The three - Avtandil Darsavelidze, Elguja Gadabadze and Tengiz Darakhvelidze - have been jailed for breaking safety regulations. Central to the state's case was that the public were not evacuated from a wide enough area.
However the police - the public authority who carried out the evacuation and who have a duty to ensure the law is being upheld - have faced no legal sanction. Nor has there been any examination of the president's role in bringing the demolition forward to pre-empt protests against the destruction of a memorial to those who died in the war against fascism and what impact that may have had on safety preparations.
Yesterday, 41 days after the disastrous demolition of the Memorial of Glory in Kutaisi - which killed two local residents after the police failed to evacuate the area - president Mikheil Saakashvili finally got around to visiting Georgia's second city.
When the demolition took place - on 19 December - the president rushed back to Georgia from the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, taking personal charge of the situation and sacking the regional governor.
Reportedly the demolition of the memorial to the 300,000 Georgians who died fighting fascism between 1941 and 1945 had been brought forward on the president's orders and every impression was given that the Georgian state was looking for scapegoats. Officials of the demolition company have been thrown in jail and blamed for the improper evacuation while the police, the public authority actually responsible for enforcing the law, have not been touched.
Throughout the following week the Georgian media reported that the president was likely to visit Kutaisi "tomorrow". But he did not show.
He went to plenty of other places. Indeed he has been out of the country twice since then: on a mysterious visit to Munich (to a conference for which no public record appears to exist) and to Estonia.
But yesterday, he finally returned. To promise an ice skating rink and to claim that the city, which was economically devastated after the collapse of the unified markets of the Soviet Union, was again an industrial powerhouse.
There appears to have been no mention of the demolition and no visit to the greiving family who lost a mother an her eight-year-old daughter to what many regard as a vanity project of Saakashvili: the building of a second home for the Georgian parliament.
The family of the mother and daughter killed in the botched demolition of a major war memorial in Kutaisi have been offered 12,000 Georgian Laris (about $7000) in compensation but major questions about the incident have not been answered reports the Human Rights Centre.
The Memorial of Glory was demolished by explosives on 19 December, but local residents were not fully evacuated and a mother and eight-year-old daughter were killed by flying debris.
The demolition was brought forward, it is widely believed on Mikheil Saakashvili's orders, from 21 December in order to pre-empt planned opposition protests against the destruction of a memorial to the 350,000 Georgians who died fighting fascism between 1941 and 1945.
In the immediate aftermath the president sacked the regional governor and returned to Georgia from the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen. But, despite rumours that he would quickly visit the city, he has conspiculously stayed away.
The Human Rights Centre say sacking the governor has allowed the regional administration to claim that the disaster was nothing to do with them, while the authorities have also said public information has been withdrawn at the instruction of the prosecutor's office.
Just under six months ago President Mikheil Saakashvili promised a “new wave of democracy” was about to break over Georgia.
In a speech made to the Georgian parliament (see photograph) on the very eve of US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit he made strenuous attempts to appear to the west, and the US in particular, to be serious in wishing to recover his poise as a reforming democrat.
Our analysis shows that he has failed to deliver.
On 20 July Mikheil Saakashvili said “we should move immediately to the direct election of mayors, beginning with our next local elections.
“The direct election of mayors, including the mayor of Tbilisi, will be held in May 2010, some nine month from now.”
In reality: pledges to elect mayors in Georgia’s other cities were abandoned. Indeed leading figures in the ruling United National Movement have tried to claim that Saakashvili did not make this pledge to parliament at all and that he only said this at the UN, which, apparently, meant it did not matter in any case.
Saakashvili said: “we should have a new electoral code and a new electoral commission by the end of this year”
In reality: the ruling party walked out of talks on the electoral code when it could not get its way and simply rammed legislation through parliament, hence meeting this deadline. However the president ignored the legal deadlines on appointing the electoral commission – so there is still not a chair in place.
Saakashvili said: “We should have a chairman of the Central Election Commission selected by a broad consensus of all major political actors”
In reality: the ruling party fixed the law to ensure that the opposition would only have a “choice” from amongst the president’s nominees. Having seen the president’s nominees – all stooges of the regime -the non-parliamentary opposition have said they will not take part. As one of the president three nominees was the existing chair the possibility remains high that Georgia’s CEC will not get any sort of “new” chairman in any case.
Saakashvili said: “In the new Georgia we are building together, it must be beyond debate that we will only change the government through the voting booth. Not by cages. Not by assaults. Not by coups. And not by tricks or machinations.”
Saakashvili said: “I … proposed last May a revision of the Constitution that would increase the independent standing and power of the Parliament. “To that end, a constitutional commission was initiated, and Mr. Avtandil Demetrashvili-a broadly respected and neutral figure, nominated in fact by the Parliamentary opposition-was appointed its chairman.
“The commission has already begun meeting, and will hold hearings with both international and local experts over the coming weeks.
“Today, I want to suggest that the Commission should specifically take up the idea of enacting further limits on the ability of the President to dissolve Parliament, in order to further increase its independence and power.”
The reality: despite the implication that the president thinks he should have less power he has proposed amendments to the constitution to increase his power – such as removing the right of initiative on tax increases from parliament and handing it over to the president. One member of the constitutional commission resigned over this while Demetrashvili made clear his deep unhappiness.
The president continues to treat the parliament as a trivial and contemptible body: recently refusing to obey the law on making nominations to the electoral commission and demanding that instead the parliament change the law to make his behavior legal. The UNM majority, as always, complied.
Saakashvili said: “Today I want to propose increasing sanctions for anyone, including government officials, who contacts any judge or judicial employee about a pending court case, and that we give the judiciary new powers to investigate and punish anyone who tries to improperly influence cases from the outside.”
In reality: The Georgian media, in co-operation with the police, daily broadcast the guilt of suspects through videoed confessions made long before any trial. For once, this week, a man pronounced as guilty by the president on national TV was aquitted. But whereas in any democratic state that would lead to an outcry and the president having to at least apologise and explain himself, in Georgia the national broadcasters ignored the way the president abused due process.
Saakashvili said: “I welcome that one of the most critical media outlets has already become eligible to cover the whole of Georgia through satellite broadcasting.”
In reality: The channel he referred to, Maestro, has the technical right to broadcast via satellite but the regime ensures that it is boycotted by advertisers and so has no financial means to broadcast while at the same time ministers admit to "state aid" of pro-government stations.. Recently the government were accused of simply stealing money destined for the station.
Saakashvili said: “I am announcing that starting this month, we will establish a monthly process of extended meetings of the National Security Council in which opposition leaders will be invited to participate in the government’s deliberation on security issues and foreign policy.”
In reality: There was one such meeting, at which Saakashvili made a great show to the media of his willingness to talk. But at the meeting opposition leaders made clear further participation was dependent on releasing political prisoners. A small number were then released on bail but the government refused to take any wider action and as a result all subsequent meetings have been boycotted by any significant non-parliamentary opposition party on the basis they were not willing to provide propaganda opportunities for the president while he was locking up their relatives and party activists.
Saakashvili said: “In Tsnorias well as in Kutaisi, in Varketli as well as in Vake. All communities in Georgia will have a chance to make your voices heard…
“I welcome and would like to echo the idea that originated in western Georgia to turn Kutaisi into a Parliamentary capital, together with Tbilisi.
“This will entail the sharing of Parliamentary roles between Kutaisi and Tbilisi. To be more precise, we would create a model in which plenary sessions will be held in Kutaisi, whereas committee work will be done in Tbilisi. This will make it possible to exercise parliamentary checks on the executive branch from Tbilisi and simultaneously to be closer to the regions, as Kutaisi is the geographic center of Georgia.
“This initiative will reinvigorate political life in Kutaisi, create new jobs, and help its economy, benefits that will extend to the entire western part of Georgia. It also will help extend development out across the country.”
In reality: The President has conspicuously refused to go anywhere near Kutaisi since he ordered the demolition of the “Memorial of Glory” there and two bystanders were subsequently killed after safety precautions were ignored to ensure the demolition was completed before the opposition could protest.
Refugee families have taken to the streets in Kutaisi, Georgia's second city, to protest at their treatment by the authorities, who have dismissed their complaints as "political" and "baseless".
The families, whose protest was organised by the Alliance for Georgia, say they have no water or electricity.
The deputy mayor of the city, Davit Gordeladze, says the building has both but that some families, who were moved in on 2 January, have not had time to apply for a connection.
Gas, water and electricity are frequently cited as problems in the city, which has some of the worst urban poverty in Georgia. After a street protest last month the city council refused to act on gas supplies saying it was a matter for the privatised utility.
The city has also seen protests over the botched demolition of the "Memorial of Glory" which killed a mother and her eight-year-old-daughter on 19 December.
their treatment by the authorities, who have
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