Green politics in Georgia started out with a civic movement organization, the Greens Movement, during the late Soviet period in the late 1980s that was directly influenced by the emerging Green parties of Western Europe. The Greens Movement was an important force in the larger movement for democracy and Georgian independence as well as the main center of environmental activism in Georgia. In 1990, Green Movement activists created the Green Party in order to take part in the first ever multiparty elections in the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse. Georgians voted for independence by referendum in 1991 and prepared for parliamentary elections in 1992 in which the Greens Party would end up electing 11 member to parliament. At that time, the Greens Movement and Greens Party were part of the same organization under the umbrella of the Georgia Greens. But Georgia changed its laws regarding civic and political organizations, which forced the formal and soon functional separation of the Greens Movement and the Greens Party.

I discussed what has happened to the Greens Party since the height of its influence in the 1990s in my October 27 dispatch (No. 2). More details can be found at Tamar Pataraia, Georgia: History of Green Politics (Heinrich Boell Foundation, 2013). A major event was the movement of the Green Party leader Zurab Zhvania into the party of Eduard Sheverdnadze, which resulted in Zhvania and some other Greens taking leading positions in the Georgia government. One of them was Nino Chkobadze who became Georgia’s assistant environmental minister in 1993 and the environmental minister from 1995 to 2004. Under Nino’s tenure, most of Georgia’s environmental laws were adopted.

In this dispatch, I will discuss what I learned from my meeting with Nino Chkhobadze, the Chair of the Greens Movement since her she left Georgia’s environmental ministry twenty years ago, along with Greens Movement veterans Akaki Panchulidze and Nato Kirvalidze.

The most vibrant and powerful social movements in Georgia are community-based environmental movements against projects that are damaging communities and their local environments. They two most powerful movements are against an abusive manganese mining company and a mega-dam project.

Shukruti Manganese Mine

When I met with the Greens Movement leaders in their offices on October 29, they told me about the biggest current environmental struggle in Georgia. It is in the village of Shukruti, where the community is losing their homes as they falling into the collapsing manganese mine underneath it. The community is also being poisoned by an open pit mine. We talked to a geologist in the campaign over the phone who explained that the open pit mine is causing sulfur dioxide to be released as it cuts through one of the geological strata to get to the manganese. Sulfur dioxide irritates and can damage the nose, throat, lungs, and eyes, causing or worsening asthma, bronchitis, and heart disease, and shortening life expectancy with chronic exposure. Mine tailings are also polluting the river through the region.

The village of Shukruti has been protesting for most of the last year, conducting an encampment outside the mines. They are asking for compensation for the homes that have been lost and for the mining to be done in a way that protects the community and its environment. They don’t want to shut the mine down. It has been their main source of jobs for many years. But a new corporation bought and took over management of the mine about eight years ago. Under their management, the underground explosives have increased without regard for its impact on the village above. The open pit mine is new. The people want to continue mining, but in a way that protects Shukruti instead of destroying it.

The protest movement now has a contingent sitting on the steps of the Parliament Building every day. It has widespread popular support. Georgia role in global capitalism is to serve as a source and transit hub for raw materials linking China and the EU, as Georgia has since the days of the the Great Silk Road between China and Europe in the 6th through 15th centuries. What the Shukruti movement is ultimately demanding is that Georgia’s role in the world economy serve its people before outside investors.

The biggest outside investor now is the Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is under indictment in the U.S. for bank fraud and under arrest in Ukraine for fraud and for the murder of a lawyer in a corporate dispute. The state has been trying to suppress the movement with court injunctions against the protests with the support of both the Georgia Dream party and the main opposition party the United National Movement. Both are more beholden to corporate interests than the people they represent. Under the pressure of the movement, the state appointed a regulator, but he lives in the capital city of Tbilisi, not in the Rioni Valley region of the mines and is believed to be taking bribes for looking the other way at environmental law violations and taking kickbacks on a poorly executed water treatment project that has not cleaned up the water. The popularity and force of environmental movements like the Shukruti movement are the strongest challenges to the rule of Georgia Dream and its billionaire leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili. The environmental movements implicitly pose the issues of real democratic accountability and regulation of the economy that threaten the rule of oligarchs like Kolomoyskyi and Ivanishvili.

For more on the Shukruti protests, see Mari Imerlishvili, “Manganese Mining: Shukruti Locals’ Protests Fall on Deaf Ears,” Civil Georgia, September 13, 2024.

Namakhvani Hydroelectric Power Plant

The most significant grassroots environmental campaign has been the movement to stop the Namakhvani dam and hydroelectric power plant in the Rioni Valley. We talked about this project at the meeting at the Greens Movement offices in Tblisi. Out of that meeting they set up a meeting with leaders of the movement to stop the dam. So the next day I met by Zoom with Varlam Goletiani and Nino Gogua of the movement from their local region that is a four-hour drive to the west of Tbilisi, along with Nino Chkhobadze and Nato Kirvalidze. Varlam is the spokesperson for the movement and Nino Gogua was the his able translator.

They explained how the movement got started in 2020 to stop the flooding of 18 villages and their surrounding ancient vineyards as wells as stopping enormous ecological damage to the whole region from the proposed mega-dam. The state was moving ahead with no environmental or social impact studies. The movement persisted with frequent protests demonstrations, camp-ins, and public education until they won what they call a pause, not a cancellation of the project. The original investors pulled out due the protests. The movement believes, however, that behind the scenes, the government is recruiting a new set of investors for what the government says will be an important step toward Georgia’s energy self-reliance.

One of the tactics of the state and corporate developers was to try to discredit this local grassroots movement by saying it was whipped up by outside agitators, initially blaming Russians and later Westerners. When the foreign agents registration law was being debated in the last two years, the ruling Georgia Dream party leaders said the movement was funded by western NGOs who were agents of the globalizing war party trying to get Georgia into a third war with Russia since independence. But the movement kept scrupulous records of its finances, which showed that most of the movement’s funding came from regular $10-$20 remittances sent to them by migrant laborers working in Western Europe. The Georgia Dream then said that they needed the foreign agents law so they could snoop around and find the outside funding of the movement. The smear tactics back fired and the movement won broad support across Georgian society.

The movement they organized also stopped the development of a 100,000 square meter forest into a private resort that would have enclosed the forest from traditional uses by the surrounding villages. The movement also successfully pushed for paving the the main road through the region that had become so impassable with ruts that bus transportation stopped and most truck traffic did as well. The road is needed so the region’s products can be brought to market and outside goods can be imported to the region. Grape cultivation and wine production date back 8,000 years in the Rioni Valley of Georgia, where it was probably first invented. The region has developed many unique varieties of grapes and wine adapted to micro-environments in the mountainous region.

With young people leaving the region for the big city Tbilisi or jobs in the migrant labor markets of Western Europe, this grape and wine industry is seen by the indigenous people as the foundation for their future economic development. They don’t have a detailed development plan, saying they are not experts. But they are demanding the state pay for experts to do studies and then consult with the local people on what their development possibilities are and what their approach should be.

The grassroots movement did get some mediation regrind the mega-dam project from the Energy Community of the EU, which is a consultative process of EU countries and their neighboring countries to the east about building an integrated energy market and infrastructure across Europe. But the movement never heard back from the EU Energy Community.

Over the course of our conversation, we compared notes about their success in pausing the mega-dam and my experience in the anti-nuclear movement in pausing nuclear power development in the U.S for almost 40 years. I told them about who the Clamshell Alliance in New England occupied the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site in 1977, arrested 1,414 of us, and put our anti-nuclear movement in the national headlines for the 10 days most of us were locked up on National Guard armories. That action spawned anti-nuclear alliances across the country and the industry did not order a new nuclear power plant for 35 years until 2012 when the Obama administration put federal guarantees on loans to build new nuclear power plants. Four plants were attempted and only two completed at enormous cost overruns and construction delays. The Rioni Valley activists had never heard of our success in pausing nuclear power development in the U.S.

So we noted our common ground in having paused destructive developments in our respective countries and how we never say cancelled or stopped because the exploitative big businesses are working full time to get their projects back on track. Another common theme we found is that the power structure tries to discredit us by saying we are sincere and even endearing, but emotional and not very smart or rational. But we have found, in their movement and in our anti-nuclear movement, that developers experts are not very smart or well-informed and that we expose their ignorance and shallow thinking in public meetings with sharp, smart questions and statements. We talked about how they could deal with the U.S. Embassy, which was promoting the investors’ interests, not the public or environmental interests. That is where international pressure could help from within the U.S. could help.

The Rioni Valley activists lamented that the Western environmental movement had not been very supportive of their struggle, which they suspected was due to the fact that Georgia is a small country traditionally colonized by Russia and in what it considers its sphere of influence. Activists in Georgia expect better solidarity from the international environmental movement because that is the only way they can protect their communities and environment in a small country that the big powers, both Western and Russian, regard as pawns in their geopolitical and geoeconomics competition. We agreed to stay in touch, keep each other informed on our activities, and offer mutual support.

For more on the Rioni Valley movement, see Lela Rekhviashvili, “Struggle for the Rioni Valley in between Political and Civil Society terrains,” LeftEast, March 7, 2023. Lela is a Georgian leftist and political geographer who I will meet with and interview in Germany in late November.

Georgia in the Climate Movement

At the meeting at the Greens Movement office in Tbilisi the day before, we also discussed their perspectives on Georgia’s energy future. While the government is pushing small and medium and well as mega dams with hydro-electric power plants, of which there are plenty of potential sites in mountainous Georgia, the Greens Movement was a stop to new hydro. Instead they want to retrofit existing hydro plants with new generators that produce 50% more power, to institute an aggressive energy conservation and efficiency program across all sectors, and expand existing power capacity with wind and solar. They want to phase out fossil fuels. Although Georgia has little potential for fossil fuel development unlike neighboring Russia and Azerbaijan, they still oppose any fossil fuel development. There was an anti-fracking poster made by a school child posted in their office conference room.

They also discussed the difficulties they face with an existing energy infrastructure that is dated and dependence on centralized coal power plants, gas heating, and gasoline for trucks and cars. Public ownership of the electric power production and distribution system could be an advantage if the state decides to transition away from the existing model of central power plants and a servo-mechanical grid to a smart grid that can utilize the decentralized production of wind and solar power. But they are up against the vested interests in the old system of the Russian petrostate on its northern border and its political and private business clients in Georgia. For example, the Greens have not been able to get net metering for solar or wind installations adopted. Georgia imports a good portion of its electric power from Russia and Russia doesn’t want renewables competing with fossil fuels.

We met four days after the election in which the Georgia Dream is claiming victory and the opposition claiming a rigged election. How that conflict will play out is was the undertone of our whole discussion. The three flags on the conference table of Georgia Green Movement, Georgia, and the EU speak to both the Greens Movement’s future hopes and its roots in the fight for Georgia democracy and independence at the end of the Soviet period. The banner of the Greens Movement of George, proclaiming its affiliation with Friends of the Earth International, speaks to Georgian Greens’ understanding of themselves as part of and needed an international movement to succeed in a small country preyed upon by the bigger powers.

There are two other groups in the Greens movement in Georgia I should mention. One is a new Green Party consisting of younger activists with a more feminist, pro-LGBTQ, and anti-oligarch, pro-economic equality perspective than the old Green Party. I was supposed to meet with them, but they got sick after the demonstration at the Parliament Building on Monday night. A lot of people I encountered got sick after the election. It seems to be how many of the shocked and depressed opposition activists have responded to the stress and shock of the election. In any case, we hope to do the meeting by Zoom in the next couple of weeks. Here is an article about the new Green Party, which is still small since the announcement in this article two years ago. Tata Shoshiashvili, “New pro-queer and feminist green party launches in Georgia,” OC Media, November 28, 2022. Their social media is active: https://mtsvaneebi.ge/, https://www.facebook.com/mtsvaneebi/, https://x.com/mtsvaneebi?lang=en.

Finally, there is Green Alternative, which seems to be the best staffed and funded environmental group in Georgia. It seems to have grown out of the Greens Movement in the early 2000s, but I don’t know what that split was about. I didn’t become aware of their roots in the Greens politics movement until I had been in Georgia for several days and it was too late to try and meeting with them. Their website: https://greenalt.org/en/.

My overall takeaway is that Green politics has been central to democratic and progressive politics in Georgia since the late Soviet period. It has not sustained a Green Party with electoral clout, although everyone in the broader Green movement wants to see that. And that centrality of ecological issues in Georgia politics remains, as the grassroots movements in the Rioni Valley and Shukruti that have generated such broad popular support across the country testify. That confluence of popular democracies movements around environmental issues only makes sense when the grow-or-die global capitalist economy is consuming the biosphere and destroying out means to life.