It was in a tense campaign phase, when only the worst is expected, that Georgia was suddenly showered with an unusual amount of good news. Georgian athletes won a record nine medals at the Paris Paralympics; April, a film by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, won a special jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival; the Georgian national football team once again united the country by crushing its Czech rivals with a stunning performance; and a prominent journalist tracked down her biological family after years-long dramatic journey religiously followed by hundreds of thousands in her own country and beyond.
Why did the universe suddenly decide to bless us like this? Is this the last cry of the lifeblood of the doomed nation? Pure coincidence? Or a chance to reflect on the past and the future before the crucial vote in October?
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to talk about happy endings and draw lessons from their unhappy beginnings.
“Eight years of search are over. I have found my biological parents,” Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze said in a video announcement on September 1. The announcement instantly went viral: the journalist’s journey to find her biological family, and her valuable activism in helping many others on the same mission, has long attracted both local and international attention, even landing Museridze on the BBC’s 100 Women in 2023.
The story began when, at the age of 31, Museridze accidentally discovered that she was adopted. Here begins her long quest to trace her roots, with a major milestone being the creation of the “I’m Searching” group on Facebook, Georgians’ favorite social media platform, through which she uncovered a decades-long disturbing business scheme involving the sale of newborn babies in Georgia. The babies were torn from their mothers in maternity hospitals and sold in other regions or even abroad. The mothers, fresh from labor trauma, were easily tricked into believing the infant died and was buried in a special procedure.
From what is known so far, the scheme allegedly dates back to the early 1950s and stretches well into the first decade of regained independence, covering the entire country, and possibly affecting tens of thousands of families. Museridze’s own efforts have helped hundreds of Georgians find their original families. But until recently, she still hadn’t found her own parents.
Her story of perseverance and the admiration she drew for her role in reuniting so many long-suffering families had the entire country holding its breath to see where the journalist’s investigation would lead. And when Museridze shared the heartwarming video of her finally embracing her biological father shortly after the recent announcement, it instantly led to a nationwide celebration. The journalist tracked down the man, a choreographer and former dancer, in Zugdidi, Samegrelo region. She has yet to meet her biological mother, who she says is currently abroad.
Mirror, Mirror
The journalist’s happy ending, however, provides a rare opportunity to reflect on its unhappy beginnings, and may even hold up a much-needed mirror to Georgian society as it heads to the polls in a crucial election this October.
The cases Museridze documents include chilling tales of empty graves, deliberate mass falsification of documents that must have involved countless accomplices, stories of indifference, and even a horrifying case of sex slavery that resulted in babies being born and then sold to families. The level of corruption is enough to send the entire country into a state of self-questioning and soul-searching. And during the decisive election campaign, it might be useful to re-examine how low one can go, to figure out together how not to fall into the same abyss again. But that’s a hard task for a society that finds it easy to geopolitically outsource good and evil – especially when those external goods and evils are also very real.
The one force that speaks most about “values” during the current campaign is the one that wantonly abuses them: the ruling Georgian Dream party. The party hopes that the majority of Georgians will head to polling stations this October to choose the guaranteed autocracy which the party claims is needed to preserve “peace” amid the Ukraine war and, no less importantly, protect conservative family values. Old family traditions are not something to long for in a country with a recent history of a black market of baby trafficking, one might think. But that’s less of an issue for Mamuka Mdinaradze, one of the main demagogues of the GD, who recently promised to “make sure that life in this country doesn’t look like the opening ceremony of the (Paris) Olympic Games.”
Opposition parties have tried to counter this toxic and divisive rhetoric by ignoring it. Instead, they have focused on the stark choice between the EU and Russia while drawing attention to the persistent social and economic problems plaguing the country, an approach best summed up in the United National Movement’s campaign message: “Prosperity in Europe vs Poverty in Isolation.” The approach was initially praised for leaving GD alone in its hypocrisy of fixating on queers while ignoring the ongoing real needs of Georgians. And dealing with “real issues” is something that opposition parties have long been asked to do themselves.
Recently, however, the opposition has been criticized – albeit occasionally – for doing too little and lacking the necessary charisma due to their disregard for values-based campaigning.
Bread and Freedom
Focusing on economic issues during an election campaign is not only legitimate but necessary. But in an electoral context where one part of the country’s population is expected to deliberately outlaw another, it may take more than simply promising higher pensions. The ruling party has enough administrative and material resources to lure voters with immediate benefits over distant promises (of which they’ve heard many, not least from the ruling party), and some struggling voters may still fear that any major change through election could cost them what little they already have.
Other politicians are more prepared for the risk. With her long and eloquent speeches, President Salome Zurabishvili, for example, has tried to assume the role of a leader trying to rally a nation to a common goal through frequent appeals to values. While the president did frame the upcoming elections as a “referendum” between Russia and Europe, she has also repeatedly presented the vote as a choice between “the past or progress,” “freedom or slavery,” “dictatorship or democracy,” “one-party power or multiparty government,” “dignity or no principles,” or “Christian tolerance or Russian violence.”
It may be that the French-born president, whose knowledge of France must extend beyond a single controversial episode from the Paris Olympics, is well aware that democratic values – liberté, égalité, fraternité – actually emerged in the struggle against the attitude of Marie Antoinette, rather than to serve self-indulgent monarchs. Zurabishvili, who also likes to see herself as a kind of heiress to the emigrated officials of Georgia’s First Republic, may also be motivated to revive the value-driven debates that once led to the birth of the Georgian state.
However, the occasional speeches of a figurehead leader with no party of her own may not bring about fundamental change. Faced once again with the risks of authoritarianism, Georgia has a rare opportunity to collectively redefine and reinvent itself as a more egalitarian, democratic, close-knit state, where every citizen feels like a part of the project that they themselves helped to create and in which they have firm faith.
The country has repeatedly postponed the process of identifying itself with hard-won civil rights and self-defined notions of human dignity, choosing instead to focus on its anti-imperialist struggle. Now that the opportunity presents itself, it shouldn’t be missed.
