The Media Must Report On Georgia Violence: ‘Their Fight Is Ours, and the Scale of the Atrocities is Agonising’

We’ve got Georgia on our mind. But we’re not in good company. The protests rocking the small country of Georgia have lost their fragile grip on the Western news agenda, just as events have rocketed beyond the “protests” they were initially headlined as being.

Hundreds of thousands of Georgians are two weeks into pro-democracy demonstrations that have been met with escalating totalitarianism by a government widely perceived to have stolen the election.

The 26 October election was treated as a de facto referendum on EU membership, which polling consistently shows some 80% of Georgians support.

But 16 days ago, the ruling Georgian Dream party (led by Georgia’s richest man) said it was aborting EU accession talks until 2028, following the bloc’s denial of their electoral victory.

This led to tides of citizens halting and even risking their lives to take to the streets and declare support for Western-associated ideals of democracy, liberalism, tolerance and humanism.

But the world-stage onto which they have walked has a waning and disengaged audience. “It seems to me that it was only covered like an ordinary protest,” Georgian journalist Tata Chikviladze said, as she criticised the international coverage on Media Storm podcast.

She says her country’s events have been downplayed as “clashes against the demonstrators and the police forces”, and tells, instead, a different story.

To me, it is a gang against the people willing Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration. To me, it is the men in police uniforms against the youth of Georgia. To me, it is the oligarch with his ruling party who captured the Republic of Georgia

Tata Chikviladze, Georgian journalist

No doubt, December has made most journalists’ heads spin, from South Korea’s declaration of Marshall law, to the live manhunt of a UHC assassin, to the accusations against Jay Z, to the absolutely tectonic events in Syria – competition for attention is fierce.

It is true, too, that many major Western news outlets have had to reduce their coverage of smaller countries and centralise foreign bureaus due to budget constraints. Local freelancers are relied on to plug these gaps, but right now, the Georgian Dream party is actively suppressing their output.

But Georgia is on political fire, and its people need the world to care.

Our media’s selective empathy is guided by Western perceptions of Georgia as a peripheral actor on the global stage, overlooking its strategic importance as a democratic ally at the intersection of Europe and Asia.

Coverage often ranges from paternalistic to dismissive. There’s a tendency to categorise Georgia under a broader “post-Soviet” narrative, lumping it with other countries and ignoring its unique political and social dynamics.

Georgia is painted as a “troubled post-Soviet state,” or a “geopolitical battleground”. But while neglecting Georgia’s strategic value as a potential ally may be self-fulfilling, it is also not the point.

To frame the value of Georgian civil society in terms of Western interests does not just minimise their agency and contributions, it deprioritises our shared humanity in a way that hurts us all.

We are watching fellow people fight back against corrupt and extremely wealthy individuals in their own society who are weaponising courts and elections to steal the people’s power. Their fight is ours, and the scale of the atrocities against them is agonising.

First-hand testimonies and photos coming from Georgia show riot officers punching protesters in the head and female detainees being threatened with gang rape and 22-year-olds comatosed by gas canisters to the eye socket.

“The name”, a man twice detained tells Media Storm, “is terror. It’s literally terror from the government to our people”.

CCTV and witness footage shows opposition leaders, bloggers, reporters, and activists being brutally beaten by masked state agents and arrested on the doorsteps of their children’s kindergartens.

Lines blur between uniformed officers and masked hooligans – dubbed ‘titushki’ in a Ukrainian slang term for plainclothes Russian mercenaries – who attack unarmed activists in their own homes and beat protesters with truncheons while officers stand back and watch.

If international media fail to engage global audiences in Georgians’ civic battle, we risk emboldening authoritarian factions within Georgia.

Western leaders have been slow to sanction, in keeping with their tepid and formulaic responses to Russian occupations of Georgian territory in 2008, or Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, or the pro-democracy protests that swept Georgia last year after the telling ‘foreign agents’ law was brought in.

Many Georgians have expressed due frustration with what they see as the West’s failure to treat them as an equal partner, just as pro-Russian or nationalist factions in Georgia exploit these perceived slights to argue that the West doesn’t truly care.

This feels like another missed opportunity to support those screaming for us to be the vanguards of democracy we claim to be, from a fresh and fragile frontline.

In one viral video, Georgia’s petulant Prime Minister speaks over a reporters’ questioning of teargas use: “shut up, shut up, or I will kick you out” (he precedes to do so).

In another, a female journalist and her cameraman are beaten by masked state-linked attackers while reporting live on air. Beka Beradze, a radio producer who was arrested and beaten for 40 minutes by masked officers, told Media Storm “you could feel they were happy that they arrested somebody from the media”.

Chikvalidze told us she is no longer taking her mobile phone to protests because police officers are taking them by force. This is what those keeping eyes on Georgia are up against. The role of foreign media is more important than ever.

And yet, there is an awkwardness when reporting on a people who are screaming for liberal so-called “Western values” over here – in that namesake region – where those values are increasingly fraught.

Amid the rise of anti-liberal, Eurosceptic nationalism, it is awkward for politicians to take up the mantle of this generous reputation of ‘Western’ liberalism, when many have based their rise to power on rejecting it. And it’s awkward for a media that has under-interrogated the consequences of Brexit at home, when a foreign population risks their lives for a chance at what the UK walked away from.

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