This could have been a time of celebration for Mikheil Saakashvili, as Georgia prepares to mark 20 years since the pro-democracy revolution that he led and deepen the European integration that he pursued.
Instead, he is now an ailing prisoner of the country he used to rule.
Few political careers can match Saakashvili’s for drama: as president after the Rose Revolution of November 2003, his sweeping reforms and modernisation drive made Georgia the West’s main political and economic ally in the region, stoking Kremlin anger that fuelled a short war in 2008 which cemented Russia’s de facto control over a fifth of Georgian territory.
After stepping down in 2013, Saakashvili became governor of Odesa in Ukraine and clashed with its then president Petro Poroshenko, who stripped him of Ukrainian citizenship in 2017 and barred him from the country, only for a crowd of supporters to help him break back through the border from Poland and then free him from a police van in Kyiv, where he had been arrested on a rooftop amid unproven claims that he was plotting a coup.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Poroshenko’s successor, restored Saakashvili’s Ukrainian passport, but he soon set his sights on a return to Georgia, even though his bitter enemies were running the country and vowed to prosecute him on a raft of charges. In 2021, he did go home – smuggled inside a milk truck – but was quickly caught and jailed for six years for abuse of power.
Yet even deprived of his liberty and health – due to hunger strikes and what he alleges was a prison poisoning – Saakashvili (55) remains arguably the most dangerous enemy of the ruling Georgian Dream party and its founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire whom critics say guides the double game allegedly played by the government: publicly backing EU integration while helping Russia regain political and economic influence in Georgia.
“My presence in Georgia has put all the country in motion. It possibly came at the expense of my own suffering and health issues. But at the same time Georgia’s civil society has proven to be vibrant and having potential for resistance against anti-democratic laws,” Saakashvili writes in answer to questions delivered by aides to the Tbilisi clinic where he is serving his sentence.
Thousands of Georgians rallied in their capital, Tbilisi, to demand freedom for Saakashvili after his arrest in October 2021, and again in March this year in protests that forced the government to scrap a Bill to brand some civil society groups as “foreign agents”, which critics said mimicked a law introduced in Russia by president Vladimir Putin’s regime.
The readiness of Georgians to mobilise in defence of their rights and freedoms is a legacy of the Rose Revolution, when, after weeks of peaceful rallies against rigged elections, Saakashvili led protesters carrying roses into parliament on November 23rd, 2003 and an old guard led by former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze was swept aside.
“The moment when I understood [the] people were winning was when I brought a huge column [of people] from western Georgia into the capital and as we were entering they were cheering us from almost every window and I understood that this wave we unleashed was unstoppable,” Saakashvili writes.
“The Rose Revolution broke the stalemate of post-Soviet stagnation not only for Georgia but for the entire post-Soviet space. Everything was put in motion and still this continues irreversibly.”
Saakashvili says Putin’s actions at home and abroad have been shaped by a desire to keep “people’s potential power at bay” and prevent pro-democracy revolts such as the Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004-5 and its Maidan Revolution of 2013-14.
He argues that the West is to blame for failing to bring Georgia closer to Nato before Russia’s 2008 invasion – when Putin reportedly told the French president Nicolas Sarkozy that Saakashvili should be “hung by his balls” – and for its subsequent failure to make Moscow suffer enough for annexing Crimea six years later in a prelude to its full invasion of Ukraine.
“If the West had not tried to brush our grievances under the carpet both before the 2008 invasion and after that, Russia could have been contained,” he writes.
“Putin was testing the West’s red lines and as he suffered no serious consequences after 2008 and 2014, it finally gave him the feeling that he could go as far as he would decide, in the condition of acquiescence from the West.”
The European Union and United States have urged Georgia’s government to ensure Saakashvili’s rights are respected and his medical needs met, and major western-based rights groups have denounced the way he has been treated in jail.
Writing in English in a wobbly hand, Saakashvili says he was kept in a “hospital where I couldn’t even get a glimmer of daylight for 15 months and I basically haven’t had access to fresh air for more than two years already. I have ups and downs in my health, but of course with no fundamental treatment my health will continue to deteriorate.”
Pictures from hospital of the normally ebullient Saakashvili looking gaunt and listless even troubled many of his critics, but Georgian Dream claims his deterioration is self-induced, and part of a desperate attempt by an arch-manipulator to alarm western capitals and radicalise the Georgian public before parliamentary elections next year.
Nikoloz Samkharadze, a Georgian Dream member and chairman of the foreign relations committee in parliament, accuses Saakashvili and allies of damaging the government’s reputation and the country’s bid to secure EU candidate member status next month by spreading lies about treatment of the former president.
Samkharadze says that after an interim decision in May from the European Court of Human Rights that Saakashvili did not need urgent transfer to a hospital in the EU, “all of a sudden [he] started to feel better, he resurrected like Jesus and is making political statements every day ... preparing the party list for next year’s elections and very active on social media, as if he wasn’t dying yesterday.”
Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili is at loggerheads with the government but has said she will not pardon Saakashvili and, even if he were released, people who worked with him and the United National Movement (UNM) are divided on whether he could be a unifying figure for the opposition.
[ The Georgian siblings who are fighting Russian influence on two different frontsOpens in new window ]
“Most Georgians, whether they are Saakashvili supporters or not, question the motives behind his imprisonment ... How can elections be free or fair when the leader of the opposition sits in a prison cell?” says former defence minister David Kezerashvili.
Other former UNM members think Georgian politics should move beyond the era of divisive “big beasts” such as Saakashvili and Ivanishvili, and also end the informal influence wielded by wealthy figures such as Kezerashvili, whom Britain and France have refused to extradite to Georgia over an embezzlement conviction that he calls politically motivated.
A key election issue will be relations with Moscow, and if Georgia receives EU candidate status next month then the government may use it to counter claims that it is cosying up to the Kremlin in a host of ways, from refusing to join Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine to resuming direct flights with Russia this year.
“My message to my people is not to give up, not to be frustrated, as that’s where the oligarch [Ivanishvili] and Russia want us to be permanently, and to keep believing in [society’s] ability to keep things changing,” Saakashvili writes.
“The Georgian nation has been aspiring towards Europe through many centuries of its existence. The first thing I did as the president was to raise the EU flag, and of course we will get there.”
