Georgian Opposition Plans Takeover of Country From Pro-Russian Government To Break ‘Stalemate’
NEED TO KNOW
Georgian Opposition Plans Takeover of Country From Pro-Russian Government To Break ‘Stalemate’
GEORGIA
Every day, for nearly a year, the protesters have gathered in the capital of Tbilisi.
They hold signs reading “Down with the oligarchy” and chant “No to Russian elections.” Occasionally, these protests turn violent as they did early last month, when supporters of the government threw bottles and rocks at the demonstrators in front of the campaign headquarters of Georgian Dream’s Tbilisi mayor, Kakha Kaladze: He is up for reelection in local elections on Oct. 4 along with dozens of others across the country.
Still, the demonstrators came back the next day.
That’s because the political opposition is determined to bring down the coalition government of the Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia parties. It must be brought down, opponents add, for the sake of Georgia and its people. They plan to do so on Oct. 4, opposition organizers say, when they will take over the government and install a technocratic replacement.
“We want to peacefully topple (Georgian Dream leader, billionaire) Bidzina Ivanishvili – give us the opportunity to do this peacefully,” Paata Burchuladze, a renowned Georgian opera singer and leader of the Rustaveli Avenue activist group, told Georgia’s Interpressnews. “If you arrest us all, people will come out and you’ll see what happens to you.”
“They failed to take us seriously in time. It’s too late now,” he added. “On Oct. 4, Georgia will regain its freedom, the people will regain power.”
Conservative Georgian Dream first came to power in 2012 with nationalist rhetoric and a promise to continue the country’s push for European Union membership. However, the party has turned increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian over the past few years, analysts say.
Daily demonstrations initially broke out against the government after parliamentary elections in October 2024, when Georgian Dream secured 54 percent of the vote in elections that the opposition and Western governments say were marked by fraud and Russian interference.
Since the 2008 invasion of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, Moscow has occupied about 20 percent of Georgian territories, including two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and has expanded its influence over the government, analysts say.
Protests intensified following the government’s decision in November to delay membership talks with the European Union until 2028, Al Jazeera noted.
A majority of Georgians want EU membership, a goal written into the 1995 Georgian Constitution. The country received EU candidate status in December 2023 but relations with Brussels deteriorated following the adoption of a Russian-style “foreign agent” law this spring, which critics argue threatens civil liberties and press freedoms and is intended to suppress dissent.
Georgia Dream officials are also trying to ban all opposition parties after the October elections. Until then, they have been violently cracking down on members of the opposition, civil society and media, and are accused of using excessive force and torture against opponents and imprisoning them on trumped-up charges.
In June, a court sentenced opposition figure Giorgi Vashadze, a leader of the Strategy Builder party, to seven months in prison and banned him from holding public office for two years for refusing to cooperate with a commission probing abuse of power by a former government. Critics say the commission is a government tool to silence opponents.
“The Georgian Dream regime has imprisoned the whole of Georgia,” Vashadze said. “We are fighting for the country’s liberation.”
In early September, authorities arrested Levan Khabeishvili, a leader of the United National Movement (UNM), the largest opposition party in the country, after he called for a “peaceful revolution” during the upcoming elections. The UNM said the arrest demonstrated that the government is scared it will lose the election, even as some parties have said they will boycott the vote because it is a sham: In some districts, Georgian Dream candidates are running unopposed after opposition candidates were pressured to bow out.
Still, analysts say they expect Georgian Dream to lose support: A recent poll found that a majority of Georgians (57.1 percent) said the country is moving in the wrong direction, with 33 percent disagreeing.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has refused to step down, warning that the planned “takeover” would be met with “appropriate” force by the security forces.
“They are directly talking about radicalism, setting things on fire, Molotov (cocktails), overthrowing the government,” he said. “I call on everyone to treat their rhetoric with caution. The state and the law will (strictly handle) any display of radicalism.”
As tensions grow, Georgia, in the meantime, is stuck, say former officials.
“The country is in a standoff,” former Georgian President Salomé Zourabichvili told the Associated Press in June. “They have now put political leaders, almost all of them, into jail, but still the protests are ongoing. And the protests will go on until there is unity…and until the regime dissolves itself.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
Synagogue Attack Rocks the United Kingdom
UNITED KINGDOM
Two people were killed and at least three others wounded Thursday after a man drove a car into pedestrians and began stabbing people outside a synagogue in Manchester, an attack that took place during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Associated Press reported.
Police said the attack took place outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall, where worshipers gathered inside to celebrate Yom Kippur.
Witnesses said the attacker rammed the synagogue gates before emerging with a knife and striking people nearby, including a security guard, while attempting to enter the synagogue.
Armed officers arrived within minutes and shot a man believed to be the assailant. Police said they believed the suspect died but withheld confirmation until bomb-disposal teams had searched the scene, citing reports he may have been carrying an explosive device.
Following the attack, authorities invoked “Plato,” the national protocol for responding to “marauding terror attacks.”
British officials condemned the attack as one of the most serious in years against the country’s Jewish community.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – who was returning early from a European summit in Denmark – called it “horrific,” particularly because it took place on Yom Kippur. King Charles III and Queen Camilla said they were “deeply shocked and saddened,” while British Rabbi Jonathan Romain said the incident would intensify fears of rising antisemitism.
While mass attacks are not common in the United Kingdom, Thursday’s assault is seen as a part of a wave of antisemitic incidents across Europe since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, the Wall Street Journal wrote.
It was also the latest mass attack in Manchester, where a 2017 suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert killed 22 people.
Jewish advocacy group Community Security Trust has reported more than 1,500 antisemitic incidents in the UK during the first half of this year, the second-highest total on record.
Meanwhile, police data showed that Islamophobic incidents have also increased in the UK, with two in five reported hate crimes last year targeting Muslims.
South Korea Formally Apologizes Over Foreign Adoptions Scheme
SOUTH KOREA
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung officially apologized Thursday for the government’s handling of foreign adoptions, months after the country’s truth commission held the state accountable for violating the human rights of adoptees, Al Jazeera reported.
Lee said via Facebook he offered his “heartfelt apology and words of comfort” on behalf of the country to the thousands of children sent abroad, as well as their adoptive and birth families.
He added that the government failed to prevent the fraud and abuses regarding adoptions, and asked officials to create systems to protect adoptees and assist in helping find their birth parents.
The lucrative adoption scheme was set up as South Korea was struggling to recover from World War II and the Korean War. Starting in the 1950s, the country sent more than 200,000 babies to be adopted overseas. Scrutiny on the program, however, has been focused on adoptions during the 1970s and 1980s, when the scheme reached its peak under consecutive military regimes.
The almost three-year-long investigation analyzed complaints from 367 adoptees in Europe, the United States, and Australia. It revealed that the country fabricated birth records, faked child abandonment notices, and failed to properly vet prospective adoptive parents. As a result, many children were removed or stolen from their birth families.
The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the government was responsible for authorizing the adoption programs to lower welfare costs, and called on the government to formally apologize, Deutsche Welle noted.
After years of delay, South Korea ratified the Hague Adoption Convention in July, which is the international treaty intended to safeguard international adoptions. It took effect in the country Wednesday.
El Salvador’s Journalists Association Leaves the Country After Government Intimidation
EL SALVADOR
El Salvador’s Journalists Association announced this week it would move its legal status to an unnamed country as a result of the foreign agents law passed earlier this year, which is widely perceived as a tool to silence dissent, the Associated Press reported.
The association, founded in 1936, had already announced in September its intentions to close its offices in the country. On Wednesday, it said that it was necessary to relocate abroad to continue defending journalists’ rights and press freedom.
It added that it will transfer its legal status to another country in the region, but did not specify which one, LatAm Journalism Review added.
“This was a difficult decision, taken after evaluating the urgent need to work without limitations, pressures,” the group said in a statement.
El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has tightened his hold on power since being reelected in a landslide victory last year. He credited his electoral success to fighting the country’s powerful gangs.
In May, the country passed the foreign agents law, which imposes a 30 percent tax on funds nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) obtain from outside El Salvador and requires them to register as foreign agents.
Critics argue that the law is a tool to silence critical voices by targeting their international funding – Bukele has accused NGOs, such as human rights organizations that challenge his policies, of being sympathetic to the gangs.
The El Salvador Journalists Association was the fourth NGO to close operations in the Central American country after the passage of the law. It also reported registering 43 Salvadoran journalists who left the country between March and June, most of whom worked for independent online news outlets. They have not returned, the group said, because they fear being arrested following the detention of human rights advocates earlier this year.
Other prominent organizations have already relocated outside El Salvador. The human rights group Cristosal, for example, went into exile following the arrest in May of Ruth Eleonora López, head of its anti-corruption and justice unit.
DISCOVERIES
Xeno-partying Ants
A new study has discovered that Iberian harvester ant queens (Messor ibericus) are capable of laying eggs that hatch into an entirely different species.
This phenomenon, researchers believe, likely involves cloning and defies biology, prompting scientists to rethink the very concept of species.
It works like this: When M. ibericus mate with males of the builder harvester ant (Messor structor), the M. ibericus queens store the M. structor male’s sperm, then use it to fertilize some of the eggs they lay, Smithsonian Magazine explained. M. ibericus and M. structor, while belonging to the same genus, are different species that diverged over five million years ago.
There are a few examples of other animals, including ants, that mate with other species. But this research is made more extraordinary by the fact that this queen lays eggs of her own species and that of M. structor.
“It’s an absolutely fantastic, bizarre story of a system that allows things to happen that seem almost unimaginable,” Jacobus Boomsma, an evolutionary biologist not involved in the research, told Nature.
To conduct the study, researchers dug up various M. ibericus colonies from farm roads near Lyon, France, trying to find male ants. However, males are difficult to spot as there might be very few even in a colony of 10,000 ants.
They were, in the end, able to find 132 males from 26 M. ibericus colonies. About half of those were nearly hairless, which is a hallmark of M. structor, while the others were covered in dense hair, a typical trait of M. ibericus. DNA testing confirmed that the hairy males were M. ibericus, while the bald ones were M. structor.
The males of both species shared M. ibericus mitochondrial DNA, which comes from the mother, indicating they were all born from M. ibericus queens. However, when researchers analyzed their nuclear DNA, which comes from the father, they noticed the father was an M. structor, El País explained.
Researchers coined the term “xenoparty” to describe this behavior, which means “foreign birth.”
The team wanted to go observe this phenomenon in action, so they raised colonies in the lab, hoping to observe births of M. structor ants from an M. ibericus queen.
“It was very difficult, because in lab conditions, it’s nearly impossible to have males,” study co-author Jonathan Romiguier told New Scientist. “We had something like 50 colonies and monitored them for two years without a single male being born. Then we got lucky.”
With three M. structor born in the lab, the evidence was striking: M. ibericus queens produce males of both species. The only plausible explanation seems to be that the queen ants are cloning the M. structor males from sperm stored in a specialized organ, the spermatheca. The resulting eggs are almost totally free of M. ibericus DNA – except for mitochondrial DNA.
Moreover, by producing males of two species, the queen guarantees that her daughters, those that become queens, can mate with either species. They use M. ibericus sperm to make new queens, while M. structor sperm serves to produce hybrid workers and new M. structor males.
This biological feature ensures that M. ibericus always has plenty of workers, who take care of crucial tasks within the colony, such as building the nest, gathering food, and raising the larvae.
At the same time, the clonal M. structor males need M. ibericus queens to reproduce and hybrid workers to survive, as there is no proof of M. structor mating with members of their own kind.