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| - Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who was on Thursday appointed to Ukraine's national reforms body, is a larger-than-life reformer with an unorthodox political career. Now 52, he rose to power by leading Georgia's peaceful "Rose Revolution" in 2003, ousting the former Communist-era elite. The charismatic US-educated lawyer became the darling of the West, promising to turn the country wracked by more than a decade of political turmoil, civil war, endemic poverty and institutional corruption into a democratic success story. In 2005, then-US President George W. Bush, on a visit to Tbilisi, hailed Georgia as a "beacon of democracy," and the same year Saakashvili was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by then-US Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. US President Donald Trump has called him "one of the great leaders of the world." During his nine years at the helm in Georgia, Saakashvili led an all-out anti-graft crusade, reformed the corrupt police force, jailed crime kingpins, and rebuilt the country's crumbling infrastructure. He introduced libertarian economic reforms and created a more favourable business environment that enabled a more than threefold increase of per capita GDP. But opponents have criticised his rights record and described his style of rule -- that saw police crackdowns on anti-government protest rallies -- as authoritarian. In 2008, he led a disastrous brief war with Russia, Georgia's former imperial master, that ended in humiliating defeat. As tensions escalated with Moscow over Georgia's ambitions to join NATO, Saakashvili sent in troops to seize back the Moscow-sponsored breakaway region of South Ossetia. The Kremlin struck back and in just five days pounded the Georgian army into submission, pushing its own forces deep into the country. The war cast a shadow over Georgia's long-term security and its NATO ambitions. In 2012, Saakashvili conceded an electoral defeat to the Georgian Dream party led by his nemesis oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili -- in what was Georgia's first transfer of power through the ballot box. After his second and last term as president expired in 2013, he quit Georgia for the United States where he briefly took up a post lecturing at Boston's Tufts University. He seized back the spotlight as a vocal and energetic champion of the three-month street uprising in Kiev that toppled a Moscow-backed government in 2014 and turned Ukraine on a pro-EU course. In 2015, Ukraine's then-president Petro Poroshenko appointed him governor of the strategically important Odessa region. But his stint at the helm of the Black Sea region was dogged by controversy as he attempted to reform the notoriously corrupt customs system, ran afoul of local vested interests, and fell out with Poroshenko. When Ukraine's prosecutor-general sent security agents to arrest him at his flat, Saakashvili fled to the rooftop and addressed an angry crowd of supporters. He was ultimately stripped of his Ukrainian passport and forcefully deported from the country. Saakashvili strongly supported former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky's presidential bid that led to a landslide victory over Poroshenko. He returned to Ukraine last year after the newly elected president restored his Ukrainian citizenship. Saakashvili is still wanted by the Georgian authorities on abuse of office charges, which he denies as politically motivated. Western capitals have accused Georgian authorities of a political witch-hunt and Interpol turned down requests from Tbilisi to issue a red notice against Saakashvili. im/am/pma
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