No Smooth Sailing For Climate Activist Greta Thunberg In The Caucasus
No Smooth Sailing For Climate Activist Greta Thunberg In The Caucasus
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is used to being attacked by political enemies. In Georgia, though, she caught some flak from those she was trying to support.
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There's some stuff in this article that sure confuses me:
While she was in Tbilisi, Thunberg called for protests against the Turkish and Azerbaijani embassies, and the Azerbaijani state oil firm SOCAR, for their role in supplying energy to Israel and "complicity in fueling genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza.
That is not how many pro-Western Georgians see it. The Azerbaijani oil is shipped via Georgia, through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a strategic piece of infrastructure that ties Georgia to Europe and also helps ensure its energy independence from Russia.
What does it being a strategic piece of infrastructure have to do with their complicity? Why can't they be protested just because they're strategic? She isn't saying to dump them.
Others complained that she came with her own agenda rather than supporting the Georgian protesters' cause. While she became a regular attendee of the protests on the streets of Tbilisi, she was slow to talk in detail about the situation in Georgia to her millions of social media followers.
No shit. She's there because it's the closest she can get to COP29. She didn't intend to come there to support your agenda and made no secret of it.
On November 11, her last evening in Georgia, she held a protest against COP29, together with a group of activists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. They called attention to a variety of causes: Azerbaijan's abuses of human rights, both of Azerbaijani political dissidents and of the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, who fled en masse after Azerbaijan took back the territory by force last year. Other participants had signs supporting causes ranging from democracy in Georgia to animal rights.
The co-organizer of the protest was the Feminist Peace Collective, a group of left-wing Azerbaijanis. "We will not choose between Russia and the West," one member of the group told the crowd. "We will not choose between your imposed traditional values and your civilized values."
That's not what she asked you to do in the first place, but maybe you shouldn't support Russia anyway? Just a thought.
"It is a bit of a distraction," said one of the pro-Europe protesters, Maia, who was watching nearby. (She asked that her last name not be used.) "I thought that they were going to talk about democracy instead, or freedom, or something related to the actual purpose of our demonstration."
Oh, I see, you don't know who Great Thunberg is.
Also, these two juxtaposing parts just made my mind boggle:
She was called anti-Semitic for her support of Palestinians
an article in the pro-government newspaper Musavat called her a "puppet" of liberal philanthropist George Soros and other forces
So she's an antisemitic puppet of the Jews?
No shit. She’s there because it’s the closest she can get to COP29. She didn’t intend to come there to support your agenda and made no secret of it.
That seems to be the problem, though. If someone comes by and uses your protests as a platform for their own causes under the guise of allyship, is that not a reason to be irritated?