Zviad Mchedlishvili is a Current Time correspondent in Tbilisi, Georgia.
From December 22, 1991 to January 6, 1992, brutal, chaotic fighting ripped through downtown Tbilisi over the rule of Georgia’s first post-Soviet, elected president, Zviad Gamasakhurdia. Current Time spoke with two veterans who say the Tbilisi war was a fight that could not be avoided.
Nearly a month after ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili’s October 1, 2021 arrest in Georgia on criminal charges, most respondents in Tbilisi opted for silence when asked by Current Time whether or not they support the 2003 Rose Revolution leader.
The Georgian government is introducing new measures from September as it tries to boost the number of people vaccinated against COVID-19. People will now need to have a negative COVID test to enter restaurants, gyms, and beauty parlors if they haven't been vaccinated.
Georgian police on July 6 detained over 100 individuals for attempting to disrupt an anti-violence rally in Tbilisi intended as a response to nationalists' and ultraconservatives' disruption of a July 5 march for LGBT rights.
With unemployment in Georgia now at around 20 percent of the country’s workforce, Current Time’s Zviad Mchedlishvili spoke with Georgian jobseekers about why they are opting to go abroad to work during the coronavirus pandemic.
Unlike in nearby Armenia and Azerbaijan, ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Georgian village of Khojorni have long lived together in peace. That history is part of the reason why Georgia, which contains several such villages, has offered to mediate in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
For Georgian wines, an increasingly trendy beverage in parts of the European Union and U.S., the coronavirus pandemic could not have come at a worse time. Spring is when new wines hit the market, but Georgia’s export-oriented wine production has slowed significantly, with some wine companies either slashing production or shutting down entirely. Work in the vineyards of Georgia’s eastern Kakheti region, the heart of its wine industry, however, doesn’t stop even during a quarantine.
Georgian cancer patients appear to be regularly traveling to the European Union to claim asylum on humanitarian grounds – a measure allowed under EU migration law. Though Georgia boasts the region’s highest number of doctors (51 per 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization) and has modernized its hospitals in recent years, these patients say they cannot find the help they need.
Georgia’s governments have repeatedly declared war on poverty, but in the 300-person village of Davitiani, like in other villages in this would-be European Union member, a lack of income and lack of infrastructure remain daunting problems. To get officials’ attention, Davitiani, a predominantly ethnic Russian settlement located in the eastern vineyard region of Kakheti, is now considering an unusual option: a boycott of Georgia’s October 2020 parliamentary elections.
