Dispatch – March 25: This is fine

2026-03-25 - 13:32

It was February 20, a Friday afternoon, when the bank messaged me that my accounts were blocked. I was sitting at my desk, and my first reaction was one of irritation. I did not have time for this. I was not surprised, or shocked, or angry, and neither did I feel the dread I would have once expected from my longtime, dystopian fear that this is how it all starts — “first they freeze your bank accounts.” The bank’s message was short, misspelled, and written in Latin script but in Georgian words. It did not contain any explanation. But I knew right away what it was. Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter, to tell about minor inconveniences that build a major repressive bureaucracy. I wasn’t the first. As winter came, a growing number of politically active citizens reported similar disruptions. They, too, learned only after receiving bank messages that the aptly named Enforcement Bureau had blocked their accounts because of unpaid protest-related fines they knew nothing about. The only way to avoid the inconvenience was to call the Patrol Police hotline and ask whether there was any fine in your name. This would have given you time to appeal it before it was passed for enforcement. Easier said than done for those who suffer from phone anxiety, or simply hate the absurdity of calling some stranger to ask whether, by any chance, you are guilty of something. — Good morning, officer! Are you mad at me? And then there was the false confidence I had developed after more than a year of covering protests and being surprisingly spared similar trouble. Perhaps I had that face – invisible to cameras, unreadable by AI, or tortured enough to awaken empathy even in the most cold-blooded employees of the Interior Ministry. In the end, that illusion cost me a longer, harder hustle of trying to get my accounts back. Still, I chose to embrace the experience: if anyone could afford this illuminating adventure, it was me, a lone reporter and editor. Hell of Niceties It was indeed nice at first. You get plenty of support in the initial days: friends offer emergency cash and cards, and kind lawyers offer free advice. Even the “relevant authorities” seem helpful. The number of thank-yous and niceties I exchanged when calling Patrol Police and Enforcement Bureau hotlines to find out what I had done wrong gave me a rush of endorphins. I even made repeated calls just to double-check. Once you go to hell, everyone’s apparently super-friendly in showing you the right fire to burn in. Or maybe that’s what hell actually is: an endless wandering and asking around what your sins are, and which furnace to jump into. That’s how I found out I had a good old GEL 5,000 (≈USD 1,800) fine for “blocking” Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue on July 17. I was covering protests as a journalist that day. Luckily, I had also published the material online. But I hadn’t seen police footage, so I had to make sure first that I hadn’t forgotten to display my press badge or somehow misbehaved or created a wrong impression. What was I wearing? Maybe I did deserve to be fined $1,800 for standing on the roadway, and then not to be notified, and then to have my accounts frozen. Stuck in that uncertainty, I started my journey. I made circles around the city to collect the papers. Frozen accounts didn’t make going from one end of the capital to the other any easier. But I was learning to appreciate the music coming from a growing pile of coins in my pockets, and more in-person niceties that awaited me in those government agencies. A lady in the Patrol Police service center – the word “love” tattooed on her hand – gave me a copy of the police report and also tips on how to stop the enforcement, without me even asking. Only after that was I able to check my fine ticket on the government portals. The websites, too – thanks to whatever reforms from whatever years – openly and sincerely confirmed that I had never been notified about the fine, which strengthened my case. They could have lied about it, right? It took another couple of days of back-and-forth running to assemble the evidence for my first-ever court appeal. I was in a hurry, fearing any delay would lead to the loss of my bank savings, with no hope of ever getting them back. I finally went to court on Friday, a week after that bank message, and the last minutes felt like applying for one of those Western scholarships, where you nervously check whether you had included the list of all of your grandmother’s teenage crushes as requested, and whether your language is inhuman enough for the selection committee to take you seriously. I was lucky again: I submitted it on the first try. Guiltocracy Now all that was left was to return to the Patrol Police, present the certificate that I appealed, and request that they halt enforcement until the court ruling. They were, again, happy to help. Things happened while I was chasing papers. The UK sanctioned two Georgian pro‐government television channels, and U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran escalated into a wider regional conflict. And I was slowly noticing that, while focusing on this nice adventure of mine, I had started to overthink and stress about everything else in my life. The procedures were eating into my work duties, and half of that time had already been swallowed by what I call survival work: all the additional tasks media outlets must handle to survive in an increasingly repressive environment. That’s when you also realize why it is that most repression in Georgia comes through laws, rather than authorities just randomly stopping you in the streets and arresting you or slapping you in the face – because... why not? Instead of directly crushing you, they outlaw your existence, amendment by amendment, procedure by procedure. And when you are finally crushed, it’s with the sense that it’s not them, but YOU who did something wrong: you were the one who didn’t follow procedures, who wasn’t perfect or smart enough to navigate the maze. Rule by guilt is far more effective than rule by fists. Instead of ethics of right and wrong, you have ethics of legal or illegal. But even if you abide by those laws, there’s still room for minor inconveniences: some officer might catch you on camera while you work, and trace your face in databases, and then another officer may issue a fine, and another one may never bother notifying you, and someone else might pass it for enforcement, and someone else might end up freezing your accounts. But remedies are still in place. All you have to do is follow the procedures again: calls, documents, courts, appeals. If you have time. Who’s Them? It took me about two weeks after the bank’s message to regain access to my accounts. Another week passed before I could collect the case files – now mistakenly sent to my childhood home in Western Georgia – to finally see what was on the surveillance video. The wrongdoing was a short footage showing me approaching a march in front of the Parliament and filming it. An observant eye would have noticed the press badge and identification I was wearing. I was perfect. Whew. It will probably take weeks or months for the court to rule on my still-active fine. It may take even longer before the sense of constant bureaucratic alarm, of doing something wrong, leaves my body. And it might take a while for me to understand what – or who – that two-faced bureaucracy really is, oppressing and helping you all at the same time. Is it a large, evil, or banally evil structure with a sole purpose to punish, gaslight, drain, and ignore? Or is it a more complex, mixed creature, containing remnants of reforms once meant to protect you, and at least some of the personnel who are consciously willing to help? *** Speaking of survival, you can help Civil.ge navigate – and cover – the increasingly repressive environment by becoming our Member and subscribing to our Daily Cable newsletter, where we tell you more in-depth about Georgia’s daily hustle.