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Kakha Kukava, secretary general of the Conservative Party of Georgia and a former MP and opposition leader in the Georgian Parliament between 2004 and 2008 gives his view on the significance of the early release of the killers of Sandro Girgvliani.

A few days ago the Georgian authorities released the four killers convicted just 38 months ago for the murder of Sandro Girgvliani.

Sandro was murdered in late January 2006. Two weeks later the Imedi TV channel – then independent, now just another voice for regime propaganda, revealed the dirty truth: Sandro had visited a night club in Tbilisi where, at the same time, high level interior ministry and police officials were partying. The interior ministry party included the wife and two deputies of interior minister Vano Merabishvili.

Sandro Girgvliani's mistake was to greet a girl who was sitting at the table with policemen. What was said is subject to dispute but what happened next is not: “somebody” called a special military unit of the ministry, who detained Girgvliani, brought him to a Tbilisi cemetery, tortured him and then killed him.

After Imedi's broadcast the authorities refused to comment about the case at all or even to investigate the murder. It was immediately clear that the deputy ministers Data Akhalaia and Vasil Sanodze had become fundamental pillars of an autocratic regime and were untouchables. But after witnesses gave comments to media about the story youth protest began in all parts of the country.

Only in March did minister Merabishvili officially confirm that Sandro Girgvliani's death was murder (President Saakashvili never commented about the case then or now) and arrested four members of a special unit – announcing the case solved.

The four did not include the deputy ministers who where by now suspected by Georgian public and for that public the trial of the four accused became the trial of a Georgian judiciary who were willing to accept a case presented with no independent investigation of evidence, where the deputies of the minister were not charged and where eventually the convicted killers were imprisoned for a minimal sentence of 6 years.

Even after conviction the four became favorite prisoners: they were not locked up in any prison cell but in a separate house, with separate food and unlimited communication with their families. (Video evidence of their soft-touch regime of was broadcast by the independent – the only one we have left - Tbilisi cable TV station, Maestro, in May this year and within hours the station was attacked with a grenade.)

This spring President Saakashvili signed a special decree to decrease the imprisonment term yet further and now, in just one more insult, they have been freed.

This amnesty simply confirmed that the murder was authorised at the highest level. Why else would the authorities – usually so desperate to tell us how tough they are with criminals – even care?

Georgian justice seems to have entered a new Sicilian phase, with Don Saakashvili following the Corleone dictum: "if a witness knows that somebody will care about him he will keep silent, but if he is imprisoned for a long time, may be he will not...”

Of couse the complicity of the authorities in the murder hardly even counts as news: everybody in Tbilisi thought that murder was organized by the police in any case. What is news is that the release signals a return by President Saakashvili to the style of government that he practised up to and during 7 November 2007.

Before that day – the day of the first mass protest against Saakashvili - every passing day saw the authorities demonstrate their increasing intolerance of every different or disident view. It was not just Sandro Girgvliani who was tortured or killed: but dozens of innocent young in Tbilisi who were victims of so-called “special operations”.

The Georgian government made a show of destroying private houses with bulldozers as the “mano duro” of Saakashvili sought to build a strong state modeled on Turkmenistan. In this Asian despotism any order of the sultan was absolute law, and anything or anyone opposed was to be cut down.

But the young advisors of Sultan Saakashvili over reached themselves: they though that they lived in a poor Asian nation where all would obey every order. But that November the European reality of Georgia shone through: more than 100.000 people attended an opposition protest in Tbilisi. Never forget we were the last to submit to Soviet rule and the first to break free.

The despot tried a Uzbekistan-style dispersal and the result was a day of battles and chaos in the streets: for this nation will never again surrender its liberty and clubs and gas do not work in Georgia. Even after a state of emergency and the closure of Imedi the protest did not end: it became stronger. In January 2008 an opposition protest was attended by 200,000 – the equivalent of three million on the streets of London or Paris.

That was when the European reality of our country hit home with the Sultan and he ended his policy of open force: special operations in the streets stopped, private property was returned and some of those who had been expropriated were even compensated. (Though not in Imedi's case where new techniques were employed to steal the station).

But the protest did not go to its logical end and while the Turkmenization of Georgia was stopped no democratic reforms were started. The county's development was suspended, somewhere between Europe and Asia, between civilization and the USSR.

Then in 2009 a new wave of protest alongside catastrophic results of opinion polls showed there was a renewed challenge for Saakashvili. Nobody knows whether he ever seriously considered liberal reforms as the way of solving the crisis. But on the other hand we do know that in his team Turkmenization became popular option once again with one young “expert” saying semi-publicly that the Ukrainian way of political development had failed because fair elections and political pluralism became the cause of chaos, not its solution. Another one of the court favorites of Saakashvili convinced him that his formal resignation after the November 2007 protest and the subsequent announcement of early elections was mistake, because even if they had been fixed they had just strengthened democratic ideals in the country.

But even so and despite this spring's protests being attended by tens of thousands, President Saakashvili was not actively thinking about the Turkmenistan model.

But then in the summer, when number of demonstrators began to drop and when increased violent back-street attacks on opposition activists did not seem to increase social unrest he returned to a policy of mass arrests and the sultanate of Georgia was again revived.

In spite of public opinion or even the growing discomfort of Georgia's western partners he appointed his personal propagandist as the head of the public TV channel, and than he appointed Bacho, brother of Data, Akhalaia as his defence minster. Not only is Bacho Akhalaia brother of one of the suspected deputy ministers in the case of Sandro Girgvliani's murder, he is a figure scandal in his own right: ordereing a bloody attack in Georgia's prisons in 2006 and then in 2007 raiding a peaceful meeting.

Saakashvili's new experiment is now clear: can he establish a republic of fear in this part of the Caucasus? Is Georgia still Soviet or are our fundamental values like right to live (Georgia abolished the death penalty as early as the 12^th century) stronger yet.

The main test now is public protest. For me it is not the punishment of the killers that is the main issue but the failure to investigate the case properly in the first place. We, the Georgians, should make ourselves and our government understand that we have limits: tolerance of non-conformism and the right to democratic protest are the main signs of a true European civilization and democracy.

This is not just a challenge for the opposition, or even for government: it is a challenge for all Georgia. Democracy has failed in Russia and elsewhere in southern Caucasus, so is Georgia’s fate to be the same?

No one should pretend it is only the opposition who are in the frame. In an autocratic country nobody can count on being defended. And in recent years we have already seen how the regime destroys its own. It was not only opposition activists who became the victims of the police system, The former prime minister Zhvania died in what, at best, can be called myserious circumstances, while former Saakashvili ministers are now abroad as recognised political refugees.

And it is important that Georgia's friends in the west also understand. They might think that this or that individual and their fate is not important and that, in Georgia, the key issue is stability.

But in Georgia we recognise a greater truth: no justice, no peace.