No Smooth Sailing For Climate Activist Greta Thunberg In The Caucasus

TBILISI -- Greta Thunberg isn't going to Baku for the COP29 climate summit: Azerbaijan's land borders are closed, and the Swedish climate activist famously doesn't fly.

But she is spending the time close by, in neighboring Georgia and Armenia. And she is finding rough waters as she navigates the region's contentious politics.

Thunberg's first stop in the Caucasus was Georgia, which she reached overland via Turkey. Her visit coincided with a period of political ferment in Georgia: Opposition activists have been holding regular protests in an attempt to overturn the results of the October 26 parliamentary elections.

The ruling Georgian Dream party won the elections by a large margin, but there were widespread reports of irregularities which opposition activists argue were broad enough to invalidate the vote.

SEE ALSO: Amid Uncertainty Over Election Results, Georgians Look To The West

Immediately after arriving, on November 4, Thunberg visited one protest. "I am here to support the fight for democracy and freedom of the Georgian people," she told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. She sought to link her cause of climate justice to the Georgians' demands for democracy. "Climate activism and human rights are united," she said in one interview.

But the solidarity wasn't always reciprocated.

While Thunberg attracts fervent opposition wherever she goes -- particularly from conservatives and climate-change deniers -- in Georgia, she also faced resistance from the forces she was trying to support, as her politics was sometimes at odds with the mainstream of the Georgian liberals protesting on Tbilisi's streets.

Diverging Views

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.

Social media posts about her visit attracted dozens of comments attacking her for her political views. She was called anti-Semitic for her support of Palestinians, and mocked for her criticism of capitalism. "She is writing harmful posts about Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, threatening our security" went one comment. "The sooner she leaves, the better."

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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.

The grounds for reproaches against Thunberg "included (but was not limited to) her using the Tbilisi protest venue to push her personal climate agenda, being a Russian pawn, being anti-Semitic, spreading 'wokeism,' or, simply, existing," wrote Nini Gabritchidze, a columnist for the news website Civil.ge.

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."

Simultaneously, a few hundred meters down the road, another protest was taking place, with a different approach to the West: several members of the European Parliament had come to support the opposition's fight against the government and their ambitions to join Europe.

'Bit Of A Distraction'

Thunberg and her co-protesters marched to join the larger demonstration, but -- other than the media who thronged around her -- they were largely ignored.

"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."

In a brief interview from the protest, Thunberg said the fight for democracy did not have to have a geopolitical dimension. "We have to stop feeding into the narratives of these false dichotomies. We cannot choose between two evils but rather make a new alternative and work on the ground with all our power to create that alternative," she told RFE/RL. "But either way, the fight for democracy and fair and democratic elections will always be...a very basic principle that everyone needs to be able to stand by."

The next day, she posted a statement on the situation in Georgia, in which she voiced full-throated support for the protests. But for some, it was likely too late, as Thunberg was never going to impress "those Georgians whose highly (geo)politicized, oversimplified, and increasingly crumbling worldview had no room for tolerating Thunberg's persona, let alone agreeing with her views," columnist Gabritchidze wrote.

Her time in Armenia has gone more smoothly, given the lack of a competing domestic political agenda and her adoption of a strongly pro-Armenian position on the conflict with Azerbaijan. She spoke at a November 14 conference, The Impact of Azerbaijan's Aggression on Human Rights and Environmental Protection," in which she called it "absolutely nauseating" that Azerbaijan was hosting the conference. In an op-ed in The Guardian ahead of the event, she called for "immediate sanctions targeted against the [Azerbaijani] regime" for what she called Baku's "terrible human rights violations."

SEE ALSO: Azerbaijan Eyes Prestige Boost From Hosting COP29, Despite The Critics

As for Azerbaijan, the authorities in Baku not long ago were on Thunberg's side: In April, the Foreign Ministry criticized the Dutch authorities when she was detained at a climate protest in Amsterdam. The Azerbaijani government often highlights such incidents in an effort to call attention to what Baku sees as the hypocrisy of Western governments who complain about Azerbaijan's human rights record.

But this time around, an article in the pro-government newspaper Musavat called her a "puppet" of liberal philanthropist George Soros and other forces. And the piece recalled Baku's support for her after her arrest in Amsterdam: Now, with her attacks on Azerbaijan, she was "ungrateful."