This is a saying that sex offenders and those closest to them, such as Prince Andrew and others, should know. The Jeffrey Epstein case is still not dead, as another similar one just broke in Tbilisi, Georgia, which is even more insidious.
This time the sex offenders are not just some sick man and a network of equally sick friends in high places. The abusers are the parents themselves, who took allegedly money so that their daughters, ranging in age from 5 to 15, could to have photos of them taken and explicit sex videos made. These were then sold internationally via the dark web and networks of paedophiles, with the remuneration returning to the ringleaders via Bitcoin.
Here is a video of breaking Georgian News – little girls, age 5 to 15 making sex videos, in which their parents agree that they took money for the services of their young daughters. This is the latest hot topic of discussion here, not only due to the sinister nature of the crime but whether or not this is but the tip of an iceberg.
In Georgia everyone knows everyone. The girls involved are no longer able to attend school due to the shame involved in their activities, in a traditional country where sex remains a taboo subject. Moreover, many underage girls are openly working as sex workers in various Tbilisi nightspots, catering mostly to foreign and Middle Eastern clients. However, nobody is talking about that.
The police are turning a blind eye. It is thought that they too are sharing in the illicit proceeds of the flesh business. But whose business is it, exactly?
Truckle most when treated worst
Of course Georgia is a poor country, despite all the flash claims the previous government used to make. Anything which can bring in Lari (GEL), or, even better, dollars, has to be a good thing when the population is being kept in post-Soviet blight to make them more exploitable.
But there are some standards below which no one should ever go. Everyone knows this in a country where the churches, mosques and synagogues are packed all day, every day. If you asked any Georgian what they wanted to do for a living, only the tiniest and sickest minority would contemplate abusing children as a job choice.
So this could only happen if some other value were being promoted above those commonly held by the population. This is exactly what has been happening in Georgia ever since it overthrew its first president.
Organisations such as the Liberty Institute of Tea Tutberidze have been imported with a simple message: if you want Western help, you have to be as sick, criminal and subject as possible. Georgians have been continually told that the Western democracy most of them crave comes at the terrible price of embracing the most decadent aspects of the West.
Cigarette companies have long exported the high tar cigarettes banned in Western countries to the third world, and promoted their use as making smokers cool and Western. In Georgia it is cool, and financially necessary, to embrace arms and drugs smuggling for terrorists, an economy which is a vast money laundering exercise, rule by externally selected criminal gangs and all kinds of sexual deviancy as “Western” and “progressive”, leaving the subject population with little choice but to go along to provide themselves with a tolerable standard of living.
Beware of Americans bearing gifts
There are many child abuse stories to be told in Georgia. But the one I am about to share is even more shocking than most.
As my daughter-in-law, a Georgian native wrote “I know everything from the locals; I don’t need to read articles”. I don’t remember the surname of Maia (our direct source), but she was associated with an American who happened to be living in her brother’s home in the village of Zegduleti in the Gori region. In the nature of things, they met there and shortly afterwards—she divorced her husband and started living with the man – for money, nothing more.
He is claimed to have already been on a sex offenders list, as was an Australian who has been named as the other leader of a local paedophile ring. Their two cases are very similar, although no direct link has been made at this time, based on available information.
The man came to Georgia as a volunteer teacher, as part of an aid programme, Teach and Learn in Georgia, run by the previous Saakashvili government. He started out in a village school in 2011, and worked for one year. But what he was actually doing demonstrates the true nature of other similar programmes, the agendas they serve and who actually profits from them.
Two years ago the man in question, having departed the programme, returned to the same village and met and took pictures of some of his former students. At this stage of the investigation, 10 child victims have been identified, and even when their pictures were shown on TV with faces blocked out, friends and classmates still recognised them, meaning many have stopped attending classes.
Georgian Public TV describes in one interview that in the Guria region of West Georgia, a 12-year-old girl was filmed almost completely naked in the presence of her mother. The mother instructed the daughter not to say anything about this to her father—for obvious reasons!
Another shooting session involved one of the mothers travelling with her daughter, who met other girls in the photo studio. For the sake of her grandmother, who was curious about what kind of photos were being taken, pictures of the girls taken in nice dresses, as if for foreign magazines, were provided to cover up what was actually taking place.
The mother received money for the more revealing poses, and these shooting sessions continued for a period of over eight months, using the same girls in several cases.
The joint investigation into this activity, involving the American, Australian and Georgian authorities, proves that the parents were perfectly aware of what was going on, in spite of their claims otherwise, and were well paid for allowing their children to pose and participate in child pornography. Europol sent a request for collaboration with this investigation four months ago, but as yet it is not known whether the investigators want any more stones to be turned.
Only obeying orders
Details of the arrests which have currently been made are sketchy, due to this still being an on-going investigation. However open sources claim that in August one of the women living in the region where the man had worked had been arrested with him, on suspicion of helping him recruit children (victims) for his business.
As one respondent who knows the teacher involved told me, “I know teachers that were sent to Georgia (in Saakashvili’s time), the ones sent to teach English in regional schools, are involved with this case. It seems that there were no background checks on them. How is it possible to bring a teacher from a foreign country without the agency involved, Footprints Recruitment, not making sure that they had no criminal histories?”
It is good that TLG cleaned up its act under the new government; however, many of the holdovers from the first TLG programme are still in Georgia.
Most of the pornographic photos of underage children are sold in foreign countries. Thus far, girls from the sub-regions of Gori and Lanchkhuti are involved, the youngest being five years old, and upwards of 11 of the persons officially charged with trafficking are parents of underage victims in Lanchkhuti—a town in West Georgia.
Some of those charged have given interviews. A man and woman say they they have two underage kids involved, and hope they will be acquitted. Of course they do, they were only doing what the Americans want Georgians to do in order to have futures for those same children.
Another witness told media sources that that parents have only mentioned knowing about the photo sessions, not the nature of the acts committed at them. However, prosecutor Mariam Gogoreliani insists that every single parent involved knew all the details, and each one had received income for their participation. In many instances the parents themselves were the initiators.
Our filth, your shovel
It is good to see that such crimes are being fully investigated; such shocking news will theoretically help the development and implementation of national laws, and better enforce the ones they already have, and to establish the criminal responsibility of service providers, customers and “intermediaries” in child prostitution, child trafficking, child pornography, possession of child pornography and other unlawful sexual activity.
But who will these laws be aimed at?
Parents will be prosecuted, and so will selected intermediaries who somebody wants to get rid of. But is anyone really going to prosecute the aid agencies and national governments who are exporting their own problems to Georgia because they don’t really want to outlaw them at home? There have even been cases where US Embassy staff has been involved, one Embassy staff member posted to Baku was in fact murdered by his child victims some years ago.
More prosecutions will be accompanied by more bad press for Georgia—and thus deeper dependency on Western aid—to solve the problem. Those who take precious little action against paedophile rings in their own countries will brand Georgia as the place where they thrive, even though they imported the problem to Georgia. These parents and children are sacrificial lambs in a bigger political game, which Georgia does not have the resources to extricate itself from.
Not only will this case be the rallying call for NGOs to step in and address the problem but to turn on the tap for money Western aid. Aside from protecting homosexuals, the West will be ready to use this as another issue to further divide an already divided nation.
In Georgia the problem of sex workers is also linked with rape in childhood, or in this case – blatant sexual exploitation, and more is involved here than just money. According to many sociological studies in different countries, about 60% of prostitutes have been involved in such activity after being raped in childhood.
Another problem in Georgia is underage marriage, which persists in spite of laws being on the books. Georgia has the lowest age of marriage in any country in proximity to Europe. Marriage for children as young as 12, even with permission from the parents, should be considered morally repugnant and illegal, and the laws on the books should be strictly enforced. However, they are not because this practice provides a get out – child abuse must be native to Georgia because it has these laws, so its Western sponsors are in the clear.
Georgia makes much of its “strategic location.” In reality, this does not mean that it is the bridge between Europe and Asia. It means that it is the ideal place to conduct all the disgusting things you enjoy doing at home but do not want to be seen doing in your own back yard.
After all the propaganda, Georgians are finally beginning to see why the West is so suspicious of nationalism, democracy and everything else Western countries were themselves built on.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
