Anti Saakashvili demonstration in Georgia

This video from 2007 says about itself:

Complete chaos and confusion in Tbilisi. Tear gas covered the center of the Georgian capital. Police fire tear gas at protestants.

From Reuters:

Thousands rally against Georgian leader

Published: November 7, 2008

By Margarita Antidze and Matt Robinson

More than 10,000 Georgian opposition supporters rallied on Friday against President Mikheil Saakashvili, piling pressure on his government after its crushing military defeat by Russia.

The rally in the capital Tbilisi marked the first anniversary of a crackdown on opposition demonstrators, when police fired rubber bullets, teargas and water cannon to end days of protests outside parliament.

Backed by the West, Saakashvili came to power in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” on a promise to consolidate democracy in the ex-Soviet republic, but the opposition says he has fallen far short of expectations. …

Speakers demanded parliamentary and presidential elections in early 2009. They repeated accusations of election fraud.

Voices of discontent have grown louder since a five-day war with Russia in August, when Moscow sent in tanks and troops to repel a Georgian military bid to retake the country’s pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia.

“Saakashvili should step down,” said pensioner Vakhtang Dolidze. “He was not elected by the people and brought shame on us by losing our territories in war.”

Analysts and Western diplomats say Saakashvili‘s popularity appears for now undented, but warn that social discontent could spread as the economic fallout from the lost war and the global financial crisis kick in.

“BITTER LESSON”

Saakashvili’s critics say that by launching the assault on South Ossetia, which threw off Tbilisi’s rule in the early 1990s, the president walked into a war Georgia could not possibly win or afford.

The army was routed, the Kremlin recognised Georgia’s two breakaway regions, and tens of thousands of Georgians displaced by the fighting remain homeless with winter approaching.

Friday’s protest snaked through the capital from parliament across the river to the presidential palace, where leaders handed over their demands.

Tens of thousands protested for days last November until the government sent in the police and stormed the main opposition Imedi television station, taking it off the air.

But the opposition remains fragmented. One of the leading parties, the Christian Democrats, staged its own demonstration outside the Imedi offices.

Party leader Giorgi Targamadze said the events a year ago “dispelled the illusion that a government that comes to power through violence can ever bring any good to the country.”

A damning admission on the Georgian war: here.

Journalists working for the BBC have unearthed evidence of Georgian war crimes against South Ossetian civilians: here. See also here. And here.

The NATO meeting of foreign ministers held Tuesday and Wednesday this week in Brussels delivered a renewed rebuff to the US over the issue of membership in the organization by Georgia and Ukraine: here.