Tbilisi City Hall confirms its employees involved in clash with strikers

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include a comment from Tbilisi City Hall, which confirmed to OC Media that the ‘incident occurred at the office of the [Tbilisi City Hall’s] Social Welfare Agency and the initiators of the incident were not our employees’.

Tbilisi City Hall has confirmed to local media that its employees were captured in video footage depicting a physical conflict with people participating in Wednesday’s general strike in Saburtalo district.

On Wednesday, a three-hour general strike in Georgia demanding new and fair parliamentary elections saw thousands of employees walk out of their jobs, with businesses temporarily shutting down.

The strike came in the wake of October’s disputed parliamentary elections and on the 49th consecutive day of protests following the government’s EU U-turn.

The strike proceeded mostly peacefully, however, footage from outside a Carrefour supermarket in Tbilisi’s Saburtalo district showed a group of men, one with a baseball bat, attacking and swearing at strikers.

Businesses shutter in Georgia amidst 3-hour general strike

Thousands of employees walk out of their jobs demanding new and fair parliamentary elections.

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Since the anti-government protests began, groups of often masked men, known locally as titushki and assumed to be working for the government, have frequently attacked protesters, government critics, and journalists, with the authorities making no arrests.

Titushki is a slang term of Ukrainian origin used to describe plainclothes security forces used to attack government critics.

The opposition aligned media outlet TV Pirveli identified at least four of the attackers, saying that they are employees of the Tbilisi City Hall.

According to TV Pirveli, the four identified individuals are Tengiz Popkhadze, Luka Berbichashvili, Gia Zakaraia, and Davit Dolidze, who is reportedly the director of the Tbilisi City Hall Social Welfare Agency.

Tbilisi City Hall confirmed to local media that the people identified by TV Pirveli are in fact their employees, and that the conflict occurred outside the office of the Social Welfare Agency, but claimed that the employees were not the ‘initiators of the conflict’.

The Interior Ministry told OC Media that they had launched an investigation under Article 126 of the Criminal Code, on charges of violence.

The official results of 26 October’s parliamentary elections gave the ruling Georgian Dream party a majority, with 54% of the vote. However, local media, observer groups and opposition politicians have documented widespread vote rigging by the ruling party and the institutions it controls, which they argue resulted in a favourable outcome for Georgian Dream.

Groups of masked attackers target journalists and government critics during Tbilisi protests

A number of Georgian citizens attending the pro-EU demonstration on Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue, as well as journalists covering the protests, have been violently attacked by groups of unidentified, masked individuals. Reports of these groups, commonly referred to as ‘titushki’ — Ukraini…

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