Alt-Info’s Manipulation on Events Unfolding Around the Ninotsminda Boarding School
Verdict: MANIPULATION
On 3 June 2021, on air on the Alt-Info far-right platform, multiple pieces of disinformation and manipulation were voiced about the Ninotsminda boarding school. In addition, the show hosts attempted to discredit the Public Defender of Georgia as well as different NGOs.
Claim 1. There is an orchestrated attack against the Church. The Ninotsminda case is not a spontaneous one. The specific aim is to discredit the Church.
The Public Defender’s reports and events unfolding around the Ninotsminda boarding school since 15 April 2021 prove that the concern is about the possibility of monitoring the state of the rights of children in the boarding school as well as the effective response vis-à-vis the already identified facts of possible violence against children. Of important note is that the Ninotsminda boarding school has been in the public spotlight because of possible crimes identified within the premises and specific facts of obstructing the activities of a government institution. Being opposed to the real facts on the ground and contradicting the official position of the Patriarchate of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Alt-Info misleads the public and portrays the existing reality that responding to possible acts of violence against children as well as demanding that the Public Defender and other authorised bodies are able to carry out their duties in line with the Georgian legislation serves to discredit the Church instead of protecting the rights of children.
For more details, see FactCheck’s article on this issue.
Claim 2. “The Public Defender wrote something and submitted it to the MIA. The MIA, obviously, has to react and started to investigate a non-existing fact. And how do they assess this? – ‘investigation on violence is in progress.’ There are ongoing investigations on four cases from 2016 and two of these four cases were launched on the basis of a letter submitted by the Public Defender’s Office, one of them sent in 2021. We have to understand that when such a letter is received, an investigation should be launched, this is an obligation. We are manipulatively fed information.”
On 3 June 2021, the Ministry of Internal Affairs released a statement saying that there are four cases under investigation which were committed at the Ninotsminda boarding school between 2016-2021. Of these cases, three are of alleged physical assault (Article 126 of the Criminal Code of Georgia) and one is a case of alleged rape (Article 137 of the Criminal Code of Georgia). According to the statement, investigations were launched for two cases on the basis of a written statement received from the Public Defender's Office whilst investigative procedures were initiated upon the request of the LEPL Agency for State Care and Assistance for the (Statutory) Victims of the Human Trafficking for the other cases. In addition, as reported by the MIA, based on information disseminated by different media outlets, an investigation was started under the first section of Article 1261 of the Criminal Code of Georgia (premeditated violence against a minor) vis-à-vis possible crimes against children at the boarding school.
Of additional note is that information about psychological and physical violence on the part of tutors against children is given in the Public Defender’s special reports of 2015 and 2018 (see FactCheck’s article).
On top of the Public Defender’s reports and the ongoing criminal investigations, a 7 May 2021 UN interim measure and a Tbilisi City Court’s ruling, which mandated the removal of all disabled individuals from the boarding school, also speak about possible abuses of the rights of children at the Ninotsminda boarding school.
Furthermore, after the court’s ruling, the Agency for State Care released a statement that 20 disabled minors were removed from the Ninotsminda boarding school and accommodated in different minor care facilities (biological families, family-type small group homes and foster care facilities).
FactCheck would like to remind readers that residents of the Ninotsminda boarding school who left the school willingly and moved to alternate care articulated their recollections of facts of physical punishment and psychological violence.
An archpriest, previously working for the Ninotsminda boarding school, also confirms the facts of “strict treatment” from teachers in the past.
The aforementioned circumstances, even without ruling criminal responsibility for possible crimes committed at the Ninotsminda boarding school, attest to the problems in terms of the rights of children at this institution. Therefore, portraying the issue that launching an investigation is merely a technical procedure and, in fact, nothing alarming had happened at the Ninotsminda boarding school is a manipulation of information. The claim that the MIA launched an investigation vis-à-vis a non-existent case is false.
Claim 3. For her (Tamta Mikeladze,) it is problem that the Church, and Christians in general, set up their boarding schools and raise children there as Christians. She (Tamta Mikeladze) demands that the Turks open a Muslim boarding school and if the state does not ensure this, she will sue in international organisations but the Christian boarding school in Ninotsminda has to be closed.”
The show’s hosts seek to discredit the Public Defender and members of different NGOs, including one of the founders of the Social Justice Centre (the former EMC), Tamta Mikeladze.
The hosts drew parallels with Tamta Mikeladze’s statement in regard to Muslim boarding school in Kobuleti and her other statement about the Ninotsminda boarding school made in different periods. They also purport that Ms Mikeladze supports opening Muslim boarding schools whilst demanding the closure of Christian boarding schools.
In fact, problems related to the opening of a Muslim boarding school in Kobuleti which started to emerge from 2014 are drastically different from those related to the Ninotsminda boarding school and so we are dealing with two completely different cases.
The boarding school for Muslim pupils in Kobuleti was scheduled to be opened on 15 September 2014. However, in the aftermath of a violent and offensive action committed on 10 September 2014 (from those individuals who claim to be Orthodox Christians), the boarding school has not started functioning.
The protests continued in the same intensity until November 2014 when the very last pupil living in the boarding school had to leave the premises. Locals periodically organised rallies against the boarding school (for instance, another gathering was held in July 2015). At the rallies, protesting the opening of the boarding schools, participants constantly voiced Islamophobic and Turkophobic derogatory statements (for instance, “Turks, Tatars, traitors, we do not want Muslims here, go to Turkey and pray there”).
Of note is that according to the Social Justice Centre (the former EMC), “during the long-term persecution against the Muslim community, the role of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was largely of inactive monitoring.”
The Social Justice Centre (the former EMC) filed several simultaneous suits vis-à-vis the Kobuleti boarding school for Muslims in order to restore the rights of the local Muslim community. In 2018, a case was also submitted to the European Court of Human Rights. In addition, the Supreme Court of Georgia acknowledged the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ inactivity in regard to the Kobuleti boarding school in 2018 and partially satisfied the cassation complaint vis-à-vis the responsibility of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
This notwithstanding, the boarding school for Muslim pupils in Kobuleti has hitherto not been opened.
Given the aforementioned circumstances, the TV hosts putting the case of the Kobuleti boarding school for Muslim pupils and the events unfolding around the Ninotsminda boarding school in the same context is a manipulation of information and aims to mislead the population. The Kobuleti boarding school could not be opened because of the state’s inactivity in dealing with religious persecution and solving the problem whilst there were facts of obstructing the Public Defender from carrying out its duty in the case of the Ninotsminda boarding school, particularly in terms of monitoring which was instrumental in the previous years for identifying grievous facts of violence against children at the boarding school.
Of additional note is that the Public Defender’s reports pay attention to the violations identified at the boarding schools run by the Orthodox Church as well as those boarding schools administered by Muslims. Therefore, putting the issue in a way that discussing the situation at the Ninotsminda boarding school means waging a battle against boarding schools run by the Orthodox Church aims to show the real facts in a distorted context and constitutes a manipulation of information.
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