Forty four people were hospitalised as riot police clashed with demonstrators against the government’s decision to suspend talks on Georgia’s EU accession in Tbilisi for the third night in a row on Saturday, according to Georgia’s Health Ministry.
The ministry said on Sunday morning that 27 of those receiving treatment had been protesters, 16 were law enforcement officers and one was a journalist, adding that emergency response teams also provided medical assistance to “dozens” of people at the scene of the protests, but that none of their injuries had been life-threatening.
Footage of the protests showed police using tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators, with a fire breaking out in the parliament building on Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue as protesters launched fireworks and burned an effigy of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party.
A further 50 demonstrators were detained on Saturday night, Georgian broadcaster Rustavi 2 reported, taking the total number of detentions since the protests began on Thursday to over 200.
Many of those detained had been transferred to detention centres in other cities due to overcrowded facilities in Tbilisi, with some unable to attend their court hearings due to “visible external injuries”, the channel added.
At a press conference on Sunday, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze praised the police response to the protests, which he claimed were being orchestrated by “foreign instructors”.
“Despite the heaviest systematic violence applied yesterday by the violent groups and their foreign instructors, the police acted at a higher standard than the American and European ones and successfully protected the state from another attempt to violate the constitutional order”, Kobakhidze said in comments reported by Reuters.
On Saturday, the US State Department condemned the “excessive use of force” against protesters by law enforcement officers and announced that it was halting its strategic partnership with Georgia in light of Georgian Dream’s suspension of EU accession talks, which it said “made Georgia more vulnerable to the Kremlin”.
Writing on Telegram on Sunday, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev claimed that the protests were evidence of an attempted revolution that would “end very badly” and that Georgia was “rapidly heading down the Ukrainian path to a dark abyss”.