The FINANCIAL — According to Civil Georgia, cases have been revealed in some of the public hospitals in Tbilisi when doctors and staff were asked to fill out special forms indicating their political preferences, Sandro Kvitashvili, the healthcare minister, said on February 11.
“Here is the form,” he said at a news conference showing a form, “including several sheets one of them to indicate name of a director of hospital… then comes a sheet ‘political orientation of staff’ with another sheet requesting to show total number of staff and a separate sheet – ‘number of our supporters.’ Here also is a sheet for the name of ‘influential doctor’ and ‘our supporter’ and ‘opposition supporter.’”
“I want to make it clear that this is not an official paper,” the minister said. “Request to fill out this type of forms is not coming from any state agency. The Healthcare Ministry is absolutely against of that and I want to request all the medical centers in Georgia not to fill out these forms and inform us if someone tries to distribute them. No one needs it.”
Sandro Kvitashvili, who was invited to join the new cabinet by PM Lado Gurgenidze, said he did not know who was distributing those forms in the hospitals.
State employees, including teachers in public schools were asked to fill out similar forms by the ruling party activists on the eve of the January 5 presidential elections. Ruling party leaders, including parliamentary speaker, Nino Burjanadze, publicly condemned this practice and said that it could have been an initiative of a lower level party management as no orders of that type were coming from the leadership. At that time the ruling party leaders had to comment publicly on the practice only after the opponents started to accuse the authorities of mounting pressure on state employees ahead of the elections.
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