Ten Hours at the Roadblock on Kekelidze Street
2024 - unpublished
On Monday morning, I woke up at 6am and switched on a live stream of the protest encampment that was blocking Kekelidze street. I tuned in just as it approached imminent destruction. Bleary rows of copy-pasted police, flanked by special forces, were marching in on the scene. A delegation of opposition party leaders appealed to the policemen’s morality. An officer said that they had violated such-and-such law; the opposition responded by declaring that the government had rigged the election, and that their orders were illegitimate. The two parties spoke over each other, mutually incoherent.
The previous evening, the president of Georgia had visited this same roadblock to deliver a speech. She stated that, following the widespread voter fraud that had taken place during the recent elections, the ruling party’s hold on power was undemocratic. The novelty of this situation is worth underscoring: how often does a country’s sitting president appear at an illegal encampment to declare the illegitimacy of the same country’s ruling government?
The police onslaught on Monday morning continued regardless — flattening tents, seizing students for arrest, and violently detaining the camera operator of an opposition media channel. I felt guilty that I hadn’t remained at the protest the night before.
The roadblock was resurrected that very same evening, and I returned. New tents had been established at the intersection on Kekelidze Street. Speakers blared out the anthems of this year’s protests, all in various states of fatigue. “Every story comes with a happy ending!” I could barely see any of the friends that I had so resolutely protested with earlier this spring. Our group chat had been filled by the chirrup of crickets. Well, how often had standing around achieved anything?
Crowds at the roadblock swelled for a few hours. Civilians momentarily indulged in the possibility of political agitation, like a bite of an appetizer at a drinks reception. In light of the aggression that was demonstrated by police that morning, there was hope that the encampment would be strengthened by an incumbent rage. For a roadblock to remain in place, it needs to sustain a sufficient mass of people to prevent the police from picking off protesters.
But no one wants to wake up at 6am in the morning to paralyze traffic in Vake, and neither does anyone want to spend an entire night camped out under the blank, starless sky on Kekelidze Street to achieve the same end. The crowd began to thin out. We all have reasons to leave. How did the Armenians manage this?
A screen was erected to project a live stream of Georgia’s football match against the Czech Republic; that kept people entertained a while more. I didn’t want to stay overnight at the protest, but I had already set myself up by wearing three pairs of trousers, and was feeling sufficiently disheartened by the abrupt, paralyzing nihilism that I’d sensed in people since the election. This felt like a personal call to action, a test of my own moral integrity.
“It’s over,” — I’ve heard repeatedly from friends, if they discuss the political malaise at all. I feel disdainful of these expressions of defeat, particularly if they haven’t come at much material cost. It’s easy to say that something is over when the only coherent political tactic that you and I have ventured is to stand around in the street; not even blocking traffic (save for a couple of occasions). When we cheer, the ruling party laughs at us (when we despair, they also cheer).
By 3am, it became apparent who was here to spend the night. A couple of opposition party leaders with tired eyes and damp foreheads; an assortment of taciturn youth, predominantly students, huddled around improvised fires. All in all, somewhere between one and three hundred people were attempting to maintain the permanent encampment — arguably the most meaningful form of protest yet to emerge in the whole tragic history of our attempts to restrain an increasingly impetuous ruling party.
It’s not that people haven’t tried. Over the course of this year, people have been tear gassed, beaten, and intimidated. They’ve put their lives aside, and sacrificed months to protesting. But by and large, the protests amounted to showing how many we were. And showing how many we were. And showing how many we were.
Now, we aren’t so many, and people don’t want to think about it anymore. Something precious has been stolen from us — but can we even feel it? Democracy — it’s like a tiny screw has been removed from a machine, but the machine continues to function until the warranty runs out; then you’re left on your own with a broken tool that you have no capacity to use, let alone any idea how to fix.
I suspect that the current apathy is the result of a masterfully engineered plan to manipulate our collective emotional energy. Ivanishvili’s been rehearsing with some prominent composers, and we’re reaching the conclusion of his grand debut symphony called ‘How to Consolidate Rule by Instilling Apathy in the Masses’. We’ve been played like a string in Ivanishvili’s bow. In spring, our emotions were heightened — and then drained. Queue the bristling violins. Rudderless, we cavorted like waves through Tbilisi. But the foreign agents bill was passed, and we collectively decided to await elections in the misguided belief that they’d be reasonably democratic. Along the way, our insipid opposition asserted political alternatives that were the color and consistency of sludge. I voted in this election based on who my deceased grandfather used to like, without any understanding of the party’s policies. Now our democracy has been quashed, and we are too disenfranchised and exhausted to rally.
Perhaps the most painful aspect of our predicament: the sheer number of times that our side have criticized Russian citizens for not defying their repressive dictatorship. It’s an embarrassing thing to concede that our country has been driven close to submission by a state apparatus that is considerably less draconian. At least our country is not engaged in a vicious, foreign invasion, so we need only take responsibility for the damage that we’ll personally have to endure. But who knows, maybe in a few years it will be Georgian citizens being called up to serve in Putin’s army.
Everything is happening in reverse: Abkhazians are jamming trucks into their parliament against pro-Russian bills, whilst Georgians are becoming politically apathetic. I have been amazed by some of the things I’ve heard in the past year. Taxi drivers have told me cynically that whilst Georgians are going to fight in Ukraine, Ukrainians are coming to Georgia to drink and party. A drunk shepherd in the mountains told me that Ukrainians were the worst people he had ever met, and he hoped that Putin would cover their country in cement. A trader in Dezerter Bazaar told me that we should toast for Zelenskyy — not Putin — to ‘end his tragic war’ in Ukraine. Where are people getting these ideas? I was raised to believe that as sure as the sun rose and set, Russia was our country’s gravest threat. The fabric of reality is shifting, and positions are being recast.
The first light of dawn began to creep onto our weary crowd of stragglers at the roadblock on Kekelidze street. As a cohort of police drew towards us, we were too few in number to do much more than withdraw further down the street. They didn’t even have to push; we were simply walked back, standing at a political impasse. Protesters shuffled from foot to foot, exhausted and unfortified by new ranks. A despondent Georgian man came over and offered us some beers. He said that his heart was breaking: after so much resistance from our fore-bearers, was this the best that our people could muster? The protest disassembled, with an opposition leader muttering something about a new, more effective strategy for resistance.
On Monday, the government is planning to enter parliament and sound the death knell of Georgian democracy. At this most critical stage, will enough people be roused to stand in resolute opposition? What will it take for us to emerge from our inertia?