was only a trick to bring them to the forum, they decided to leave the theatre but it turned out to be impossible.

“Two men were standing at the exit. They refused to open the door. “The entrance was your prerogative but you will not be able to leave this place until the event is over,” they told us. When we expressed our protest they started to ask who we were, from which district and who was our coordinator. This argument lasted for approximately one hour. In the meantime the number of people who wanted to go out dramatically increased. I remember one girl who was crying. It turned out that her husband called her on the phone and told her their baby was crying and asked to come home immediately,” one of the students told us.   

Finally the guests from Tbilisi found out about the problem. One of the guests came down and made the man standing at the exit open the door. So students were finally relieved.

Lela Khidasheli, Kutaisi