If you approach Georgia’s parliament building by day, you will find a misleading hush. Located on the usually busy thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, by sunrise all that remains of the previous night’s pandemonium is a few police stragglers and a skeleton crew of pressure cleaners who scour layers of fresh black graffiti from its historic facade. As traffic cautiously resumes, some venture to the road with brooms to sweep up broken glass and ashy kindling.
These are cosmetic fixes. If any semblance of order can be recouped in the daylight hours, it will be decimated when the sun sets and tens of thousands of protesters converge here once again. They will stream from all directions bedecked in Georgian and EU flags. They will thump hard objects against the tall metal barrier the government has constructed around the seat of its democracy to keep the people out. They will square off against line upon line of impervious riot police and scream protest slogans with one voice. They will burn effigies—some of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire oligarch considered the “shadow ruler” of the country, and others of Interior Ministry riot police chief Zviad “Khareba” Kharazishvili, who is believed to oversee state violence against protesters. On some nights, they will dance and sing “Chakrulo”, a three-part folk song about preparing for battle.
It’s apt enough, for in the early hours of the morning this major artery of the city will become a battlefield. Dispersal sirens will sound, gas canisters will be launched into the crowd and the frontline will be beaten back by armoured police known here as robocops. Barricades will be piled high with dumpsters and benches, and then set on fire. Police riot control vehicles will fix their blinding headlights on the crowds and fire water and tear gas. Masked gangs of men—who opposition here refer to as titushky, the Ukrainian word for mercenary agents who attack regime critics on behalf of security services—will surge into the crowd, beating journalists and protesters indiscriminately. Protesters will fight back with firework guns, which they aim into the ranks of riot police and at the face of their parliament, and defend their people from masked provocateurs. After hours of clashes, with water cannons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets deployed against protesters, the crowd will finally be dispersed through a crowd of acrid smoke, bloody and limping but unbowed.
Today marks the 20th consecutive day of such clashes, kindled by an announcement by the ruling party Georgian Dream—which was recently re-elected in a disputed vote marred by allegations of rigging, corruption and violence—that EU accession talks would be shelved until 2028. Some 80 per cent of Georgians support European integration, and the issue has been a flashpoint in continuous rounds of protests. Although Georgian Dream ostensibly supports Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration, critics concur that its democratic backsliding and introduction of laws against foreign influence and LGBT “propaganda” copied from Moscow’s playbook indicate a desire to align more closely with Putin and imperil Georgians’ hopes of joining the bloc.
Protesters increasingly feel that they are fighting authoritarianism, as the country’s government consolidates its power with a brutal crackdown. More than 460 protesters have been detained, while more than 300 reported severe beatings and torture by security services. More than 60 journalists were injured in the first week of protests alone, with many feeling that they were being targeted by police. But attempts to cow protesters with a culture of terror failed as protests stretched from urban centres like Tbilisi, Batumi, Kutaisi and Rustavi to tiny rural settlements usually viewed as the heartland of Georgian Dream support.
As authorities erected a vast Christmas tree outside parliament, protesters hung photos of the bandaged and brutalised faces of demonstrators from its scaffolding. Many show the same injuries: broken facial bones, concussions, fractures, black eyes. They have told journalists that special forces took them inside vans with tinted windows, beat them to a pulp, threatened them with rape and withheld medical treatment.
As the capital remains all but paralysed by night, authorities have been weakened by a spate of resignations by prominent diplomatic staff and journalists from pro-government channels. But Georgian Dream has powered forward with replacing pro-European sitting president Salome Zurabishvili, the country’s first female president, with a far-right successor, Mikheil Kavelashvili. Kavelashvili, a former Manchester City footballer who is a hardline critic of the west, was the only candidate on the ballot and was voted in by 224 out of 225 members of the Georgian Dream-dominated electoral college on Saturday.
“Why are they making me count for no reason?” lamented the Central Election Committee representative tasked with casting the vote, in a moment of pure farce.
Although the role of president is largely ceremonial, Zurabishvili had acted as a powerful public voice of opposition to Georgian Dream’s Kremlin-aligned policy regress in recent years. Zurabishvili, who says she holds the only remaining legitimately elected post in Georgia, has claimed she will not step down. Many feel that 29th December, when Kavelashvili will formally assume office, could be a tipping point in Georgians’ long fight for democracy. In the meantime, they continue to take to the street, albeit in smaller numbers, as the temperature plummets and snow begins to fall under the bright Christmas lights.
The site of this overbearing, Soviet-era parliament building, now deformed by smashed windows and graffitied expletives and sealed off from the electorate by two-metre-high metal barricades, was once occupied by a vast military cathedral built to mark the conquest of the Caucasus by Tsarist Russia. In 1989, it was witness to a massacre, when 21 people died at a pro-independence protest crushed by the Soviet Army. In 2003’s Rose Revolution, demonstrators broke through this entrance and ousted leader Eduard Shevardnadze, a figure from the Soviet era. It has seen some of the most pivotal moments in this country’s fight against its aggressive northern neighbour, as well as its own authoritarianism and oligarchic rule. But in Georgia, 20 per cent of which remains under Russian military occupation, many are keenly aware that the fight is far from over.
“Have you ever seen a country fight so hard for its freedom?” Eka, a young student protester, asks me as she leaves a protest in the early hours of the morning. “Whatever happens, we refuse to become Belarus.”