“We are ignored by everyone. Since 2019, we’ve been trying to make the government listen to our concerns, but to no avail. Not a single person has come to our aid. The opposition, too, has its own agenda,” Giorgi Neparidze, a protester from Shukruti, told POLITICO.
Georgian Manganese, their mining employer, has caused huge environmental damage to the area they call home. For this reason, the company has been fined millions of dollars and, in 2016, a court appointed a special manager in the company to mitigate the issue. But since then, not much has changed for the protesters.
For several years now, residents of Shukruti village have been holding demonstrations in makeshift tents. As they blocked the entrance to mines during their protest, Georgia’s Prosecutor’s Office launched a lawsuit against three protesters in July. Neparidze is one of them. If found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison.
Recently, they decided to take their protest to Chorvila — Ivanishvili’s hometown — to draw attention to the issue, but on their way there, they were confronted by a group of people Neparidze claims are affiliated with the ruling party, who barred them from entering the village.
“This election will largely be marked as a geopolitical choice,” said Sopho Verdzeuli, co-founder of the Georgian civil movement Voters Against Single-party Governance.
“But we’re concerned about the lack of substantive discussion [about bread-and-butter issues].”
