Georgian '60 Minutes' saved
By Kathy Lally Posted Fri, Sep 1 2000
Inspired by American-style hard-hitting reporting, a Georgian television journalist and a Russian radio reporter took to the airwaves with exposés of corruption and eyewitness accounts of military battles gone terribly wrong.
They barely got away with their lives.
Akaki Gogichaishvili returned to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in 1997 from a journalism fellowship in the United States, determined to create a muckraking program like 60 Minutes. He finally got it on the air in December — and called it 60 Minutes.
He found a huge amount of material, and it was all his. The impoverished Georgian press was too dependent on the government and well-off patrons to risk offending them.
Week after week, Gogichaishvili broadcast detailed reports of the corruption that was sapping the economy and sinking the nation of 5.4 million people into ever-deeper poverty. His accusations implicated powerful and well-off Georgian officials, including friends and family of the president, Eduard Shevardnadze.
The threat came last May. If he didn’t flee the country, he would be killed. Gogichaishvili says the country’s deputy general prosecutor issued the death threat.
The prosecutor denied it.
The frightened journalist sought advice from Ann Imse, a Denver reporter who was at the time in Tbilisi working for the U.S.-supported International Center for Journalists.
When she heard 60 Minutes had 500,000 viewers, Imse knew what to do.
“I said, ‘Akaki, they’re afraid of you. Have a press conference, call the newspapers, tell the world what’s happening,’ ” Imse says.
Six hours later, Gogichaishvili was in front of a microphone. It was May 18. Within a day, 600 demonstrators were parading in front of Shevardnadze’s office, insisting the president guarantee Gogichaishvili’s safety. After a few days of hearing protests, he did.
60 Minutes remains on the air. Gogichaishvili has more sources than ever, who offer him documents and demand investigations. But he’s pessimistic about Georgia’s future.
“I don’t think my program will bring changes,” he says, “but I think I should keep on doing it — just in case.”
While Gogichaishvili managed to save his 60 Minutes, Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter who was taken prisoner by Russian soldiers in Chechnya, remains alive — and free so far. But the government has effectively put an end to his reporting.
Babitsky was arrested in January for traveling without authorization in Chechnya. The Russians traded him to a group of masked men they claimed were Chechen rebels, and asserted the rebels had given them captured Russian soldiers in return.
Later, reporters wrote that this was untrue, that Babitsky had been traded to Chechens in the pay of Moscow. His captors told him his life was in danger if his identity became known, gave him false papers and finally let him go. He was arrested again almost immediately for carrying false papers.
Babitsky has been back in Moscow for some months, doing occasional work for the U.S.-supported Radio Liberty. He has been unable to return to Chechnya, where he had roamed behind the lines, reporting on the losses Russia was trying to hide and on widespread civilian casualties.
Today, Babitsky still has no passport and no rights. He can’t leave Moscow. Even his driver’s license was taken away.
And in early July, the Interior Ministry informed him he had been charged with carrying false documents, given by his captors.