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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.