It’s been over 50 days of protesting outside. The warmest jackets are now worn out, as are the faces of their owners. The soles of the rally shoes are torn, but finding a replacement seems like too much work. The favorite cozy hoodie is starting to lose its charm, and yet it remains the only thing that offers a sense of protection and stability these days. For Georgian demonstrators, it’s hard not to feel homesick after tramping through the country’s central streets during the long, cold winter days of the last protest wave. And yet going home doesn’t seem to be an option: basic rights are yet to be won back, while the home itself, and everything that made it, has been ruined: for some – temporarily, for others – for good.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to recount the eventful week of Georgian protests, full of developments ranging from the absurd to the tragic, but hardly shocking anymore.
A reel dated January 14 and published by RFE/RL’s local bureau looks like a fragment from a Georgian movie: one of those old-and-gold works that stars mostly theater actors whose over-expressive acting manner risks compromising authenticity. “Nobody talks like that in real life,” a skeptic might frown. Except the scenes in the video are from real life, and the people in them are real people who look too angry and hopeless to even think about acting.
“You rotten person!” a woman is seen frantically shouting at a female judge, waving (but not throwing) an empty water bottle at her as she is being escorted out of the courtroom. “How wrong I was to toast for you at your wedding!” – now follows a male voice, again directed at a judge, as an exasperated older, gray-haired man who would make a perfect cast for a Shakespearean king is also shown out of the room. “You are a pure slave,” the voice fades as the man disappears behind the door.
The reel then cuts to another scene in the same room. Act two, the defendants. “I don’t want to listen to this absurdity,” Droa party member Shushana Matsaberidze now is seen fuming as she addresses the courtroom, standing near the exit. “I want to leave this room” (exits).
“Giorgi, what do you want to say?” a journalist’s voice is heard as the camera cuts to Giorgi Kakaladze, a 19-year-old football player sitting nearby. “Mom, I love you very much, and don’t worry, there’s nothing to worry about, they can’t sentence me to anything in any way, I’m free anyway,” Kakaladze speaks into the camera with a mix of agitation and cheerfulness. “Mom, I love you very much, don’t worry, I apologize for all this,” the footballer repeats, blowing a kiss.
High-quality tragedy
The scenes depict the January 14 Batumi City Court hearings that ended with six activists – including Kakaladze and Matsaberidze – being sent to administrative detention. The hearings follow a series of arrests in Georgia’s coastal city as police officers, apparently well-rested from the Christmas holiday, went on a rampage of arbitrary detentions.
Theater references have perhaps been used too often when commenting on Georgian politics. Until recently, words like “drama” or “theatricals” were mainly chosen to mock and dismiss silly political infighting as cheap antics, not doing justice to actual Georgian theater, which, if we are to trust its loyal patrons, has expanded and improved over the years. But one reason why life is now actually beginning to imitate art, and quality drama is infiltrating courtrooms, is that events here may have finally risen to the level of Greek tragedy: bonds of loyalty are broken, families parted, and absurdities are so great that to respond properly, one has to relearn centuries-old emotions that have until now only survived on stage.
And the scenes from the courtrooms of Batumi were only a part of the madness that the past week offered, each development unique enough to deserve a proper creative representation for it to be passed on between the generations as a warning.
From Batumi to Abu Dhabi
The tragicomedy that unfolded last week included, but was not limited to:
- Large police mobilization at a Tbilisi restaurant on January 12 to protect from protesters a corporate party of judges who were out for some well-deserved fun after a long and exhausting week of putting people behind bars on silly charges. Arrests were made;
- Parallel rallies in Batumi to protest arbitrary detentions logically ended in new arbitrary detentions. Among the detainees is journalist Mzia Amaglobeli, who was detained twice in one night (first for putting a sticker on the fence of a police department) and now faces years in prison for slapping a bullying police chief during a tense encounter (read more).
- Batumi tensions culminated in the beatings of ex-Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia and media advocate Zviad Koridze in a hotel, in attacks that involved notorious Georgian Dream MP Dito Samkharadze (who is widely assumed to be the puppet master of thugs. It was in Samkharadze’s honor that the word Titushki was remade as Ditushki to better fit the Georgian context);
- In Zugdidi, several women activists were repeatedly fined and detained for defying the recently introduced ban on masks and fireworks at rallies. This meant that the activists had to go through a lot of court nonsense, but at least they inspired bolder moves in the larger but more cautious Tbilisi protest scene.
- The only city where GD can’t get away with violence seems to be Abu Dhabi, where Georgian Dream MPs got in trouble with police after beating a Georgian protester in a local hotel. As things stand, the whereabouts of the implicated politicians remain unknown to the general public.
But as detentions, physical attacks, and threats to citizens and politicians slowly become statistics, the toll they take on individual families and lives in a small country cannot be ignored either.
Long Covid
Hearing harrowing stories of how the current crisis affects families has become a daily routine.
This week we’ve learned that Giorgi Akhobadze, a doctor arrested during the protests after police allegedly planted a drug, has lost his bedridden mother for whom he was once the sole caregiver; Nutsa Eremiani said she suffered a miscarriage amid lingering stress shortly after her husband, Anri Kvaratskhelia, was captured in a violent early morning police raid on their home; There was also Mate Devidze, a 21-year-old activist arrested on the charges of assaulting police during the post-election protests, who told the judge he “missed his guitar” to plead for bail, but was still remanded in custody.
More protesters are also reporting long-term health complications they attribute to what medical professionals say was the excessive use of tear gas by riot police in the early weeks of the protests. Others share their daily struggles with their own anxious families, who try to keep their sons and daughters at home for fear that they may not return safe – or return at all – from the rallies.
The repression is spreading like an epidemic, first as news on TV, then picking up speed so you know it’s only a matter of time before you catch it. (And risks grow now that they’ve also outlawed facemasks).
And as the repression grows, so does the sense of urgency to do something about it.
Do we pluck up the courage for larger and fiercer civil disobedience?
Or do we stick with the routine, hoping that the Georgian Dream will eventually back down, even though there are little signs of that?
Shall we hope that the international uncertainty will end and someone will come to our rescue?
Or will it be the theater that saves the day? After all, Tbilisi’s New Theater has warned that it will “move from passive protest to action” if its actor Andro Chichinadze, imprisoned for group violence, isn’t released by January 20. The time is up, so shall be the curtain.
At least going home doesn’t seem to be an option. For too many, home as we knew it – a place of safety, peace, and security – no longer exists.