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The Dispatch – May 24/25: Strange Alliances

2 Days of Namakhvani Protests in Tbilisi – Strange Alliances, Main Paradoxes, and Controversies | Discourse around Protests Draws a Line of Key Social Divisions | Troubled: Queer Support for Rioni Valley Protests | Egoistic Thinking: Georgian Reaction to Ryanair Incident 

As the protests against the controversial Namakhvani HPP moved to the Georgian capital on May 23, some ugly truths hit Tbilisi too: after more than 200 days of protests, the Namakhvani cause – coming from the “outside” of the political and intellectual “center” – still reverberates and shocks it. The body politic, so painfully constricted to the capital’s few neighborhoods, and the sterile TV studios grapple helplessly with the fresh understanding – not all politics are Tbilisi politics, not all disputes come from these neighborhoods, not all lines are dividing the same sides… Here is Nini, your operator, trying to make sense as the old divisions try to adapt and absorb the new.

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STRANGE ALLIANCES The scale of two days of the long-announced massive protests of the Rioni Valley movement on May 23-24 did not surprise anyone. Large crowds coming from western Georgia were joined in solidarity by the participants of various newly-emerged workers’ movements across the country, as well as by the residents of the capital city. Their backgrounds and ideology are as diverse as they may be: Tbilisi rally united groups from political left and right, with radical-right, and ultra-right standing – uneasily, even aggressively – but still alongside prominent feminist or LGBTQ activists. After the government refused to meet protesters’ demands overnight, the activists pledge to continue protests and disrupt the road traffic.

AND A UNITY EVEN STRANGER This, however, was not the only strange alliance that Tbilisi witnessed that day: those who are against the cause of protesters – and thus for building the Namakhvani HPP – also found a common ground, and discovered themselves with no less unusual bedfellows.  Together, they employed some rather rough – some may even say ethically questionable – tools to fight the protesters’ cause.

Namakhvani protests have divided the Georgian public. While the opponents of the project cite detrimental investor agreement and underresearched environmental concerns, the supporters – among them political elites both from the opposition and the ruling Georgian Dream party – believe the project is essential for energy security to make the country less dependent on the imported energy, particularly from hostile neighbors. The statist and economic liberal streams, strong both in the ruling party and the opposition thus converge in their disdain to the counter-establishmentarian left and right. The old schemas are visibly breaking down: sometimes the protesters are slammed for keeping xenophobic radical right groups, who try to ride the wave of protests at arm’s length. Sometimes, they are branded as Russia-managed, or as Russia’s useful idiots, because… apparently that’s the best (or the most habitual?) way to discredit people in Georgia.  Follow our Namakhvani tag for earlier developments about the controversial project.

So below are some of the most profound and strange controversies (and sometimes paradoxes) the two days of protests brought to light:

POSITIVE THINKING PATTERNS Speaking of Russia, occupation and human rights concerns that Georgia is comfortable sacrificing for its perceived “national interests: The reaction by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the incident in Belarus, where a Ryanair flight was diverted to capture the opposition media figure, was more than meek. It came late – after the plane has landed at its intended destination in Vilnius, after the ordeal. And it expressed happiness over the “safe landing” without too much fuss about the incident. Parliamentary Speaker Kakha Kuchava had a tad stricter tone, but still lacking emphasis on the journalist’s detention. As an exception, President Zurabishvili was more aligned with the European Union’s tone in her tweet, calling “forced landing of the Ryanair flight in Belarus and the arrest of a journalist” unacceptable and violating “too many international norms to be ignored.” Which, still, begs a question: exactly how many international norms Madam President is comfortable with ignoring?

VALUES WITHIN BORDERS The meek response was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident, but a part of the larger predicament of Georgia’s foreign policy, with became a hostage to a single, egoistic issue – what if President Lukashenka gets angry and recognizes the independence of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region/South Ossetia? But what if, by drifting too far from the EU and U.S. positions, the country finds itself both stripped of territories and drained of its moral case for being a part of the free world? We got some interesting read to fuel that debate:

That’s the full lid for today. Celebrate the bizarre and the curious in Georgia’s politics with us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!