The Georgian historian, human rights activist and dissident-turned-politician Guram Mamulia, who has died aged 65, spent his life swimming against the political tide.
Born at the height of the Stalinist terror, he liked to tell people he had started life in Moscow's Butyrka prison, though this may have been an embellishment. Certainly, his father, Samson Mamulia, a former first secretary of the Georgian Communist party, was imprisoned in Tbilisi a month after his son's birth - and Guram and his mother followed him for the next two years. Samson was executed, his wife died in the Gulag, and their son was brought up by an aunt.
After graduating in history from Tbilisi State University in 1960, he spent 38 years studying ancient Georgian history at the Georgian Academy of Sciences. He retired as a senior research fellow, and then combined a political career with a lectureship at the Georgian Diplomatic Academy (1998-2001).
Central to Mamulia's life was the Meskhetian Question. In 1944, Stalin had some 120,000 Meskhetians, a southern Georgian Muslim minority, packed into cattle wagons and deported from Meskhetia (now Samtskhe-Javakheti) to Uzbekistan. More than 10,000 perished en route. They and their descendants have remained in exile ever since and, unlike the other 11 ethnic minorities who suffered similar treatment, have never been officially rehabilitated.
Mamulia's championing of the Meskhetian cause set him against popular opinion in Georgia. In 1990, he was severely beaten while defending a group of early Meskhetian repatriates against a nationalist mob. In 1981, he was expelled from the Communist party for protesting at the arrest of two dissidents. Two years later, he was forced out of Tbilisi University, where he had held a history chair since 1973, after publishing a paper condemning the Georgievsk Treaty of 1783, under which Russia annexed Georgia.
In 1988, as the spirit of glasnost swept the Soviet Union, Mamulia became a co-founder of the Ilia Chavchavadze Society, the first formal political opposition to the Communist party. In 1989, he helped create the Georgian branch of the Memorial Society, which is devoted to recovering information about victims of Soviet repression.
His decision to become more actively involved in politics was galvanised by the appointent of Zviad Gamsakhurdia as president in 1991, and the sharp rise in Georgian nationalism. He also campaigned for the return to Georgia of Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze.
After Shevardnadze ousted Gamsarkhurdia in 1992, Mamulia was elected to the Georgian parliament, and made head of the department of inter-ethnic relations at the state human rights committee, a post he held until 1996. In 1999, Shevardnadze appointed him head of the government's new repatriation service, created to provide a framework for the return of the Meskhetians - a precondition of Georgia's entry into the Council of Europe.
However, two years later, stymied by opponents, Mamulia resigned, and the organisation was disbanded. Early last year, he formed the independent Association for the Repatriation and Integration of Meskhetians, submitting a draft law to the Council of Europe, which he hoped would be used as the blueprint for such a programme.
Although colleagues and opponents found his quixotic stubbornness exasperating, Mamulia remained loyal to the principles of tolerance and freedom of speech. In 1998, he was one of the key movers behind the creation of the Black Sea University, a UN-sponsored initiative between Georgian and Turkish academics, which saw him branded, ridiculously, as a Turkish agent.
Even after two heart attacks, he remained tireless about Meskhetian repatriation, and the door of his tiny flat in the heart of old Tbilisi was always open. At the time of his death, supported by his lawyer son Georgi, he was preparing to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
As well as his son, he is survived by his wife, Elizaveta.
· Guram Mamulia, historian, human rights activist and politician, born May 9 1937; died January 1 2003