TBILISI: Georgia jailed two prominent opposition figures on Friday, the latest in a string of sentences that critics condemn as a crackdown on dissent that puts nearly all opposition leaders behind bars.
Georgia has faced political unrest since the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed victory in October’s parliamentary elections.
The opposition rejected the results, triggering mass protests that escalated after the government suspended negotiations on joining the European Union.
Protesters accuse the ruling party of drifting toward authoritarianism and aligning the country with Moscow — allegations the government denies.
Opposition figures and rights activists are being targeted in a wave of arrests and prosecutions.
On Friday, a Tbilisi court ordered Nika Melia — the co-leader of the key opposition Akhali party — to be jailed for eight months.
Another prominent opposition politician, Givi Targamadze, was sentenced to seven months in prison.
The two were also barred from holding public office for two years.
They were convicted of failing to cooperate with a divisive parliamentary enquiry probing alleged abuses under jailed ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Saakashvili, a pro-Western reformer, is serving a 12.5-year sentence on charges widely condemned by rights groups as politically motivated.
Melia has been in pre-trial detention since late May.
Targamadze, a member of Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM), said he believed his sentence was “a Russian order.”
In 2016, he survived a bomb attack when his car exploded in central Tbilisi just days before parliamentary elections.
Nearly all of Georgia’s opposition leaders have been jailed this month on charges similar to those levelled at Melia and Targamadze.
They have dismissed the parliamentary commission as illegitimate and accused Georgian Dream of using it to silence dissent.
Ahead of last year’s elections, Georgian Dream announced plans to outlaw all major opposition parties.
Georgia tightens screws on opposition, jails more leaders
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Georgia tightens screws on opposition, jails more leaders
- Opposition figures and rights activists are being targeted in a wave of arrests and prosecutions
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
