Escaping the bear’s shadow
The war in Ukraine is pitting Georgia’s people against a government they think is too close to the Kremlin. Tom Ball reports.
On a bright May afternoon in 2005, George W Bush clasped hands with Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square. Addressing a cheering crowd at the site of the country’s Rose Revolution two years previously, the United States president proclaimed Georgia to be a ‘‘beacon of liberty’’ in a region that had for decades been an outpost of Soviet authoritarianism.
Seventeen years on, however, the war in Ukraine has exposed signs of creeping illiberalism returning to the southern Caucasus country – and the ruling Georgian Dream party seems out of step with its people.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the Georgian parliament last month for 14 consecutive nights in one of the largest anti-war protests seen in Europe since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What began as an expression of solidarity with Ukraine quickly morphed into an expression of anger aimed at Georgia’s own government, which the crowd accused of failing to speak out against Russia.
As the mood turned, police began to round up the organisers. Shota Dighmelashvili, leader of the so-called Shame Movement, the pro-Western protest group behind the demonstration, was arrested and detained by police for four days. Eight other Shame activists were also arrested and given hefty fines.
Dighmelashvili said the growing crackdown on free expression was a manifestation of the ‘‘battle of the narratives’’ about Georgia’s relationship to Russia, with which it shares a 900km border from the Black Sea to Azerbaijan.
Like Ukraine, Georgia runs a narrow gauntlet between integration with Europe and pacification of its belligerent neighbour to the north. For many, though, the current government has drifted too closely towards the latter.
Irakli Garibashvili, the prime minister from the Georgian Dream party, which toppled Saakashvili in 2013 and reduced the presidency to a largely ceremonial role, was returned to power last year. But the de facto leader of the government is still considered to be Bidzina Ivanishvili, a reclusive billionaire who founded and still controls Georgian Dream.
Ivanishvili, who was himself prime minister from 2012-13, made his fortune in Russia during the privatisation era of the 1990s.
Rather than standing by Ukraine after Putin’s invasion, Garibashvili and Ivanishvili broke with most of Europe and refused to impose sanctions on Russia. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Tbilisi of ‘‘holding an immoral position regarding sanctions’’, and recalled his country’s ambassador.
This cautious approach puts the Georgian government at odds with most of its population, however. Recent polling shows that 70 per cent of Georgians support stronger sanctions against Russia, while more than 70 per cent now support joining the European Union and Nato.
Georgians feel an emotional solidarity with Ukraine, as their own country was invaded by Russia in 2008. Onefifth of Georgian territory remains occupied, in the breakaway self-declared republic of South Ossetia, which has aligned itself with Moscow.
Yet all over the capital, Tbilisi, the Ukrainian colours prominently fly – and earlier this month, an effigy of Russian President Vladimir Putin was burnt at the stake.
Shame was formed in 2019 after a Russian MP, Sergei Gavrilov, was allowed to address the Georgian parliament despite lingering public resentment since the 2008 war. His appearance sparked a public outcry and 100 days of mass protests in Tbilisi.
‘‘The government wants to tell us that we must follow a policy of doing nothing that could anger Russia, but that simply gives Russia everything it wants, and provides us with no guarantees of security,’’ Dighmelashvili says.
‘‘For hundreds of years, we have been fighting to throw off Russian domination. We feel that we are, and have always been, a Western country. Now is a critical moment, when we have a window of opportunity to leave Russia’s orbit.’’
Freedom House, a think tank that monitors democratic rights around the world, has for the past five years successively downgraded Georgia’s rating, citing ‘‘oligarchic influence’’ on policy decisions, the media environment and the rule of law.
Last August, state security was revealed to have carried out surveillance of several hundred individuals, including journalists, activists, politicians and members of the clergy. The government denies wrongdoing.
Saakashvili returned to Georgia in October last year after eight years in exile, including a period in Ukraine, where he served as governor of Odesa and an adviser to Zelenskyy. Despite hopes of making a political comeback, the former president was swiftly arrested and jailed, accused of corruption and abuse of office – charges he claims are spurious and politically motivated.
Having previously staged a 50-day hunger strike in protest at his treatment, Saakashvili appeared in court this week on further charges of entering the country illegally. His lawyers claimed he was subjected to ‘‘torture’’ by being denied adequate medical treatment during his time in prison.
Amnesty International says freedom of expression has been ‘‘deteriorating in Georgia’’. It has branded Saakashvili’s treatment by the Georgian government ‘‘not just selective justice but apparent political revenge’’.
Batu Kutelia, a former Georgian ambassador to the US and former deputy defence minister, describes the regime in Tbilisi as a ‘‘franchise of Putinism’’.
‘‘We are now in a system where opposition politicians are being put on trial and journalists are being spied on by the security services,’’ said Kutelia, a member of Droa, a newly formed opposition party.
Kutelia, also a former head of the intelligence service, said Georgia had been weakened by Russian infiltration of the security and political apparatus, as shown by the fact that no Russian agents had been detained in the past 10 years.
‘‘My fear now is that if Georgia joins Nato in the future, Russia might try to destabilise the country in some way from inside, like it tried to in Montenegro,’’ he said. In October 2016, Russian military intelligence agents attempted to stage a coup in Montenegro as the country was about to join Nato.
Garibashvili’s government argues that such criticism is unfair, and that it is committed to joining both Nato and the EU, objectives which were written into Georgia’s constitution in 2017. The country has also had no formal diplomatic ties with Russia since 2008.
Democratic backsliding could stymie any future accession to the EU, according to Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics. ‘‘If Georgia is to be really serious about integration into the West, it first needs to root out single-party dominance, informal governance, and authoritarian tendencies that have been allowed to grow,’’ he said.
‘‘Now is a critical moment, when we have a window of opportunity to leave Russia’s orbit.’’
Shota Dighmelashvili, Shame Movement leader