About 3,000 former Georgia supporters of President Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday messed up at the prison where Saakashvili is stationed to demand his release.
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Saakashvili, who founded Georgia’s largest opposition party, the United National Movement, and served as president from 2004 to 2013, secretly returned from exile on the eve of Georgia’s municipal elections and was detained.
He is currently in Rustavi City Prison.
Saakashvili supporters gathered at the prison and promised to organize mass protests in the coming days.
“Saakashvili, who rebuilt Georgia, is in prison, and those in power are destroying the country,” Natal Svanidze, a 51-year-old nurse, told AFP. “He must be released.”
Saakashvili left Georgia in 2013, when his second term as president ended. In recent years, he has lived in Ukraine, where he has held various high-ranking positions and currently chairs the Ukraine Reform Executive Committee.
In 2018, he was convicted in absentia on abuse of office and sentenced to six years in prison. Saakashvili, a 53-year-old Ukrainian citizen, himself dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and went on hunger strike after his arrest.
He is now also the subject of criminal proceedings for illegal crossing of the state border.
The Georgian prosecutor has ruled that the convictions handed down to the former president cannot be appealed and has rejected the possibility of extraditing him to Ukraine. Saakashvili’s lawyer, on the other hand, has indicated that his defendant can be released only if he is pardoned by Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, who has stated that he is not allowed to do so.
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said on television that “no one on the planet will be able to persuade us to release Saakashvili.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will try to secure Saakashvili’s release.
Garibashvili, for his part, said that Saakashvili would have to serve all his sentence and then, of course, he would be able to return to Ukraine.
He pointed out that Saakashvili had a choice. “Saakashvili had to leave politics or we had to detain him,” Garibashvili said, advising Saakashvili to behave well or reckon with new charges.
Garibashvili said Saakashvili had neither abandoned politics, nor asked for forgiveness, nor claimed clemency.
In Georgia’s local elections on Saturday, the ruling party “Georgia’s Dream” won the most votes, ahead of the United National Movement founded by Saakashvili.
However, the United National Movement has succeeded in winning the majority in several major cities.
All major cities, including Tbilisi, will have to hold a second round of mayoral elections scheduled for October 30. Candidates for the “Georgia Dream” and the United National Movement will compete in it.
The opposition has said the election has been fraudulent.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observers also said on Saturday that there had been numerous and consistent complaints of intimidation, vote-buying, pressure on candidates and voters, and unequal opportunities for candidates. The “Georgia Dream” has misused the resources at its disposal, gaining an advantage over the candidates, and there have been instances of journalists being intimidated and abused, observers said.
Saakashvili said the results signaled the acceptance of the opposition and called on opposition parties to “unite, forget all resentment and permanently restore democracy in Georgia”.
“Now – in all the major cities where the second round is scheduled – we should go on a much stronger offensive,” Saakashvili told Facebook on Sunday.
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