Georgia’s parliament gave final approval Tuesday to a controversial bill that has sparked a series of tense protests in the capital, Tbilisi, fueled by fears that the legislation could push the country back into the Kremlin’s orbit.
President Salomé Zourabichvili has fiance to veto the bill. But Georgian Dream, the party that has governed Georgia since 2012, has enough votes to override his veto.
Both the opposition and the government have presented the approval of the harmless-sounding bill, titled “On Transparency of Foreign Influence,” as a momentous step in the history of Georgia, a mountainous country of 3.6 million people nestled in the middle of the Caucasus mountains. .
The bill would require non-governmental groups and media outlets that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from foreign sources to register as “organizations defending the interests of a foreign power” and provide annual financial statements about their activities. . Georgia’s Ministry of Justice would be given broad powers to monitor compliance. Violations would carry fines equivalent to more than $9,300.
Government officials and ruling party lawmakers said the bill would strengthen the country’s sovereignty by making non-governmental organizations, which have occupied a central role in Georgia’s highly polarized political life, more transparent to the public.
But the pro-Western opposition has denounced the legislation as a stealth effort to turn Georgia into a pro-Russian state.
Over the past month, thousands of people have protested against the bill in Tbilisi and other cities in Georgia. As the crowd grew, police began using heavy-handed tactics to disperse them.
Riot police officers used tear gas, pepper spray and fists against protesters as some of them surrounded the Parliament building. Some protesters have been beaten in tense clashes, including Ted Jonas, a Georgian American lawyer who has lived in the country since the early 1990s.
“They dragged me about 30 meters down the sidewalk, hitting and kicking me the entire way,” Jonas said in a Facebook post. “I ended up with a bloody nose, bruises from kicks or punches on my head, jaw, right eye socket and some on my left.”
As Parliament neared the final reading of the bill, clashes continued to intensify. At least 20 protesters were detained early Monday, police said, including a Russian citizen and two Americans. Student groups from the country’s top universities said Sunday they were going on strike to protest the bill.
Protesters labeled the bill “Russian law,” arguing that it mimics a similar measure in Russia. Passed in 2012, Russia’s “foreign agents” law was also presented by the Russian government as a transparency measure, but quickly became a heavy-handed tool to repress and stigmatize anti-government advocacy groups and media organizations. -Kremlin.
“We have so many pro-Western NGOs and they are against the West, they are pro-Russian,” said Luna Iakobadze, 26, a protester, referring to the government.
Georgia’s government has been denying accusations that the bill has anything to do with Moscow. Government representatives insisted they were committed to pursuing the country’s widely popular aspiration to join the European Union.
But in a recent speech, Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of the Georgian Dream party, portrayed the West as an enemy, not a friend. At a pro-government rally in late April, Ivanishvili said NATO and the European Union were controlled by a “global war party” that sees “Georgia and Ukraine as cannon fodder.”
“The first time Georgia entered into confrontation with Russia was in 2008,” Ivanishvili said, referring to a brief war fought between Moscow and the government in Tbilisi. “In 2014 and 2022 they put Ukraine in an even more difficult situation.”
Ivanishvili, a reclusive oligarch who made a fortune in Russia before returning to Georgia in the early 2000s, accused Western elites of trying to foment a revolution against his party because he refused to actively oppose the Kremlin after its invasion. from Ukraine.
But some protesters said Moscow was the natural center of gravity for Ivanishvili and his party, which has ruled Georgia for almost 12 years and aims to strengthen its grip on the country’s politics in upcoming elections in October.
“This is their only way to stay in power, to be with Russia,” Ilia Burduli, a 39-year-old lawyer, said at one of the protests. “This is the only way to be in charge forever.”
Irakli Kobakhidze, Georgia’s newly appointed prime minister, described activists opposing the bill as arrogant and clueless people who were brainwashed into believing the bill was linked to Russia.
“A self-confident person with no knowledge or intelligence is worse than a Russian tank,” Kobakhidze said Friday in a Facebook post.
Some commentators have echoed the government’s reasoning, saying that the Western-funded non-governmental organization sector has an enormous impact on Georgia’s political life despite not being democratically elected. But they also said the new law would not address that problem.
European Union representatives and U.S. officials have criticized the legislation, saying it renews doubts about Georgia’s democratic record.
On Saturday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the US government was “deeply alarmed by the democratic backsliding in Georgia.” In a publication On social media, Sullivan said Georgian lawmakers faced “a critical choice: support the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of the Georgian people or pass a Kremlin-style foreign agents law.”
In recent years, the West has been walking a tightrope in Georgia: on the one hand, it tried to encourage the popular pro-Western aspirations of the Georgian people, on the other, it strove not to alienate the ruling party and put it in the hands of the Kremlin. In December, the European Union granted Georgia candidate status, a move widely seen as an effort to prevent the country from entering the Kremlin’s orbit.
But the balancing act has become more difficult since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which pushed many former Soviet states to choose sides. The invasion also presented Georgia and some other countries with a lucrative opportunity to help conduct trade between Russia and the West, which has become restricted due to sanctions and other measures.
“The Georgian Dream sees that the West’s focus is elsewhere, their focus on Georgia has weakened, so the price they would have to pay for adopting this law might not be too high,” said Mikheil Kechaqmadze, an analyst. from Georgia. policy.
“They don’t want to do European integration,” he said in an interview. “By introducing the law they want to subvert it.”