According to his supporters, his state of health is critical, but he will still remain behind bars: former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili did not obtain the provisional release demanded by his lawyers. He will therefore continue to serve his sentence and appeals to the international community, believing that his life is now in danger.
His supporters let their anger burst out on this evening of February 6, after an unfavorable hearing for the former Georgian president. Mikheil Saakashvili will have to continue serving his sentence despite an increasingly critical state of health. For Georgian justice and for the power in place, nothing can justify the release of the former president, accused of simulating or exaggerating his health problems to escape his sentence: six years in prison for “abuse of power “. However, all those who have been able to approach him in recent months are formal: Mikheil Saakashvili’s state of health has suddenly deteriorated. This was told to RFI Khatia Dekanoïdze, an opposition MP who was authorized to visit the former president.
“ It was a shock to see him like that… You know he can barely move, he walks with a walker, and he lost a lot of weight. Previously he was full of energy, he was a charismatic person and now it is quite the opposite. He is a destroyed man, physically and psychologically tortured. So yes it is difficult to see him in this state. »
► To read also: Georgia: ex-president Saakashvili would have been poisoned in prison
A form of personal revenge
For this deputy, former minister of Mikheil Saakashvili, there is political and judicial relentlessness against the former Georgian president. And behind this relentlessness, there is a man: Bidzina Ivanichvili. A billionaire whose fortune was made in Russia in the 1990s and who has ruled Georgia behind the scenes for a decade. “ He considers Mikheil Saakashvili as a personal enemy and therefore it is a kind of revenge against him, denounces the deputy of the United National Movement, the party founded in the early 2000s by the former president. ” For Bidzina Inachvili, it is also a way of showing that he is all-powerful, that he does what he wants. And then that’s how the ruling party treats the opposition. They dehumanize anyone who is pro-Western or critical of the government. »
Another explanation put forward by supporters of the man who was the hero of the “Rose Revolution” in 2003, the hatred felt against him by Vladimir Putin, the Russian President. ” When there was the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008, Khatia Dekanoidze point, Putin told Condoleezza Rice, who was US Secretary of State at the time, that he wanted to punish Saakashvili. » His wrong? Having spearheaded the first “color revolution” in the post-Soviet space, and having resolutely turned towards the Western camp. Keeping Saakashvili in prison, despite the risk incurred by the former president, would therefore be a form of service rendered to the Kremlin by the current Georgian power, anxious to spare the susceptibility of its Russian neighbour.
Calculation error
Mikheil Saakashvili’s ordeal begins in the fall of 2021. Tired of his exile in Ukraine, the former president is convinced that all he has to do is return to his country to overthrow power. But this gamble turns into a fiasco: the demonstrations do not take on the expected scale, and Saakashvili is quickly arrested. ” Ihe believed on returning to Georgia that his supporters were going to win and he was seriously mistaken “, analyzes the geographer Jean Radvanyi, professor emeritus at Inalco, the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations*. ” He was wrong on two counts:firstly because his supporters do not represent a sufficient majority to impose political change in Georgia and secondly because he himself still arouses deep discontent in Georgia. »
A miscalculation and a misunderstanding that come from the contrasting record of his decade in power. Arriving at the presidency in 2004, in the wake of the “Rose Revolution” which saw the fall of Edouard Shevardnadze, when he was 36 years old, Mikheil Saakashvili first successfully tackled corruption endemic that was rampant in Georgia. ” Ithe virtually succeeded in eliminating petty corruption, notes Jean Radvanyi, the corruption of daily life, of administrative procedures, of the police, etc. And that was the basis of his success for his re-election, from the first round in 2008. And then, then, there was the disaster of the war against Russia and an authoritarian drift with a mixture of corruption, clanism, violence. So that in the following political crisis, he lost the elections and he had to go into exile. »
A second Belarus?
Today, Mikheil Saakashvili is a physically and politically weakened man. His Western allies are too busy with Ukraine to give him the support he needs. And in the street, his supporters fail to impose the balance of power that would allow them to obtain the release of the “fallen hero” of the “Rose Revolution”. Tells him that he was poisoned and that he risks losing his life if he remains in prison. ” As I’m dying, I don’t have much time, he wrote in a letter published by the daily The world on January 31, 2023. France can still prevent Georgia from becoming a second Belarus “, writes the former president, who asks Emmanuel Macron to put pressure on the authorities of the country to obtain his release.
► On the same subject: Georgia: anti-government and pro-EU membership protests continue
*author of Russia, a vertigo of power to be published on February 23, 2023 by Éditions La Découverte