After spending weeks locked up in a hospital, breakaway South Ossetia’s embattled opposition leader has become the troubled region's de-facto deputy prime minister through a power-sharing pact with the ruling establishment.
It is hard to say if the appointment is a promotion or a demotion for Alla Jioyeva, the main opposition candidate in South Ossetia’s multiple attempts to elect a de-facto president. Her claims to the presidency over fierce opposition from the powers-that-be and their patrons in Moscow brought her homeland to the verge of civil war and left her confined in a hospital, many of her supporters jailed.
“I will try to save those who were jailed… because of my presidential campaign, although it was not my fault,” Jioyeva told Russia's official RIA news agency.
Jioyeva’s office was raided by police in MARCH as she was preparing for her Do-It-Yourself presidential inauguration. Jioyeva and her supporters claimed they were assaulted during the raid. The powers-that-were denied the allegations, but online photos showed Jioyeva in a hospital with bodily injuries.
That was then, but now is now. Jioyeva insists that the de-facto authorities illegally revoked her victory at the polls, but, apparently, she has come to terms with the fact that South Ossetia has a new (de-facto) president and it is not her.
In an interview with Kavkazky Uzel news service, Jioyeva carefully worded her views of South Ossetia's new de-facto leader, Leonid Tibilov and his government. She said that she is relieved that the political crisis is on the mend and expressed hope that South Ossetian will not tolerate the one-upmanship that marked the rule of former leader Eduard Kokoity. Tibilov’s appointment of several Jioyeva supporters to his government could be the reason for such optimism. Let's see how long it lasts.
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