Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, December 3, 2024, p. 23
Moscow. The protests in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, and other cities of this former Soviet republic in the South Caucasus continued yesterday for the fifth consecutive day and led once again to clashes, repressed again by the authorities with the police force that resorted to the use of water cannons and tear gas.
In this way, those dissatisfied with the decision of the government of Irakli Kobajidze to postpone until 2028 the negotiations for the country’s entry into the European Union (EU) were dispersed.
The dissatisfied, as they have been doing since last Thursday, when the decision was announced, assure that they will meet again on the central Rustaveli Avenue, next to the headquarters of the Georgian Parliament, a traditional place to express disagreement with government decisions in rallies and sit-ins. .
The president of Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, who is unaware of the victory of the ruling Georgian Dream party in the legislative elections on October 26 and refuses to leave office until the country has a legitimate Parliament and government, wrote yesterday on her X account : another impressive night in which Georgians defended their Constitution and their European option. The determination in the streets shows no sign of stopping.
Zurabishvili commented with these words on Sunday’s gathering of no less than 40,000 people in front of the Legislative headquarters in Tbilisi, along with images of the clashes that ended, once again, with dozens of detainees waving flags of Georgia and the EU. Yesterday it was learned that the police arrested Zurab Dzhaparidze, one of the leaders of the opposition Coalition for Change, as reported by that group on its Internet accounts.
In a cabinet meeting broadcast live on Georgian television, including major satellite channels, Premier Kobajidze accused opposition parties of violating the country’s constitutional order, which is sufficient reason to ask the Constitutional Court to declare them outside the law.reflected the head of government.
He reiterated that there is nothing to negotiate with them, that they demand a repeat of the legislative elections of October 26, whose results gave victory to the ruling Georgian Dream party, a victory that their political rivals consider fraudulent.
The spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dimitri Peskov, although he said that what is happening in Georgia is an internal matter of that republic in the post-Soviet space, stated yesterday that in sight there is an attempt to destabilize the situation in the Caucasian country.
He added: “we see all the signs that an attempt is being made to organize a orange revolution”, in the image and likeness of what happened in Ukraine” in the popular protests against the electoral fraud of Moscow’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, in Independence Square, known as Maidan Nezaleshnoshty, in 2004, which the Kremlin describes as coup d’état that established a nazi regime in kyiv.
