Tens of thousands of people across Georgia took to the streets on December 4 for a seventh consecutive night of anti-government protests, following raids on opposition offices and activists’ homes. 

Local outlet JamNews reported that drone footage shot during the evening indicated that the crowds which gathered on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi may have been the biggest yet.

It seems the increasingly brutal crackdown by the ruling Georgian Dream party, which Georgia’s pro-Western opposition and president say rigged the October general election, drew more people than ever out onto the streets to express their condemnation of the ruling party’s actions and show solidarity with those arrested.

Repression by the authorities ramped up a notch on December 3, when multiple opposition leaders where violently detained both in party offices and during a meeting of Georgia’s four main opposition coalitions at the Courtyard Marriot hotel on Liberty Square.

For the first time since the ongoing wave of unrest began a week ago, sparked by an announcement by the Georgian prime minister that the country’s would be suspending its EU membership bid, the demonstration remained calm throughout the night, with no forced dispersals from riot police.

In the last six protests police used physical violence, water cannons and tear gas to try and clear the crowds. Dozens of protesters have suffered serious injuries and 300 individuals have been detained. 

Police have also deployed ambush and encirclement tactics following the final dispersions of the crowds which typically occur around dawn, chasing individuals into buildings, onto side streets and through residential areas far beyond Rustaveli Avenue. 

However, on the night of December 4 and into the morning of December 5, demonstrators were able to leave the protest site peacefully.

MIA resignations 

It remains unclear why there was no full police crackdown, but speculation on social media has pointed to several factors at play, including the resignation of high-level Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) official, Irakli Shaishmelashvili, head of the Operational Planning Unit at the interior ministry’s Special Tasks Department, which is directly involved in the dispersals, beatings and arrests of protesters. 

Pro-opposition media in Georgia are increasingly reporting a “system collapse” within the MIA as law enforcement ranks are allegedly hit by a surge of resignations. According to reports, dozens of officials have resigned since the protests began on November 28, and this situation has intensified with Shaishmelashvili’s announcement of his resignation on December 4.

According to reports by JamNews, a former Coast Guard official, Gocha Beridze, claimed on social media that Shaishmelashvili's departure was followed by the resignations of his four deputies, 16 special forces instructors, the head and 12 members of the psychological training unit, and the entire water cannon team — 16 operators in total.

Additionally, the opposition channel Mtavari Arxi, has published a list of over 200 names of special forces officers and their commanders accused of violence against protesters. The channel says the names were leaked from a anonymous source within the MIA. Since the publication, named individuals have reportedly been deleting their photos and profiles from social media.

Although police did not deploy violence, evening was not devoid of tension. Police carried out searches at Liberty Square and Rustaveli metro stations, which bookend Rustaveli Avenue, targeting people on their way to the rally outside parliament and confiscating their protective equipment.

Two people were detained following physical confrontations with officers in front of Liberty Square metro station.

Firework sales banned

Rustaveli was comparatively quiet on the night of December 6. Protesters’ supplies of fireworks, which they have been using to agitate and repel riot police cordons, have dwindled, following the government’s recent warning to vendors in Tbilisi to cease the sale of pyrotechnics.

The previous night’s protest, on December 3, which did end in violent crackdowns by huge deployments of riot police, displayed signs of increasing strategic coordination by certain groups of demonstrators.

Tear gas canisters thrown and fired by police were quickly neutralised by well equipped, well organised protesters at the front of the crowd, meaning the thousands behind them were spared the worst effects of the gas. 

A website has been set up which shows the locations of riot police cordons in real time, although issues with GPS and phone signals around the Rustaveli area on the evening of December 4 interfered with this tool.

Shaishmelashvili's resignation followed the news earlier in the day that Giorgi Gvimradze, the director of the news and current affairs department of Georgian Public Broadcaster, which protesters have accused of bias and failing to broadcast scenes of police brutality at protests, had resigned.

The Georgian Young Lawyers Association, a human rights watchdog, announced on December 4 that it plans to file an appeal with the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding the security forces’ use of violence during the dispersal of protests. 

GYLA chairperson Nona Kurdovanidze stated that GYLA has been monitoring human rights violations since the protests began a week ago and believes that the systematic and brutal repression of civilians constitutes a crime against humanity, warranting a case at the ICC.

Sanctions announced 

On December 5, Ukraine joined the Baltic States in sanctioning a list of 20 government officials, including Georgian Dream (GD) founder Bidzina Ivanishvili and Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, who Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated are “betraying the interests of Georgia and the Georgian people”. 

The US has also announced it is “preparing to use the tools at [its] disposal, including additional sanctions” to hold accountable those who “undermine democratic processes or institutions in Georgia”. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that his country “strongly condemns” the Georgian Dream party’s “brutal and unjustified violence against Georgian citizens, protesters, members of the media, and opposition figures” and called on Georgian Dream to “cease its repressive tactics, including its use of arbitrary detention and physical violence, to attempt to silence its critics”.