The pro-government Georgian TV channel POSTV has appeared to have reported the detentions of several anti-government figures before they actually happened. The preemptive details of their arrests were deleted shortly after but all of those individuals were ultimately detained, prompting suspicions that the TV station had prior knowledge of the police’s targets.
The TV channel, known for its fiercely pro-government coverage, published a card containing information about the arrests on one of its Facebook pages on the afternoon of 24 October.
OC Media did not see the original card live before it was deleted from Facebook, but its veracity has been confirmed by numerous sources, some of whom took a screenshot of the post in question.
By that time, the police had been carrying out a week-long series of arrests of participants in the daily anti-government protests on Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue, following the tightening of protest legislation, including rules against blocking roads.
The card’s headline read:
‘Propaganda claims that the protests on Rustaveli are apolitical. Meanwhile, just yesterday, [these people] were arrested for illegally blocking the road’.
The text was followed by a list of individuals whom the channel claimed had already been detained.
The list included Tamta Gogoladze, a member of the opposition party Droa; Nato Slepakova from Freedom Square; Nika Kvitatiani of Ahali; Giorgi Lemonjava of Droa; as well as Giorgi Sikharulidze and Tengiz Kirtadze, who are currently members of the Federalists, though the card incorrectly listed them as members of the European Georgia party.
The main reason the card drew attention was that, at the time it was published, at least three of the people listed — Gogoladze, Kvitatiani, and Lemonjava — had not yet been arrested.
The material was apparently deleted minutes after its publication, but opposition figures managed to make copies, ridiculing the channel.
‘I was detained in advance’, Kvitatiani wrote on Facebook with laughing emojis, attaching a copy of the POSTV card.
‘Here we are’, Droa member Shushana Matsaberidze wrote at the same time, posting a copy of the card along with a video of Gogoladze and Lemonjava from the street.
Alongside the jokes, the card also sparked angry reactions from critics of the ruling party, who noted that pro-government media outlets appear to have prior knowledge from the relevant authorities of whose arrests are planned.
‘Look at these motherfuckers!’, anti-government activist Giorgi Mumladze wrote on Facebook.
‘Apparently, the lists were handed over from the State Security Agency to the “journalists”, as their branch representatives, and they just posted like crazy’, he added.
Tengo Tevzadze, a member of the opposition Ahali party, said that ‘POSTTV [sic] knows in advance who will be arrested’.
‘We won’t call the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the detention centers anymore; we’ll just ask POSTV directly about your whereabouts’, he wrote in a Facebook post, tagging on it some of the people the pro-government channel falsely listed as already arrested.
In the end, the individuals listed on the card were indeed detained: Lemonjava was taken by police a few hours after the card was reportedly published, while Kvitatiani and Gogoladze were detained on the third day. The court convicted all of them and sentenced them to several days in jail.
Even if the identities of those to be arrested were known in advance for POSTV, it remains unclear why the pro-government TV channel published their names beforehand instead of waiting for the arrests to actually take place.
However, critics of the government have said they do not need to know the exact details to see the nature of the current authorities.
‘This is a response for everyone, first and foremost for supporters of Georgian Dream and neutral observers, that this country has no independent institutions — in this case, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the courts — and that all decisions are made in the Georgian Dream office or by [by its founder] Bidzina Ivanishvili’, Nika Parulava, a member of Ahali, told OC Media.
According to Parulava, he and Kvitatiani were at their party office when they came across the card posted by one of the Facebook pages run by POSTV, before it was later deleted. They even made a humorous video, which begins by showing the card open on Kvitatiani’s phone, then the camera pans to Kvitatiani standing nearby, smoking a cigarette and laughing.
Parulava also highlighted the content of the card, which tends to portray the participation of party representatives in the protests in a negative light.
‘It is evident that this proves they know in advance who will be arrested, especially when it comes to political party members, so that they can later create, through their propaganda narratives, a reality in which the ongoing continuous resistance appears to be organised by parties and/or politicians’, he added.
POSTV was founded in 2017. Its current main shareholder is Viktor Japaridze, an MP from People’s Power, a satellite party of Georgian Dream.
The TV channel did not respond to OC Media’s inquiries regarding the card.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
