‘No one could guess it would happen like it did’: Georgia divided 20 years after Rose Revolution

Twenty years ago, the peaceful Rose Revolution was about to transform Georgia, shake the region and put the Kremlin on alert, but between protests Nini Gogiberidze was preparing for a law exam rather than a historic victory over her country’s ex-communist old guard.

“No one could guess it would happen like it did. We didn’t know how it would turn out until the very end.” she says of three weeks of rallies against rigged elections that culminated on November 22nd-23rd, when former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as Georgia’s president after protesters waving roses took over parliament in the capital, Tbilisi.

They were led by Mikheil Saakashvili, a 35-year-old US-educated lawyer who took power a few months later and launched a reform drive that made Georgia a key western ally in a Black Sea region that Russia views as its own backyard, and committed this Ireland-sized country of 3.7 million people to the pursuit of European Union and Nato membership.

Yet this week’s anniversary finds Georgia deeply divided: Saakashvili is serving a six-year jail term for abuse of power,  while the current government is accused of restoring Russian influence and will not even officially mark a revolution that it derides, and suspects that Gogiberidze and other activists are involved in a US-backed plot to stage a coup.

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Gogiberidze was a co-founder of the Kmara (“Enough”) movement, a student anti-corruption group that encouraged Georgians to vote in November 2003 parliamentary elections and then to protest against blatant ballot-rigging.

“We were demonstrating every day for three weeks,” she says of protests on Rustaveli Avenue, the tree-lined boulevard in central Tbilisi that runs past Georgia’s parliament. “We were doing shifts to make sure we always had enough people on Rustaveli. And we were doing things at home, making lunches and dinners to feed our activists.”

Since regaining its independence with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia had become a failing state: Russian-backed separatists had seized its Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions, a brief civil war rocked Tbilisi, blackouts occurred every day, violent crime was common and corruption was rampant, including in the education system.

[ ‘We will get there’: Jailed Saakashvili rallies Georgians before revolution anniversary and EU verdict ]

Kmara’s successful campaign to introduce Georgia’s first student self-government at Tbilisi State University in 2001 inspired them to think bigger during election year in 2003.

“We thought perhaps it would also be possible to change something on the country level – at least to mobilise people to come out and vote and then defend their vote. That was our aim, nothing else,” says Gogiberidze (43).

Another co-founder of Kmara, Giorgi Kandelaki, says “a student anti-corruption campaign evolved into Kmara and then became a more political movement… Kmara was important because it spearheaded and energised the apathetic youth”.

Kmara activists used simple but novel ways to engage communities, whether cleaning up people’s communal courtyards and then discussing with curious residents how the state should be doing this; or asking their own grandmothers to talk about social issues with other elderly people who were too scared to open their doors to young strangers.

Some Kmara tactics were gleaned from Otpor (Resistance), a Serbian movement advocating non-violent struggle that helped oust Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and whose leaders shared ideas with hundreds of Georgian activists in 2002 and 2003.

“Meeting Otpor was important for us to learn how to create superiority – not physical but moral – and find the way to create legitimate, peaceful infrastructure to push out an authoritarian regime,” says Giga Bokeria, who was at Tbilisi’s Liberty Institute think tank in 2003 and would later serve as national security adviser under Saakashvili.

“But things are always decided by society here, not abroad. A foreign example can be important for inspiration or learning but you can do nothing if it [the desire for change] is not here,” he adds.

“We never said there would be a revolution. I think Saakashvili was the first to talk about a revolution just a day before it happened. Kmara means ‘enough’, and it was about people saying: ‘I’ve had enough of Shevardnadze because I love my country.’”

The protests in Tbilisi peaked when Shevardnadze accepted outlandish election results from Adjara – a Black Sea region then run like a fiefdom by pro-Russian authoritarian Aslan Abashidze – and tried to open the first session of a new parliament.

[ In a shaky handwritten letter, Georgia’s former president appeals for help ]

“The regime doubled down on the fraud and in response the protest movement doubled down on the protest, and eventually prevailed,” says Kandelaki (41), recalling how fears of a crackdown remained until the veteran leader resigned on November 23rd.

“It was really uncertain until the moment Shevardnadze decided to step down, and one must give him credit for that. Until then, no one was sure of anything,” he recalls.

Saakashvili and his party won elections in early 2004 and would rule for most of the next decade.

They quickly slashed petty graft and bureaucracy, making life easier for ordinary Georgians and attracting a surge in investment from the West, which hailed the emergence of a pro-EU and -US democracy in a strategic region long dominated by Moscow.

Yet the picture grew darker over time. Russia crushed Georgia in a short war in 2008 and recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, and Saakashvili’s rule became increasingly heavy handed and at times violent, fuelling discontent that brought the Georgian Dream party of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili to power in 2012.

Saakashvili returned to Georgia from Ukraine in 2021 and was quickly jailed for six years for abuse of power, in a case he says was fabricated by Georgian Dream.

Some of his allies plan to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rose Revolution, but it will officially pass “without any major notice” according to Nikoloz Samkharadze, a Georgian Dream member who chairs the foreign relations committee in the country’s parliament.

“Basically, what we had after the Rose Revolution was the establishment of authoritarian rule in Georgia. So there is nothing to celebrate. A lot of people were put in jail, a lot of people were forced to give up their property, a lot of people were murdered and the perpetrators were not sentenced.”

Many supporters of the revolution became deeply disillusioned with Saakashvili, but now accuse Georgian Dream of taking the country towards autocracy and back into the orbit of Russia, where Ivanishvili made his fortune.

The government refuses to join western sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine and relaunched direct flights to Russia in May. Four months later, the United States blacklisted Otar Partskhaladze, a Georgian former prosecutor general and ally of Ivanishvili, for allegedly helping the Kremlin exert “malign influence” in Georgia.

In late September, Georgia’s security service questioned three visiting Serbian members of Canvas – a group that grew out of Otpor – and claimed they were holding US-funded training sessions in Tbilisi to teach activists how to overthrow the government. Gogiberidze, who is a consultant for Canvas, was also questioned.

“These people still think this is the Georgia of 2003 and they can stage a revolution, but that is an illusion,” Samkharadze says. “Georgia has moved on … the country is progressing and the economy is growing, so people do not want a revolutionary scenario.”

The US embassy in Tbilisi rejected the “unfounded” allegations and said the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) was working with Canvas “to help people voice their opinions on issues that are important to their families and communities”.

Gogiberidze says “there was a covert operation during this training and everything we said was recorded… We are being listened to and watched. There is systemic coercion of civil society”.

Activists take heart from protests that erupted outside parliament in March, when thousands of people successfully demanded that the government drop plans to brand some civil society groups as “foreign agents” – a measure that Russia uses against Kremlin critics.

“I was ready personally to go to prison rather than register myself as a spy or whatever they wanted to call us, as they do in Russia,” says Eka Gigauri, executive director of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International Georgia.

She helped reform Georgia’s graft-riddled border guards after the Rose Revolution, when many young Georgians entered public service to modernise and clean up the state.

“People are still physically ready to go out and defend the European future of Georgia,” Gigauri adds.

With parliamentary elections scheduled for next year, Gogiberidze says, “Georgia is not going to disappear – we need to struggle on.”

“Georgia free and independent is what we strove for in 2003 and what we will strive for in 2024 and in the years ahead. Our main idea – of bringing this country to a secure place – did not die for me with the Rose Revolution and will not die with me for as long as I live. And hopefully the next generation will also join this struggle.”