"They won't silence us' Activist's vow after ambush and beating

Opposition is pinning its hopes on parliamentary elections in October, amid attacks on government critics

- Pjotr Sauer

Zuka Berdzenishvili's face was a canvas of rainbow colours, his piercing blue eyes partly bloodstained above a pronounced purple bruise.

Berdzenishvili, a prominent activist and co-founder of the Georgian pro-democracy movement Shame, was ambushed and beaten outside his house last month by a group of unknown assailants.

"I got lucky. I had just arrived home on my scooter and was still wearing a helmet when they started beating me. Without it, my brain would have turned to soup,' he said, speaking outside the Georgian parliament in central Tbilisi, where a month earlier the ruling Georgian Dream party passed a controversial "foreign agents" law that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in protest.

The law has also derailed Georgia's long-held EU aspirations in favour of closer ties with Moscow. Mass protests in the country have largely faded away since it was passed.

Meanwhile, the Georgian government is doubling down on its anti-western shift before parliamentary elections in October, openly casting critics as traitors and accused of orchestrating violence against them.

More than a dozen NGO workers, opposition politicians and activists have been targeted by unidentified gangs, which are widely believed to have links to the government.

Berdzenishvili's attack came just after the speaker of Georgia's parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, accused him and other activists in a Facebook post of engaging in "politically motivated terror" sponsored by the EU.