As citizens of Georgia waited in anticipation of the New Year, two high profile scandals were instead set to dampen the holiday spirit. As part of plans to decentralize government, a Soviet-era statue to hundreds of thousands of Georgians who died during World War II was set to be demolished in Georgia's second largest city of Kutaisi to make room for the construction of a new parliament building in the hope of spurring regional economic development. Originally planned to be demolished on 21 December, the president's birthday, its destruction was brought forward by two days after the city's former mayor started a campaign to collect signatures protesting the destruction of the monument by a noted Georgian sculptor, and while the opposition threatened to encircle the site. What happened next was catastrophic with a mother and her 8-year-old daughter left dead. The governor of the Imereti region, Mikheil Chogovadze, was dismissed as a result, and several other arrests, including the technical director of the company responsible for demolishing the monument, were also made. However, some bloggers and analysts consider that the real responsibility for the tragedy lies instead with the Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, and his continuing personal conflict with Russia. Crappy Town is just one of them. As Mikheil Saakashvili`s rule in Georgia is becoming more dictatorial, the empowerment of his persona`s lunacy is reaching absurd levels. […] Recently, in his the most bizzare act jet, he decreed the parliament be moved away from Tbilisi to Georgia`s second largest city Kutaisi. Choosing for it from all the sites in and around the city – one already taken by a 46 metres tall monument to the memory of thousands of Georgians who fell in the ranks of Red Army in the Second World War. […] In the end Saakashvili desecrated the memory of Georgian WWII fallen to send a message, what message and to whom only he knows, and caused deaths of a woman and a child in the process, jet it has been barely reported on in the West and then only in carefully chosen terms. Too embarrassing for them that their vassal is becoming more and more like Saparmurat Niyazov “Turkmenbashi” or perhaps Idi Amin. An erratic, authoritarian lunatic. In the mean time official Russia has declared willingness to recreate the monument in Moscow, so the Georgian Red Army fallen may be honoured there if under Saakashvili they can no longer be honoured in Kutaisi. An Armenian blog, Blogian, calls for Saakashvili's resignation. First he started a devastating war with Russia allegedly because of personal distaste for fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin and for bullying the latter as “Liliputin.” Now Georgian president Saakahsvili has finished the demolition of a WWII memorial honoring his countrymen (and countrywomen) who gave their lives in fighting the Nazis. Add two more people to that list of 300,000 people: a woman and her 8-year-old daughter were killed in the blast that brought down the war memorial […] in Kutaisi, Georgia, supposedly to clear up space for a new parliament building. […] Georgia’s president Saakashvili has (perhaps completely) lost his mind. It’s time for his dangerous adventure, initially seen as a democratic one, to end. It’s in Georgia’s national interest for her bipolar president – a democrat in rhetoric yet a dictator at heart – to resign. And while one Armenian satirical blog insensitively mocked the tragedy, failing to even mention or lament the casualties, Apolyton notes the irony in the decision to destroy the statue. The Kutaisi Glory Memorial (a distinctly Georgian-faced, semi-naked horseman with a fiery sword in front of a large concrete arch) commemorates the Georgians who served in the Red Army during World War II and went to fight the Germans. A third of them died. At the same time, Kutaisi has a memorial to Stalin which is guarded by Georgians and survived all waves of demontage of Stalin memorials. I love that we're backing this guy. Wu Wei is another who is less than impressed. His disastrous order to blow up the war memorial in Kutaisi, ignoring local and national feeling, resulted in the death of a mother and daughter who were hit quite a long way away by large chunks of flying concrete. He rushed home from the Copenhagen summit, but still hasn't gone near Kutaisi after 13 days. […] See the video of the demolition […] or perhaps don't, as You Tube warns you it is too gory. Evolutsia, however, a recently launched blog-based online magazine, takes a more restrained perspective, in an its analysis.