Tbilisi Mayor: Saakashvili’s ‘poems’ cannot make us forget his past prison abuse

“People do not care what Mikheil Saakashvili has to say; the majority of our country’s population gave an appropriate response to him and his bloody regime on October 1, 2012,” stated the Mayor of the Capital, Kakha Kaladze, in response to a statement made by the former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.

As Kaladze noted while speaking to the media, no matter what Saakashvili says, the prison footage leaked in 2012 was real, and everyone remembers too well how the regime abused prisoners.

“For years, there was a deliberate violation of human rights, restriction of freedom of speech and expression, and the persecution of dissenting opinions. People did not have the right to express an alternative point of view because, if they did, they would be cut off from everything. A wife could not talk to her husband; they spoke in whispers, and we all remember how much terror the population lived under. No matter how many poems Saakashvili writes, this was reality, and facts are facts. We all remember too well how prisoners were treated. We remember that harrowing footage from the punishment cells. All of this was so horrific that it is hard for me to recall it. Now, what Saakashvili says does not interest the public. The population of our country knows very well what was happening in the country before 2012. The majority of our country’s population gave an appropriate response to Saakashvili and his bloody regime on October 1, 2012,” Kakha Kaladze stated.