GEORGIA’S jailed opposition leader and ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili has developed serious neurological conditions as a result of torture and ill treatment in custody, an independent council of medics said yesterday.

Saakashvili had refused food for 50 days to protest against his jailing on abuse of office conviction he has denounced as politically motivated.

The 53-year-old pro-Western reformer called off his hunger strike after he was placed – in a critical condition – in a military hospital in Georgia’s eastern city of Gori.

Saakashvili has developed a number of neurological diseases “as a result of torture, ill treatment, inadequate medical care, and a prolonged hunger strike”, said the doctors, who had examined him in custody.

Their statement said he had been diagnosed with the potentially life-threatening brain disease Wernicke encephalopathy and with post-traumatic stress disorder, among other conditions.

One of the doctors, psychiatrist Mariam Jishkariani, told AFP that the conditions that “resulted from Saakashvili’s psychological torture in prison, could lead to his incapacitation if he is not given a proper medical care”.

Earlier last month, Saakashvili said he was subjected to psychological torture that included death threats, sleep deprivation and physical abuse.

“I was tortured, I was treated inhumanely, beaten up, and humiliated,” he said.

Amnesty International has branded Saakashvili’s treatment “not just selective justice but apparent political revenge”.

Georgia’s president from 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili was arrested on October 1, shortly after he secretly returned to Georgia from exile in Ukraine.

The arrest of the country’s foremost opposition leader exacerbated a political crisis stemming from parliamentary polls last year that the opposition denounced as fraudulent.

It has also spurred the largest anti-government protests in a decade.

Rights groups have accused the Georgian government of using criminal prosecutions to punish political opponents and critical media. 

Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili sparked an uproar recently when he said the government had been forced to arrest Saakashvili because he refused to quit politics. – AFP, December 19, 2021.