Lika Jejelava is 18 years old and attending the protests taking place today in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is a native Georgian and attending the protests in order to show the government of President Mikhail Saakashvili she thinks it’s controlling too much power.
“The media, parlament, court everything belongs to Saakashvili and his group,” Jejelava wrote in a Skype message. “And, Georgian society wants to stop them.”
I starting chatting with Jejelava about two weeks ago and since then we have spent time talking about Georgian society. Today, she sent me a message saying she was going to the protests.
The current protests are marked by historical reference 20 years ago. In 1989, Georgia was under Soviet rule. Restless citizens, who wanted independence, organized a protest on April 9 that resulted in the killing of 20 Georgian citizens by the Soviet military, which had been called in by the then First Secretary of the Georgian Community Party Jumber Pastiashvili.
According to a BBC article titled Georgia recalls Soviet crackdown, before the protest began the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church asked the demonstrators to go home. They didn’t.
“Georgia got what it needed, but it was just a shortime fairytail,” Jejelava wrote, referring to the time period since 1989 that has mostly been without Soviet rule.
I asked Jejelava if she thought the protests would become violent. She has been to four protests before but never really hurt. A policeman shoved her at one protest. The Georgian government has alleged that opposition forces are planning to disrupt the protest in a way that provokes the police into using force. The opposition has denied the allegation.
Jejelava wrote she doesn’t think there will be violence at the protest, because the Georgian government wants to show European nations that they are democratic. But, she wrote that if demonstrations continue, the government would try to stop the protesters.
The BBC article quotes Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili saying that “the government would ‘not intervene or impede members of the protest in expressing their will freely’ but indicated that the authorities could take action if they deemed it necessary.”
There is a question of how long the protests will go on. Jejelava said protesters could “struggle up to the end” if the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church asks them to.
“Today the only leader is our religion,” she wrote.
Jejelava wrote she expects this protest to be bigger than the one in Nov. 2007, when police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break it up. Opposition forces expect around 150,000 to attend the protest.
Students will be protesting, but some parents won’t let their children go to the protest, fearing they might be harmed, Jejelava wrote. This could pose a problem for the protesters, she said.
“Everyone knows that students are great power,” Jejelava wrote. “But here they are not active, that’s what gives our Government to think that we can’t do anything.
“Georgian society has bad habbit, it can live and get on with all kind of government…even worst one!”
“Shavlego” is an old war song Georgian soldiers used to listen to, Jejelava wrote. The song has also inspired her to protest.
“Makes u stronger, so that nothing can stop u,” she wrote of the song, “kind of energizer.”
