Mandatory military service in Georgia

For much of modern history, forced enlistment (conscription) has been used widely to meet national demands for military personnel. Conscription is an involuntary removal of individuals from civilian society by compelling young men and sometimes women to become a part of the active duty armed forces for a specified duration.

Over the past 45 years, a large number of countries have reduced the lengths of their compulsory military service obligations or moved entirely to an AVF (all-volunteer force). But in the past decade conscription has seen a sudden revival in some countries.

In Georgia, conscription is enshrined in Article 101 of the 1995 Constitution. It is further regulated by subsequent laws.

Russian military aggression, especially following the Ukraine–Russia conflict from 2014, acted as a motivation for reintroducing conscription in Lithuania, Sweden, and Georgia.

Tina Khidasheli, who served as a minister of defense in the years 2015-2016, abolished military conscription, stating that forcing young men to serve in the military only worsened their social problems and weakened the defensive capabilities of the country. "The Georgian Armed Forces doesn’t need servants who were forced to join it against their own will,” said Khidasheli in defense of her decision.

Khidasheli’s successor, Levan Izoria restored the compulsory military service after coming into power in 2016.

With the reestablishment of conscription, came a few new initiatives, like the monthly remuneration of GEL 50 for conscripts, who would serve for 12 months.

According to Georgian law, priests serving a religious organization are exempt from compulsory military service. Taking advantage of the loophole, a political party, Girchi, registered a religious order in 2017 called Christian Evangelical Protestant Biblical Freedom Church of Georgia and gained a state-recognized authority to issue a document stating that a person is a priest. Thus, helping young men avoid the draft.

The establishment of the church hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Georgian Armed Forces. It was clear to them that drafting conscripts would slowly become impossible if the precedent set by Girchi became a common practice.

The ruling Georgian Dream party representative and the head of Parliament’s Defence Committee, Irakli Sesiashvili, approved Izoria’s decision of reinstating conscription in 2016. And on March 13, 2019, he introduced an initiative that would ban members of non-Orthodox Christian churches to avoid drafting.

The initiative was followed with a massive backlash from the public and Sesiashvili was accused of initiating a discriminative law. He clarified that he doesn’t think the proposed law is discriminatory because it doesn’t explicitly mention Orthodox priests.

The Constitutional Agreement between the Georgian state and the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia (Concordat), exempts clergymen of the Orthodox Georgian Church from the military service.

The Law on Alternative Service entered into force in 1998. According to Article 4: "Those conscripts who according to the legislation must perform military service, but refuse to do so because military service of any sort is incompatible with their conscience, may be called up to perform civilian service in times of peace". This allowed people of various religious believes, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists especially, to avoid bearing arms.

Concordat puts Orthodox priests to an unjust advantage and that became evident immediately after the announcement of the new law. Sesiashvili suggested continuing consultations concerning his proposition. “Since there’s a certain view in the public that my initiative might be discriminatory, I suggest to all political parties that we continue discussions regarding the subject” – said Sesiashvili.

Patriarchate of Georgia issued a statement regarding the issue. They reaffirmed their support of allowing priests to avoid serving in the military but mentioned that there should be a mechanism that would prevent “pseudo-religious groups to use this for their narrow interests, which is an apparent manipulation with religion and poses a threat to the country”.

The proposed initiative was specifically aimed towards Girchi and their established church. Even though the author of the proposed law is a member of the ruling party, Georgian Dream, one of the leaders of the opposition, Grigol Vashadze, also agrees that “false religions” became prevalent, but criticizes the ruling party for drafting a discriminatory law.

In response to being accused of creating a false religion, political party Girchi published an exhaustive list of the children of deputies from current and previous Georgian Parliaments that avoided compulsory military service. According to the leader of Girchi, Zurab Japaridze, since its creation, Biblical Freedom Church of Georgia “has saved more than 15 000 young men from having a ruined life and a mutilated body”.

Georgian experience as a developing and democratizing state creates the most challenging settings for developing a strong military personnel policy. Frequent changes to the army recruitment system could lead to the weakening of the country’s defensive capabilities.

People in favor of conscription often call it a social contract between a state and a citizen and a moral obligation, especially for small countries like Georgia. Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO has also been used as a justification for the military conscription.

It is noteworthy that conscripts can fill the military, but having professional armies is far more advantageous since they are generally better trained, more specialized and far more efficient. This is the reason why EU nations continue abolishing military conscription.

Many say that in Georgia, conscription doesn’t work as it should. Conscripts often don’t get enough training and most of them are employed as guards for the government institution buildings, therefore it has become more of a way for the government to attain free labor than a definite practice of expanding the military capabilities.

Conscription betrays the core values of democratic norms, such as liberty. Compulsory military service bonds citizens to states. Mandating service for months or years is a dangerous diversion from early adulthood that poses a threat to the citizen’s personal bonds, higher education, and employment.

The discussion about conscription continues within the government and the society, but one thing remains clear – the current system of drafting is not working as it should and needs to be changed or eliminated altogether in order to effectively increase Georgia’s defensive capabilities.