‘Georgia is Descending Into a Pro-Putin Mafia State’

A flock of magpies bursts and swiftly rises from the thistles and dry brush ahead, spooked by the grind and jolt of the 4×4 against breakers carved out and frozen solid in the mud. Under patches of unthawed snow aligning the track there are lonely rose hips and half-burnt mounds of refuse in the bracken, fenced cemeteries cloistered in thickets at the outset of hills rising steep and pale in the mid-afternoon sun.

Gamdlistkaro is a quiet place. An hour’s drive northwest of Tbilisi, its corrugated iron rooftops and crumbling cinderblock walls stand a half-kilometre south of the administrative boundary with Georgia’s breakaway region of Tskhinvali, occupied by Russian troops since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

It may be 74-year-old Ramaz Tsutori’s home, but there are parts of the village he dares not venture, having been kidnapped from his vineyard by FSB border agents in the winter of 2013. Given his release less than a week later, he says the sole purpose of the abduction was to instill fear in the local community, driving residents away so as to cement control of the areas along the occupation line.

“The situation here is very tough. All the youths have already left the village, and in the school there are only three children,” Tsutori explained. “Because we cannot work on our own land, we are forced to rely on government subsidies to survive.”

On the same day Byline Times spoke with Tsutori, a seismic sequence of events was unfolding at rapid pace halfway across the world in Washington, with members of Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ launching what was effectively a raid of USAID.

Musk’s ransacking of the US international aid agency, which he’s described as a “corrupt” and “criminal” organisation, followed less than a week after President Donald Trump announced a 90-day funding freeze as part of his ‘America First’ foreign policy pivot — one that has since decimated the global humanitarian and development sectors.

In Georgia, this rug-pull on longstanding US support for civil society and independent media, and the accompanying demonisation of those once administering that support, has handed a budding authoritarian regime carte blanche to further pursue an already brutal slew of repressions that have followed October’s rigged elections.

As the country’s security apparatus continues its attacks on Government critics, former officials warn Georgia’s Interior Ministry in particular has now embarked on an accelerating slide into lawlessness, and that with little to no effort being expended on its mandate to monitor and secure the occupation line people like Tsutori have seldom, if ever, been left more exposed.

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From Bad to Worse

Georgia had consistently sought closer ties with Western governments since its independence from the Soviet Union, not least in hope of greater security guarantees following a disastrous 16-day war with Russia in 2008 that saw Moscow consolidate control of Georgia’s breakaway territories of Tskhinvali and Abkhazia. 

But since 2022, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has upended geopolitical dynamics across the region. Led by Russian-made oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, the ruling Georgian Dream party has dismantled long-standing relations with the US, the UK and the EU over the past three years, demonising these erstwhile allies as agents of a conspiratorial ‘global war party’ as part of what critics describe as a concerted effort to reorient Georgia back toward the Kremlin’s orbit.

By the end of last year, an accompanying slide into authoritarianism — borne out by widespread allegations of rigging at parliamentary polls held in October, as well as horrific acts of violence and torture against protesters opposed to the government scrapping Georgia’s bid for EU accession — had seen international sanctions brought against Ivanishvili and other officials responsible for the mounting wave of repressions.

Trump’s victory at the November elections prompted bizarre scenes on the streets of Tbilisi. Adorned in US and EU and Georgian flags, demonstrators assembled in their thousands to celebrate in hopes the then-thriving resistance movement would enjoy continued support under the new Republican administration.

Georgian Dream, meanwhile, welcomed Trump’s triumph with the confidence of fellow nationalist-populists backed by the American president’s staunch advocate in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban. 

For now, Trump has little interest in a country likely neither he nor the vast majority of his support base could place on a map. But that vacuum has only emboldened Georgian Dream to further intensify its attacks on government critics in the months that have followed since the US presidential polls.

At a protest held earlier this month in defiance of measures criminalising road blockades, a crucial feature of anti-government demonstrations in Georgia, footage appeared to show a high-ranking government employee personally participating in the beating of demonstrators. 

Already sanctioned by several partner states, including the US and the UK, for his role in coordinating the brutalisation of arrestees, that man is believed to have been head of the Interior Ministry’s Department of Special Tasks (DST), Zviad ‘Khareba’ Kharazishvili.

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Government Ministry or ‘Criminal Clan’?

Irakli Shaishmelashvili’s decision to leave the DST was not an easy one. But after six years as head of the unit’s Operational Planning Division, he resigned last December after witnessing first-hand the violence brought by his colleagues against peaceful protesters the night Georgia’s government effectively nixed the country’s bid for EU membership.

“When I left the service, they started an absurd investigation against me,” the former official told Byline Times in a series of letters penned from the US, where he has fled.

Operatives were placed on duty at my residence, various cars followed me wherever I went, and through intermediaries they threatened that if I made any statements or cooperated with any opposition parties, they would liquidate my family

Irakli Shaishmelashvili, former DST official

It wasn’t always like this. For more than a decade, the DST benefited from tens of millions of dollars worth of training and capacity-building initiatives from Georgia’s Western partners, including practical courses on crowd control from the FBI and on human rights-compliant policing of protests from the Council of Europe. 

“We had launched some really earthquake reforms, particularly by investing in human rights protections,” said Kakhaber Kemoklidze, previously director of the Interior Ministry’s Department of Information Analyses under former Minister Giorgi Gakharia. “For a time there was a lot of praise coming in from the NGO sector, because people could see how the system was beginning to guard against the sort of violations we’re now seeing.”

The change, Kemoklidze says, came about after Gakharia was replaced in 2019 by Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri — a former bodyguard to ruling oligarch, Ivanishvili, and close associate of DST head Kharazishvili, and who has now similarly been targeted with international sanctions for his role orchestrating the brutal policing of dissent over the past several months. 

Stripping away the reforms introduced by his predecessor, former officials explained how Gomelauri has steadily implemented a strict culture of centralised management, requiring ministerial-level approval on even minor tasks while working with Kharazishvili to populate the ministry and in particular the DST with hardline loyalists. 

In essence, interviewees described the Interior Ministry as functioning not like a government body but rather a “criminal clan,” its officials bound by a code of “unconditional obedience” enforced by threats of dismissal and violence. The result, they say, has been an institution crippled first by fear; and later professional ineptitude.

“By now they’ve substituted almost everyone for people they trust. At one point I had all types of relatives under me — someone’s daughter, someone’s granddaughter, someone’s wife,” said Eka Machavariani, previously head of the ministry’s Department of International Relations.

“The worst thing for me is the total lack of professionalism. For example, my successor doesn’t even speak English, but it’s all part of how they’ve implemented this strategy of total control.”

Grigol Sakandelidze, Shaishmelashvili’s predecessor as head of the DST’s Operational Planning Division, told Byline Times of his personal experience of these threats, beginning when he was fired in 2018 for refusing to hire a friend of another of Ivanishvili’s former bodyguards.

Once his complaint was lodged with Gakharia, who he believes had no prior knowledge of the incident, Sakandelidze was reinstated as a patrol officer, the lowest rank within the ministry. But his continued pursuit of the issue following the 2019 change in management eventually saw him confronted by members of Kharazishvili’s entourage. 

“They had me meet them where they kept the police dogs in kennels,” he recalled. “We went for a walk, and these guys told me if I continued to complain, they would destroy me.

I realised maybe they would kill me, maybe they would plant something in my house or in my car. I was afraid for my wife and child, and so I decided to leave the country.

Grigol Sakandelidze, former DST employee

Speaking from his home in the US, where he has lived since 2022, Sakandelidze further shed light on how exactly the DST coordinates its policing of demonstrations in Tbilisi, charging riot control officers with frontline response while largely assigning behind-the-line beatings to SWAT officers drawn from both within the Interior Ministry and across other government bodies. 

“The riot control units, they’ve done all the courses, so they have a certain way of thinking about how to manage that situation. But the SWAT teams are totally different, because they haven’t had that training,” he said. “Riot control officers know to be careful to avoid overuse of force. But the SWAT guys, all their psychology drives them to do one thing, and that is to kill.”

Meanwhile, Shaishmelashvili adds the ministry’s mandate for securing the administrative boundary with Georgia’s occupied territories has fallen almost completely by the wayside.

Nor does he believe this entirely incidental, taken against the government’s wider ‘pro-Russian’ turn, and having been expressly told by Gomelauri and his deputies on several occasions to wind down or outright suspend monitoring efforts along the occupation line.

“Protecting the administrative boundary has basically just become a formality,” he said, adding: “because the government has now shifted all of its attention to simply maintaining power.”

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Return of the Mafia State

Georgia has long enjoyed a reputation for being largely crime-free, thanks to a war on the country’s criminal clans following the Rose Revolution of 2003, which saw many Soviet-era ‘thieves-in-law’ driven abroad by the United National Movement (UNM) government of former President Mikhail Saakashvili. 

Critics say that perception, however, no longer reflects reality. Much like security along the boundary line with Georgia’s occupied territories, Kemoklidze says the bigger picture has been deliberately obscured by an active suppression of public data by the Interior Ministry.

“One of things we did back in 2017 was address the manipulation of crime statistics,” he explained. “When we started reporting things properly, the rates skyrocketed more than 60% from one month to the next. Now, they’re suppressing them again, pretending things are fine even though everybody knows the environment is very different on the streets.”

The US State Department has nevertheless repeatedly warned that Georgia represents an “attractive transit hub” for narco-trafficking syndicates smuggling opiates into Europe from Afghanistan and Iran, with its most recent report suggesting the war in Ukraine has also seen criminal groups making increased use of new routes through Georgia to smuggle synthetic drugs from Europe into Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

According to Givi Targamadze, a Defence and Security Committee Chairman under the previous government, Georgia’s narcotics trade is currently overseen by a criminal syndicate headed up by ‘the Mikadze brothers’, Giorgi and Dato, who he claims operate under protection from, and even in direct collusion with Georgia’s State Security Service.

Active cooperation between criminal elements and state officials indeed proved a recurrent theme in Byline Times’ interviews for this story. Both Sakandelidze and Shaishmelashvili accuse the DST of routinely hiring street thugs to carry out attacks against government critics, with Shaishmelashvili saying he personally witnessed cash payments to local criminals for securing pro-government votes during the October elections. 

While bolstering the execution of repressive measures in the shorter term, former officials added this allegedly increasing reliance on criminal networks has not gone without presenting its own unique challenges for Georgian Dream.

As a case in point, Targamadze outlined an ongoing dispute between DST head Kharazishvili and Giorgi Shinjikashvili — deputy governor of Georgia’s Kvemo Kartli region, and the reputed ringleader of a gang of enforcers largely made up of former wrestlers.

Tensions first erupted after Targamadze claims the pair were instructed to work together in carrying out a series of attacks against protesters last spring. Following a particularly violent altercation between their respective crews at a Tbilisi gym earlier in December, however, Shinjikashvili is understood to have now fled the country to take refuge in neighbouring Turkey. 

“From what I know, I’m not surprised they’re seeing these sorts of conflicts erupt. This is exactly what happens in a classic mafia state — different gangs linked with different political elites, different business elites, and everyone trying to dominate and compete with one another,” Kemoklidze explained. “I’m talking here about the rule of the jungle, because really, there is no longer any rule of law in Georgia.”