Georgia's ID Cards : A Sign of the Devil?

Published on January 14, 2014

TbilisiPolitics

In Au­gust 2011 the Min­istry of Jus­tice made dig­i­tal ID cards avail­able to every­one ob­tain­ing an ID card for the first time or re­new­ing their old one. The gov­ern­ment de­cided to pro­mote these new ID cards be­cause they are very dif­fi­cult to fal­sify, as they allow peo­ple to have their own dig­i­tal sig­na­ture. More­over, peo­ple can now do their on­line bank­ing, pay bills, buy bus tick­ets, and even check their grades and reg­is­ter for classes with the new cards. They are mod­ern and com­fort­able, and stu­dents even gain ac­cess to dozens of dis­counts with them. De­spite all of these ad­van­tages, the Church op­poses the adop­tion of these cards. 

Violation of freedom

Some of the main ID op­po­si­tion lead­ers are Tea Gegia from the Or­tho­dox Col­lec­tive, Fa­ther Zosime from the Quashveti Church in Tbil­isi, and lawyer Irma Bandze­ladze. Fol­low­ing the most re­cent protests on 21 No­vem­ber, the or­ga­niz­ers were in­vited to discuss their po­si­tion on the radio. Lawyer Irma Bandze­ladze claims that the ID cards vi­o­late peo­ple’s free­dom, as every­one’s per­sonal in­for­ma­tion is held in one cen­tral­ized sys­tem. This ar­gu­ment, how­ever, is not very ra­tio­nal, as the gov­ern­ment and banks al­ready store every­one’s in­for­ma­tion, and no one has op­posed this until today.

What is even more trou­bling is that the Church rep­re­sen­ta­tives claim to speak for the en­tire com­mu­nity. Cur­rently, only 100,000 peo­ple have signed a pe­ti­tion stat­ing they do not want elec­tronic ID cards, but Geor­gia has a pop­u­la­tion of around 4 mil­lion peo­ple. De­spite these fig­ures, Irma Bandze­ladze claims that 99% of Geor­gians want their for­mer ID cards back.

Second coming of Christ

Re­li­gious fa­nati­cism is com­mon in Geor­gia, and those who op­pose the ID cards use su­per­sti­tion as their main ar­gu­ment against them. Fa­ther Zosime claims that the elec­tronic ID cards sig­nal the sec­ond com­ing of Christ. He also be­lieves that using a bar­code for prod­ucts pur­chased in the su­per­mar­ket is a sign of the com­ing apoc­a­lypse. If the elec­tronic ID cards are abol­ished, this group of re­li­gious rep­re­sen­ta­tives also plans to de­mand that Geor­gians no longer use the per­sonal num­bers on their IDs, or any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber at all.

While the Geor­gian gov­ern­ment has tried to en­gage with the op­po­nents of elec­tronic ID cards, no con­sen­sus has been reached. With the hope of rais­ing aware­ness about the harm­less na­ture of this in­no­va­tion, the Min­is­ter of Jus­tice has given sev­eral in­for­ma­tive TV ap­pear­ances re­gard­ing the new ID cards. She even is­sued a 5-minute in­for­ma­tive video about ID cards, pre­sent­ing strong ar­gu­ments from IT tech­ni­cians and com­puter ex­perts stat­ing that there is no sign of a bib­li­cal an­tichrist em­bed­ded in the mi­crochip that has be­come an un­for­tu­nate sym­bol for Geor­gia’s ul­tra-or­tho­dox groups to latch onto. De­spite this ef­fort, the ID cards’ op­po­nents show no signs of giv­ing up.