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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.
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Lazare Maglakelidze asks to meet by an old warehouse in Tbilisi’s northern outskirts. Here in the quiet, few cars pass along the dirt track winding amid mounds of rusted metal and derelict buildings, the scrap yards and repair shops.
But his caution is hard-won, speaking from behind a mess of gauze, with yellowed eyes bedded in ribbons of vicious purple, a cardboard cast, and a tangle of hooped bandages holding his bludgeoned nose in place.
“Those blacked-out vans they use, they’re nothing but mobile torture chambers,” the 20-year-old student activist told Byline Times.
People need to understand, this isn’t just a couple of guys improvising, it’s an entire system at work. As soon as somebody hears one of the vehicles is free they get all riled up and the threats start coming, how they’re gonna rape you with their batons, because we’re ‘pederasts’ and ‘you guys like that, right?’
Lazare Maglakelidze, activist
On 2 December, Maglakelidze became one of the now-hundreds of people brutalised by the gangs of masked assailants currently roaming Tbilisi, unleashed by Georgia’s disputed government to quell mass protests that have, over the past two weeks, spread to almost every corner of the country following the ruling Georgian Dream party’s decision to suspend the nation’s constitutionally-enshrined bid for EU membership.
Coming hot on the heels of parliamentary elections widely slammed as rigged, critics describe the mounting crackdown as the latest instalment of a violent authoritarian campaign designed to rob Georgia of its democratic progress since independence from the Soviet Union, reorienting a once Western-facing country back toward Moscow’s orbit amid the war in Ukraine. And, despite, sustained support from more than 80% of the population for further European integration.
A Spiralling Political Crisis
In the face of sanctions, suspensions to strategic partnerships and an indefinite halt to government aid from Western allies, Georgian Dream has doubled down on its autocratic course, intensifying the violence visited on protesters and carrying out targeted arrests of opposition politicians, civil society leaders, prominent activists, even beloved actors and poets.
The party has recently announced a slate of new legislative measures including streamlining the process for firing public sector employees who voice support for the growing popular movement, banning face coverings at protests, widening grounds for detention, and introducing harsher penalties for minor violations like graffiti and obstruction of traffic.
The country’s State Security Service has issued warnings that “criminal actors,” backed by “special services of foreign countries,” are forging ahead with plans to foment a “colour revolution” with the goal of disrupting presidential elections on Saturday.
For the first time in Georgia’s independent history, those polls will see the country’s head of state appointed not by popular vote, but an electoral college described by critics as made up almost entirely of ruling party loyalists.
Given Georgian Dream’s rhetoric and increasing use of repressive measures, there’s mounting concern that firebrand anti-Western nominee Mikheil Kavelashvili may seek to institute a state of emergency once he formally takes over the presidential office from the pro-European incumbent, Salome Zurabishvili, on 29 December.
“To keep people off the streets, the most effective way is to declare a state of emergency, imposing curfews and possibly restricting access to the internet as well,” Sergi Kapanadze, founder of local think-tank Georgia Reforms Associates, told Byline Times. “If they do it right before the new year, they’ll be counting on people being in for the holidays, and that things may then simmer down in January.”
“It’s clear that they haven’t been able to repress the protests so far, which are not only ongoing but gaining momentum every day,” he adds.
For the government to resist, simply arresting people is not enough, because the demonstrators have shown they’re not afraid of that
Sergi Kapanadze, Georgia Reforms Associates
‘Nothing But Mobile Torture Chambers’
For activist, Maglakelidze, the deterrent of any blanket stay-at-home order would pale in comparison to the beating he sustained on 2 December after being snatched by armoured, but otherwise plain-clothed assailants, from the frontlines of the nightly demonstration held outside parliament on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue.
“The first thing that happened when they broke ranks was that I was pepper sprayed, that’s how they got me,” he recalls. “I immediately dropped to the ground and put my hands over my head – they got a few good kicks in there, but nothing compared to what happened after I was dragged back behind the line.”
A few hundred metres from where Maglakelidze was detained, the men, alleged to be working under the direction of sanctioned Interior Ministry chief Zviad Kharazashvili, had assembled a small fleet of tinted-windowed vans.
Maglakelidze’s raincoat was pulled over his head and he was repeatedly hit in the face until he lost consciousness, with what other detainees later told him were the men’s fists, knees and boots.
By the time he came round, one of the vans was free. He was then thrown in with three other protesters to be beaten again, subjected to intermittent moralisings about their lack of manhood, lack of patriotism, and how their supposed homosexuality had poisoned Georgian society.
“After that they left for around 30 seconds, with one of the other guys then having a panic attack, screaming, ‘I’m gonna die if you beat me more’,” Maglakelidze recalled to Byline Times.
“I remember trying to calm him down, but you’ve no idea what to expect. All I could tell him was, ‘be resilient’, I can’t tell him everything’s going to be alright, because I have no clue if someone’s going to come in and rape him in the next instant.”
When the men returned, the lights went out and Maglakelidze soon lost consciousness again, waking afterwards on the floor of the van with his coat drenched in blood. Before arriving at the police station, and later the hospital, he was instructed to clean himself down for fear, he suspects, of the media catching sight of the state he was in.
Washing off the blood and the pepper spray still clinging to his face and clothes, Maglakelidze remembers being asked why he had insisted on attending the rally that evening.
“At that moment I was still fuzzy from all the beatings, and because I was so angry I told them – what the f*** is the point of asking me that?” he says. “Every time you ask me a question, I just get beaten mercilessly, so you know what, just f****** beat me and be done with it.”
Maglakelidze’s warrant was later filled out for throwing rocks at the police, which he denies, and for resisting arrest, which video evidence from the night shows he did not.
Though the charges are administrative, rather than criminal, he will still likely face a fine and up to fifteen days in jail once his case is heard.
“My court date hasn’t been set, and it’s probably gonna be delayed given the huge intake of people they’re bringing in at the moment,” Maglakelidze says. “Once it is, I don’t have any doubts about how that’s going to go. I mean, with the way our justice system is right now, they could probably push a case through finding it was me who sank the Titanic.”
Rhizomatic Resistance
At last count, more than 460 people have been arrested in Georgia following the outbreak of mass protests on 28 November, with over 300 subjected to acts of violence that include, local watchdogs say, torture and cruel or inhumane treatment under international human rights law. A further 90 journalists have been either injured or obstructed in the course of their work.
Despite these numbers, Georgian Dream’s increasing use of repressive measures to quell the unrest appears to have, instead, cause it to spread. Demonstrations are now in more than 30 cities, towns and villages outside of Tbilisi. It has also prompted the capital’s frontline protesters to adapt their tactics and defences against government forces.
“At the moment there are about four main units, and we all communicate via group chats on different encrypted channels to carry out different responsibilities as the need arises on the ground,” one frontline protester, who withheld their name for fear of reprisals, told Byline Times.
“There are tear-gas neutralisation teams, guys who provide medical assistance, others in charge of fundraising, food and water, and of course now the self-defence units, who’ve made a pretty loud entrance with pledges to protect the movement from all the beatings.”
Borrowing a term from the work of post-structuralist French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gutarri, another demonstrator, who similarly chose to remain anonymous, suggested this organisational model might be best described as ‘rhizomatic’, emerging organically like a branched system of interconnected roots but nevertheless without a centralised point of coordination, making it harder for authorities to frustrate their activities by targeting ringleaders.
Though many activists recognise one another only by the clothes or equipment they wear and the pseudonyms used in communications, vigilant efforts are apparently made to keep track of who may have been arrested on any given evening, with histories deleted, even group chats shut down, if any one of their members has their phone confiscated.
Perhaps the most spectacular innovation so far has been the custom-made ‘gatling gun’ firework launchers, seen in videos circulated online to fire rockets in rapid succession at the lines of riot forces.
But protesters interviewed for this story say they’ve also started coordinating en-masse to target water cannon operators with laser pointers, temporarily blinding them to provide other demonstrators with time to escape crackdowns.
“The eggs and oil — or paint-filled balloons, they kind of serve a dual purpose — on the one hand if you get a plain-clothes guy on his visor then he’s out of the game for a while, but the hope is he’s also then less likely to beat anyone because he’s been marked out from the others,” one of the protesters explains.
Sometimes we’ve also been using medicinal alcohol or, um… well, fart spray. It might seem childish, sure, but if they can’t stand the stink and have to leave and clean up, that’s a good thing for us and one man less for them
Georgia protester
Other defensive measures have included gallon jugs and mobile water drums to extinguish gas canisters, even leaf blowers to help disperse some of the smoke.
“None of us really knew how to build barricades either before all this started,” the second protester explained. “But we’re getting really good at finding all the stuff we need. Over the past few weeks we’ve basically just, like, turned ourselves into beavers.”
Ahead of a prospective state of emergency, and amid increasing efforts by the government to curb the sale and use of fireworks and protective gear, frontliners acknowledge that maintaining a sustained flow of equipment and materials may prove a challenge as the unrest continues.
Nevertheless, efforts have already been made to establish a network of underground contacts to keep up supplies. They cite the case of an employee at a local supermarket who was able to get access to a stockpile of pyrotechnics and gas masks at the retailer’s warehouse as an example.
We’re fighting for our freedom here. The guys wearing masks on the other side, they’re just rented thugs, paid to maintain the status quo
Georgia protester
The protester continued: “Tbilisi is a small city, people know one another. If we can keep the tempo up, keep applying pressure every night, then the cracks we’re already seeing will start to grow, and the movement will prevail.”