TBILISI — Greta Thunberg is not going to Baku for the COP29 local weather summit: Azerbaijan’s land borders are closed, and the Swedish local weather activist famously does not fly.
However she is spending the time shut by, in neighboring Georgia and Armenia. And she or he is discovering tough waters as she navigates the area’s contentious politics.
Thunberg’s first cease within the Caucasus was Georgia, which she reached overland by way of Turkey. Her go to coincided with a interval of political ferment in Georgia: Opposition activists have been holding common protests in an try and overturn the outcomes of the October 26 parliamentary elections.
The ruling Georgian Dream celebration received the elections by a big margin, however there have been widespread experiences of irregularities which opposition activists argue had been broad sufficient to invalidate the vote.
Instantly after arriving, on November 4, Thunberg visited one protest. “I’m right here to help the battle for democracy and freedom of the Georgian folks,” she advised RFE/RL’s Georgian Service. She sought to hyperlink her explanation for local weather justice to the Georgians’ calls for for democracy. “Local weather activism and human rights are united,” she mentioned in a single interview.
However the solidarity wasn’t all the time reciprocated.
Whereas Thunberg attracts fervent opposition wherever she goes — notably from conservatives and climate-change deniers — in Georgia, she additionally confronted resistance from the forces she was making an attempt to help, as her politics was typically at odds with the mainstream of the Georgian liberals protesting on Tbilisi’s streets.
Diverging Views
Whereas she was in Tbilisi, Thunberg known as for protests in opposition to the Turkish and Azerbaijani embassies, and the Azerbaijani state oil agency SOCAR, for his or her position in supplying power to Israel and “complicity in fueling genocide” in opposition to Palestinians in Gaza.
That’s not what number of pro-Western Georgians see it. The Azerbaijani oil is shipped by way of Georgia, by means of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a strategic piece of infrastructure that ties Georgia to Europe and likewise helps guarantee its power independence from Russia.
Social media posts about her go to attracted dozens of feedback attacking her for her political opinions. She was known as anti-Semitic for her help of Palestinians, and mocked for her criticism of capitalism. “She is writing dangerous posts about Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, threatening our safety” went one remark. “The earlier she leaves, the higher.”
Others complained that she got here along with her personal agenda reasonably than supporting the Georgian protesters’ trigger. Whereas she turned an everyday attendee of the protests on the streets of Tbilisi, she was gradual to speak intimately concerning the state of affairs in Georgia to her hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
The grounds for reproaches in opposition to Thunberg “included (however was not restricted to) her utilizing the Tbilisi protest venue to push her private local weather agenda, being a Russian pawn, being anti-Semitic, spreading ‘wokeism,’ or, merely, present,” wrote Nini Gabritchidze, a columnist for the information web site Civil.ge.
On November 11, her final night in Georgia, she held a protest in opposition to COP29, along with a bunch of activists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. They known as consideration to a wide range of causes: Azerbaijan’s abuses of human rights, each of Azerbaijani political dissidents and of the ethnic Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh, who fled en masse after Azerbaijan took again the territory by drive final yr. Different contributors had indicators supporting causes starting from democracy in Georgia to animal rights.
The co-organizer of the protest was the Feminist Peace Collective, a bunch of left-wing Azerbaijanis. “We is not going to select between Russia and the West,” one member of the group advised the group. “We is not going to select between your imposed conventional values and your civilized values.”
Concurrently, just a few hundred meters down the street, one other protest was going down, with a special strategy to the West: a number of members of the European Parliament had come to help the opposition’s battle in opposition to the federal government and their ambitions to affix Europe.
‘Bit Of A Distraction‘
Thunberg and her co-protesters marched to affix the bigger demonstration, however — aside from the media who thronged round her — they had been largely ignored.
“It’s a little bit of a distraction,” mentioned one of many pro-Europe protesters, Maia, who was watching close by. (She requested that her final identify not be used.) “I believed that they had been going to speak about democracy as a substitute, or freedom, or one thing associated to the precise function of our demonstration.”
In a quick interview from the protest, Thunberg mentioned the battle for democracy didn’t should have a geopolitical dimension. “We have now to cease feeding into the narratives of those false dichotomies. We can’t select between two evils however reasonably make a brand new various and work on the bottom with all our energy to create that various,” she advised RFE/RL. “However both means, the battle for democracy and honest and democratic elections will all the time be…a really fundamental precept that everybody wants to have the ability to stand by.”
The following day, she posted a assertion on the state of affairs in Georgia, during which she voiced full-throated help for the protests. However for some, it was seemingly too late, as Thunberg was by no means going to impress “these Georgians whose extremely (geo)politicized, oversimplified, and more and more crumbling worldview had no room for tolerating Thunberg’s persona, not to mention agreeing along with her views,” columnist Gabritchidze wrote.
Her time in Armenia has gone extra easily, given the shortage of a competing home political agenda and her adoption of a strongly pro-Armenian place on the battle with Azerbaijan. She spoke at a November 14 convention, The Affect of Azerbaijan’s Aggression on Human Rights and Environmental Safety,” during which she known as it “completely nauseating” that Azerbaijan was internet hosting the convention. In an op-ed in The Guardian forward of the occasion, she known as for “speedy sanctions focused in opposition to the [Azerbaijani] regime” for what she known as Baku’s “horrible human rights violations.”
As for Azerbaijan, the authorities in Baku not way back had been on Thunberg’s aspect: In April, the Overseas Ministry criticized the Dutch authorities when she was detained at a local weather protest in Amsterdam. The Azerbaijani authorities usually highlights such incidents in an effort to name consideration to what Baku sees because the hypocrisy of Western governments who complain about Azerbaijan’s human rights file.
However this time round, an article within the pro-government newspaper Musavat known as her a “puppet” of liberal philanthropist George Soros and different forces. And the piece recalled Baku’s help for her after her arrest in Amsterdam: Now, along with her assaults on Azerbaijan, she was “ungrateful.”