A new law targeting NGOs and independent journalists in Georgia has sparked mass protests about the country’s future
There wasn’t one specific moment at which Tengiz Gogotishvili, a journalist at Georgian independent news channel Mtavari TV, decided to take a stand against Georgia’s government. Rather, as the situation gradually deteriorated he felt he had no other option.
Gogotishvili and his colleagues are continually harassed by pro-government thugs while trying to report. “It’s not just getting a bit worse, it’s getting catastrophic. Journalists are physically beaten,” he says.
He insists that they are “wire-tapped everywhere, always.” Worse still, the Georgian communications regulator has frozen Mtavari’s bank accounts and imposed fines. According to Gogotishvili, the state is determined to break his outfit financially through spurious means. “And they succeeded,” he adds bitterly.
The situation has become so bad that Gogotishvili has had to abandon journalistic impartiality. “Now we are not a ‘real media’ – we are part of the fight, a side in this conflict. We have no other choice,” says Gogotishvili.
Georgia has caught the world’s attention in recent months because of mass protests against a new law that requires NGOs and independent media organisations that receive more than 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The legislation has sparked fears amongst Georgians that its government is trying to sabotage the country’s EU accession and turn towards Russia.
For the groups affected by the law, it is just the latest in a series of provocations by the governing Georgian Dream party, which has been in power for the past 12 years.
Photo credit: Levan Gogotishvili
Paata Gaprindashvili is the director of Georgia’s Reform Associates (GRASS), a think tank that advises the government on European integration. Whilst GRASS has been able to cooperate in some areas with the government, it has also found itself “a target for different kinds of pressure [such as] blackmail, first and foremost from the ruling party.”
Rights Georgia, one of Georgia’s oldest human rights organisations, is another NGO that has been subject to intimidation from the government. “Last week outside of my office was stuck the posters of NGO leaders, including me, with the slogans ‘enemy of the state’, ‘foreign spy’, ‘there is no place for him in this country’,” says Vladimer Mkervalishvili, Rights Georgia’s executive director. “Previously, we allocated our resources to the protection of others, but we now have to prioritise our own security.”
Groups like GRASS and Rights Georgia, as well as independent journalists such as Gogotishvili, are the backbone of Georgian civil society. For the past thirty years, they have been the driving force behind Georgia’s gradual assimilation with Europe. Their work has been animated as much by a desire to modernise their country as by a deep-seated fear that it will not be able to escape Russian domination: “We do not have a choice but Europe. The other choice, if one can dub it a choice, is to be part of the Russian swamp,” says Gaprindashvili.
This has made them the natural target of a ruling party that seems increasingly ambivalent about the country’s European future. Georgian Dream was founded in 2011 by Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made his fortune in Moscow in the 1990s. Under Georgian Dream, the country has made some progress towards European integration – Georgia was granted candidate status by the EU in December last year.
But the Ivanishvili-controlled government also increasingly resembles Vladimir Putin’s regime. The proposed foreign agents law appears to have been lifted straight from the Kremlin’s playbook – an almost identical piece of legislation was enacted in Russia in 2012. Georgian Dream has taken steps towards normalising relations with Russia. It did not join in with Western sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, and reopened flights with Russia last year.
If Gogotishvili, Gaprindashvili, and Mkervalishvili are right in believing the Ivanishvili-controlled government is intent on fully replicating the Putin system and eliminating democratic opposition, then it makes sense to go after civil society groups — which are well-organised and staffed by Georgia’s educated elite — rather than the opposition parties. “Unfortunately the political opposition in Georgia is very weak,” says Mkvervalishvili, who explains that the opposition is made up of discredited members of the previous government which had become deeply unpopular by the time it left office.
As a result, civil society groups are one of the last relatively organised bastions of liberal democratic values in Georgian society. “[NGOs are the only] remaining institutions capable of holding the state to account for its illegality, corruption, arbitrariness and opacity” says Mkvervalishvili.
The foreign agents law, which finally passed the Georgian parliament on 28 May and will come into force in the coming months, could well be a fatal blow to this network, as it is largely dependent on foreign funding from overseas donors. Rights Georgia and GRASS have both said that they will not comply with the law, and will cease all cooperation with the Georgian Dream government.
This reliance on foreign funding has made them an easy target for Georgian Dream’s propaganda. In a recent speech, Ivanishvili claimed that Georgian NGOs were doing the bidding of Western spy agencies, who he blamed for provoking conflict with Russia in Ukraine and Georgia.
One protester and former NGO worker says that “there are several people, including my childhood friends, who really believe that I’m getting paid for this protest. So you imagine how deep the roots of this propaganda have gone.”
Gaprindashvili says that the reliance on foreign funding is simply a result of a lack of funding available in Georgia: “I wish Georgia was, if not like the UK, like that wonderful country Estonia, which itself has become rich enough [to fund NGOs] domestically. I wish Georgia already was rich enough to help others, including its own civil society groups. We are not.”
Georgia will hold parliamentary elections in October. Gaprindashvili is cautiously optimistic that Georgian Dream will not be able to hold onto power: “Now there is a top issue: to stop Georgia changing its foreign policy direction and to get it back to the European trajectory. I predict that if elections are held in a free and fair manner, then Georgia’s ruling party does not have a political future.”
Feature image: “There is no place for him in this country” – a poster of Vladimer Mkervalishvili outside his office in Tbilisi. Photo Credit: Vladimer Mkervalishvili.