Protesters Push for Georgian President to Step Down

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Protesters Push for Georgian President to Step Down

AP photo / Shakh Aivazov

Demonstrators march toward Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s residence during a rally in Tbilisi on Friday.

During last summer’s war, Mikhail Saakashvili was beseeching the international community to help his country fend off “Russian aggression,” but now the biggest problem of the Georgian president is rising from within his nation’s own borders. Meanwhile, the U.S. is lying low on Georgians’ demand that Saakashvili resign the presidency.

AP via Google News:

About 20,000 demonstrators kept up the pressure on Georgia’s president to resign Friday, with some pelting his residence with cabbages and carrots on a second day of protests.

President Mikhail Saakashvili rejected their demands and called for talks.

The crowds were thinner than on Thursday, a national holiday, when three times as many demonstrators jammed the capital’s main avenue, but the daily protests showed no sign of ending.

Their most bitter criticism is directed at the president’s handling of the brief war last summer with Russia. The Georgian army was humiliated and the country lost territory as separatists and their Russian allies took full control of two breakaway Georgian regions.

Saakashvili, whose five-year term runs until 2013, told foreign reporters that he would not resign.

“It’s obvious the answer to this question is ‘no,’ ” he said in English. “It has always been ‘no,’ because that’s how it is under the constitution.”

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TAGS: bush administration georgia president protest resignation rose revolution russia saakashvili tiblisi

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By geronimo, April 11, 2009 at 11:39 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Having been put in office by Empire-USA, puppet President Saakashvili will get the same treatment from Georgians as South Vietnam’s last puppet president, General Nguyen Van Thieu got from the Vietnamese people, namely, forced exile. If he’s lucky that is, because he could get much worse, considering how many Georgian lives were lost in last year’s ill-fated U.S. sponsored Georgian-Russo War that the puppet president gladly undetook on hehalf of his U.S. benefactors. How much worse? Execution, that’s how much worse, based on what happened to Norway’s Nazi installed puppet president Vidkun Quisling after Germany’s defeat in WW II.

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By afif elias, April 11, 2009 at 8:33 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Saakashvili is a US puppet and supported by the NGO for the advancement of the imperlist capitlist folks. Those folks robbed the country and left his in bankrupt. He was promoted by NGO like criminal George Soros. Same goes for the Ukranian President who is corrupt and stole million of dollar from his people.

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By Russian Paul, April 10, 2009 at 5:19 pm Link to this comment

Saakashvili is a US puppet and a dangerous, despotic one. He started the conflict with Russia at the behest of Cheney and friends, but plays the innocent victim, the heroic, hardworking leader of a “fledgling democracy” and the MSM eats that up. The fact that Georgia might join NATO is extremely terrifying.

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