Even after the Georgian parliament passed the controversial “foreign influence” law, thousands of people continue to protest the bill. Maja, a Lithuanian who has called the Caucasus country home for almost a decade, was among them.
The protests rocking Tbilisi have so far remained mostly peaceful, although there have been occasional reports of police and special services using force. Maja admits that these moments are frightening.
"It was really uncomfortable at first. [...] There were water cannons, tear gas from afar. [...] Certainly, it’s a bit scary. Having grown up in a free Lithuania [...] it’s strange to see how the police behave lately,” Maja shared her experience with LRT RADIO programme 10–12.
She does imagine a situation escalating, especially if the police use violence against the protesters.
“If people who are considered heroes are beaten up in public, I don’t know how long people’s patience will last,” she said, referring to one recent police attack on David Katsarava, a popular public figure.
Maya admits she has considered whether it is still safe for her to take part in the protests, as more people have been arrested. However, she feels it is her duty to be among the protesters.
Painful stories
While many foreigners who live in Georgia stay away from the country’s political life and especially protests, Maja, who came almost by chance nine years ago, tries to get involved in the country’s life.
This is not the first time she has found herself caught up in the protests shaking the country, although she admits that she initially wanted to stay on the sidelines.
“When I came to live here in 2015, the current government had been in power for three years. There were already protests then. When I made friends who are artists and human rights activists, journalists, [...] I somehow started to see that they were already fighting against it. [I thought], what is happening here? I slowly started to go to these protests,” says Maja, who works in the tourism sector.
She is convinced that the painful stories of her friends and colleagues also had a strong impact on her – almost everyone lost loved ones or had other terrible experiences during the wars in 1993 and 2008.
“When the war broke out in Ukraine, I saw people taking to the streets with pictures of the last wars in 1993 and 2008, how much they were suffering, how much they wanted to move towards Europe and were having that right taken away from them,” says Maja.
Maja says that the support from the foreign ministers of the Baltic states and Iceland, who showed up at the protests on Wednesday, was particularly encouraging to the demonstrators.
“I was in that crowd, among all of them, and I saw how important it was to them, how happy they were,” Maja says of the address by the Lithuanian and Estonian foreign ministers.
“I saw journalists interviewing locals, asking them directly [...] what it means to them. And they said: we feel that we are not alone, that they see us, that they support us,” she added.
The so-called “foreign influence” law was adopted earlier this week. It requires NGOs and media organisations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as “acting in the interests of a foreign state”.
While the government defends the measure as a way to make foreign funding more transparent, EU leaders have warned that it endangers Georgia’s ambitions to join the union.
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