Caucasus Report

Georgian prosecutor Revaz Nadoy announced on September 30 that the body of former Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania will be exhumed and tests conducted by international pathologists in order to clarify the cause of his death. He did not specify a time frame.

Zhvania was found dead in a rented apartment in Tbilisi together with a friend, Kvemo Kartli Deputy Governor Rasul Yusupov, early on February 3, 2005. The postmortem concluded that the two men died of carbon-monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning gas heater.

But Zhvania's brother, Giorgi, has consistently rejected that ruling, citing circumstantial evidence that the two men had died at another location.

In 2012, he openly accused three former senior government officials -- former Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, former Deputy Prime Minister Giorgi Baramidze, and former Prosecutor-General Zurab Adeishvili -- of having moved the two bodies to the apartment where they were subsequently found and faked the evidence of asphyxiation. At the same time, Giorgi Zhvania stressed that he was not accusing the three men of murder.

In March 2014, photographic evidence surfaced that seemed to corroborate Giorgi Zhvania's doubts about the circumstances of his brother's death. Photos were uploaded to YouTube apparently taken at the time of the postmortem that -- according to current Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili -- showed that Zhvania had sustained head injuries prior to his death

Levan Chachua, the pathologist who had carried out the postmortem, was immediately arrested, as was Mikheil Dzadzamia, the bodyguard tasked with watching over Zhvania on the night he died. Both were subsequently charged with dereliction of duty and remanded in pretrial custody.

Dzadzamia is currently on trial together with the head of Zhvania's security detail, Koba Kharshiladze. He is pleading not guilty.

Nadoy, who is prosecutor at the trial, ruled on September 30 that five senior members of the former ruling United National Movement (ENM) should be summoned to testify. The five are: Merabishvili, who is currently serving three separate prison terms on charges of exceeding his official authority and using public funds to bribe voters; Baramidze; and ENM parliament deputies Goka Gabashvili; Mikheil Machavaviari; and Khatuna Gogorishvili.

Nadoy also said it had been established that the photos of the dead bodies of Zhvania and Usupov were uploaded to YouTube from Turkey, but he declined to specify the precise location, or the identity of "Hakim Pasha," who uploaded them.

Nadoy is not quoted as saying that Yusupov's body too will be exhumed. Yusupov's father Yashir Yusupov, who is convinced that his son was the target of "a planned killing of a political character," said last year that the bodies should be exhumed if it is impossible to clarify the cause of death by other means.

-- Liz Fuller

Over the past three years, Russian media have periodically reported the release from slavery of men forced against their will to work at Daghestan's numerous brickworks.

The most recent such victim, a man from Murmansk rescued by the public organization Alternativa, claims to have been held for 18 years as a slave in Daghestan, where he worked first at a brickworks and then, after an unsuccessful attempt to escape, as a cattle herder.

According to Alternativa, the man was the fifth whose release they have secured so far this year, compared with at least 12 in 2013. In some cases, the victims (most of them Russians, but also some from Belarus) said they were drugged after signing a work contract in Moscow or Yekaterinburg, and transported unconscious to Daghestan.

Daghestan's prosecutor's office announced one year ago, however, that inspections of brickworks in the towns of Makhachkala, Kaspiisk, Kizlyar, and Kizilyurt and in the Babayurt, Kizilyurt, and Karabudakhkent districts failed to yield any evidence of the use of involuntary or slave labor. Those inspections did, however, uncover numerous unspecified violations of labor, land, and tax legislation and of health and safety regulations.

Assuming that the workers who managed to escape, and whose escape was reported in the media, constitute the tip of the iceberg, calculating how many may remain in semicaptivity is problematic. In March 2013, an official from the Makhachkala prosecutor's office for nature conservation told parliament officials that "until recently," there had been a total of 86 functioning brickworks in Daghestan, 39 of them in Makhachkala and the coastal town of Kaspiisk. One month later, Daghestan's Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Gasan Idrisov cited a figure of 27 for Makhachkala and Kaspiisk.

But no estimates have been made public of the proportion of those enterprises that employ slave labor. Commenting on the release in January 2013 by Alternativa activists of nine laborers, five of them from Belarus, then-Daghestan Information Minister Nariman Gadzhiyev admitted that "slave labor is not a rare occurrence in Daghestan," and that it was not confined to the construction industry. In May 2013, police launched an investigation after one Daghestani blogger claimed there was a functioning slave market behind one of the city's cinemas where it was possible to purchase a male slave for 15,000 rubles ($380 at today's exchange rate).

On the whole, the republic's authorities appear more concerned by the aesthetic and ecological impact of the brickworks and their importance for the republic's economy than the status of their workforce. Republic of Daghestan head Ramazan Abdulatipov complained in February that seen from the air, Makhachkala is surrounded by flooded craters from which clay for bricks has been excavated. Some of those craters are up to 150 meters in diameter and 25-30 meters deep. Other abandoned craters are used as garbage tips, although by law the brickworks owners are obliged to recultivate them.

The brickworks are inspected at intervals: four of six works in Kaspiisk inspected last month were ordered to suspend production "temporarily" to address violations of ecological and sanitary norms. But any large-scale crackdown or reduction in the total number of such enterprises is unlikely in view of the importance of the construction sector to Daghestan's ramshackle economy. According to official statistics, the Kaspiisk brickworks alone produce between 8 million-9 million tons of bricks per year.