Dispatch – February 20: Mzia and News

On who is Mzia Amaglobeli, and why her

“This is Batumelebi‘s office cat named News, who officially hates everyone and everything,” a colleague of Mzia Amaglobeli, an imprisoned journalist and founder of the Batumelebi and Netgazeti outlets, posted on Facebook in late January, attaching a photo of Amaglobeli with a stern-faced black cat sitting on her desk. News-the-Cat “only loves Mzia and only goes to her to lie in front of her laptop.” We don’t know what the black cat knows about Mzia, and many things we do know about Amaglobeli we learned after her arrest. But the country has been long familiar with the work she’s done, and it’s that kind of work that has made people like Mzia the primary target of the increasingly repressive regime.

Here is Nini and the Dispatch Newsletter to trace the story of Mzia Amaglobeli and see why Georgian Dream is after her

The news on February 18 that Mzia Amaglobeli, the imprisoned journalist and media manager, was ending her 38-day hunger strike was a happy one. Until then, those familiar with the journalist’s unbreakable character, but also the unbreakable resolve of the authorities who held her in custody, had been bracing for the worst. Doctors monitoring her health in the hospital warned of irreversible damage. Friends, family, and colleagues pleaded with her to put her well-being first, trying to convince her that the country needed her alive and healthy. Reports of the deteriorating health of someone who had become a symbol and inspiration for the ongoing resistance gave no peace to the Georgian activists, who carried banners with her name and photos in the subways but were hardly prepared for what might have happened to her.

Ultimately, the journalist changed her mind. In a letter she sent to her colleagues, she said it was “unimaginably hard” for her to hear the public concern for her life and health in the midst of the recent tragedy when two children died after falling into a ditch in “Dream Town,” a poverty-stricken slum-like settlement in Batumi, the coastal city where Amaglobeli has lived and worked. The tragic incident was widely blamed on official corruption and negligence, issues that Amaglobeli and her local outlet, Batumelebi, have extensively covered over the decades. Amaglobeli also said she felt a “special responsibility” to her friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded people who she didn’t want to be weakened by her hunger strike.

Many of these like-minded people hadn’t heard Amaglobeli’s name until a few weeks ago. The 49-year-old journalist and media manager came into the public spotlight after the tense night of January 12, when a series of arbitrary arrests in Batumi left her, too, behind bars. She was detained twice that night, first after putting a sticker on a fence of the police department and then for slapping Batumi police chief Irakli Dgebuadze, to whose verbal abuse the journalist reportedly responded during a tense encounter. In a video of one of the detentions, a male voice – allegedly Dgebuadze’s – can be heard swearing and vowing to imprison her on criminal charges.

That’s exactly what happened. She was soon remanded in custody on charges of assaulting a police officer, which carries a stiff penalty of up to 7 years in prison. The court refused to accept the defense’s arguments that custody was too harsh a pre-trial measure, and the judge was not swayed by arguments – supported by judicial practice – that a slap could hardly amount to “assault” under the legal definition. The defense has pointed to invalid and falsified police documents in her case file. Subsequent motions to change her pre-trial measure were also dismissed by Georgian Dream-loyal courts. The arrest also comes as still no police officer has been held responsible for widespread abuses against protesters over the past months.

Instead, police officers have come forward with strangely identical accounts of the pain (and redness) inflicted on Dgebuadze’s cheek as a result of the light slap. The embarrassing lengths to which the prosecution has gone to keep Amaglobeli in prison has convinced many that she is being persecuted for her work.

‘Civic Ascetes’

Amaglobeli co-founded Batumelebi in 2001, at the age of 26. The prominent local print and online media outlet has since become a key source of information on the coastal region of Adjara and Batumi, its administrative capital. Nine years later, Batumelebi’s editorial team launched Netgazeti, an online news website, to expand its coverage nationwide. The new outlet quickly gained a reputation as a credible news source, gaining the trust of its audience already during the last years of the United National Movement’s rule and maintaining that reputation through several terms of the Georgian Dream.

Throughout these years, the people behind one of the leading independent outlets have remained in the shadows. The public learned about Amaglobeli’s personality piece by piece in the past weeks, mostly from the accounts of those who’ve known her. One of the four nieces/nephews she helped raise after her brother’s untimely death described her as a caring, devoted person with an extremely strong character. Activist Malkhaz Chkadua, familiar with Mzia’s work ethic, called her attitude “civic asceticism,” a lifestyle of a withdrawn workaholic who’d give voice to the oppressed and neglected, whether in Batumi slums or in the more desolate mountainous areas of Adjara, where the journalist is from.

In short, Amaglobeli and her colleagues have done all these years what good journalists and editors are expected to do: make the news instead of being the news. That task, however, becomes impossible as the regime becomes more oppressive.

“It wasn’t until this government that I had to be the opponent instead of the one asking questions,” Eter Turadze, who co-founded Batumelebi and Netgazeti with Mzia Amaglobeli, said last April. The journalist was addressing Shalva Papuashvili, a parliament speaker who has, over time, become the No. 1 enemy of Georgian online media. In a speech that followed the reintroduction of the Foreign Agents Law, Turadze recalled decades of her media work, including surviving various illiberal rulers and shadowy strongmen like the Adjarian feudal lord Aslan Abashidze.

Speeches from that meeting by Turadze and her colleagues from other independent media made rounds at the time. Many saw them as proof that those targeted by the Georgian Dream as part of their imaginary wars against the UNM, the former ruling party, were, in fact, the ones who had once bravely kept that same previous government in check, all the while people like Papuashvili were still enjoying the comfort of their well-paid international jobs. Except that it wasn’t in spite of their professional background that these journalists were targeted, but precisely because of it.

‘Regional Journalists’

Media work is often associated with extroverted lifestyles and overly communicative routines. But in Georgia, being a dedicated journalist can be a very lonely business.

Telling someone you are a journalist here often comes with a strange urge to explain yourself. Even among those who claim to appreciate your work, there is a lingering prejudice that a reporter is an annoying, somewhat shallow person whose only expertise is “how to hold a microphone.” This isolating loneliness increases if you work for online and/or print media. Politicians love to downplay their role and snub their media requests, only to make such outlets their primary targets when they feel the urge to persecute someone. And that loneliness peaks for those who work as “regional journalists,” removed from The City life where activism and political attention are concentrated, and assigned to places where misery and corruption are no less (if not more) present.

Covering “regions” is a thankless beat. It usually means working with communities that are most mistreated by, but also most dependent on, governments; it also means confronting local strongmen who have all the money and influence in the world to try to silence you, while there aren’t many who will stand up for you: In fact, you may find that those you’ve once given a voice to turn against you, either under pressure or for their own comfort (the challenge was on display during the recent tragic incident in Dream Town, when reporters – including from Batumelebi – were physically pushed out of the scene after arriving to cover the tragedy.)

Not everyone can withstand such a toxic atmosphere. Political parties, with networks and resources far greater than these small media outlets, have recently been criticized for giving up on Georgia’s provinces too easily for the same reason. This seems to be less of an option for local journalists, who have emerged as a rare remaining obstacle to the ruling party’s course of turning the country’s regions into its stronghold by destroying the last sources of trust and truth in these places. It is no wonder, then, that Georgian Dream, in its quest to fully consolidate its power, has made such outlets its main target.

Define Sacrifice

Even after Mzia Amaglobeli announced that she was ending her hunger strike, her case continues to draw attention and inspire the ongoing Georgian resistance. Demonstrators continue to carry her posters, whether the ones showing the journalist with the News-the-Cat or the famous courtroom scene of Amaglobeli holding a copy of the book How to Stand up to a Dictator by Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa.

This scene also seemed to answer the main question that – as Ressa told us during the interview last summer – journalists and Georgians would have to deal with: “What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?” That sacrifice can mean many things: risking your life, your health, your freedom. And in countries like Georgia and for journalists like Mzia, every minute of simply continuing to do your job as an independent journalist can already amount to a sacrifice.