GEORGIA: PRISON ABUSE SCANDAL ROCKS GEORGIA IN LEAD UP TO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili appears to be suffering the same torrid fate which has befallen his incumbent contemporaries in the lead up to presidential elections in their respective countries.

With leadership elections due on October 1, Saakashvili already faced an uphill task to secure re-election, what with the country’s stagnating economy – an experience which is not too dissimilar from the rest of the continent - and its people discontent with a government seen by many to have no qualms about encroaching on their civil liberties and freedom. Unfortunately for Saakashvili and his supporters his problems have been further compounded by recent videos released by his political opponents which show gross abuse of prisoners by the authorities.

As expected the images have drawn the ire of the public and the furore which emanated as a result has failed to dissipate into the ether with the rapidity which Saakashvili seeks. The broadcast of the images by television stations allied with the country’s opposition parties has led to days of protests by individuals who have taken to the streets in their thousands to denounce the authorities.

To his credit Saakashvili has moved to distance himself and his party from the images which show prison authorities indiscriminately beating, allegedly raping, manhandling and hitting prisoners. The chief of Tbilisi prison where the abuse was recorded, his deputies and prison guards with alleged involvement in the debacle have been detained by the authorities. The country’s Interior Minister Bacho Akhalaia resigned earlier in the week and Saakashvili has also this week appointed a new Prisons Minister in Georgy Tugushi following the resignation of the minister in charge of the prisons at the time of the scandal.

Controversy still surrounds the production of the video and how it happened to have been acquired by the media. According to the global news agency Reuters, Saakashvili’s United National Movement party claim that the videos were staged and the recording filmed by guards who had been bribed by “politically motivated persons”. Whatever the origins of the video, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe (COE) have weighed in on the scandal and urged Saakashvili to bring those culpable to justice and also reminded the government of the duty to maintain human rights standards across the nation.

The revelations which surfaced at such a late phase in the presidential campaign comes as a gift to the Georgian Dream coalition led Bidzina Ivanishvili and no doubt has the capacity to significantly hurt Saakashvili’s re-election ambitions although not enough, in the current writer’s opinion, to decimate the 20 percentage points cushion which the United National Movement had over its opponents before the scandal broke and by election day.