TBILISI, Colony – Riot personnel with truncheons and liquid shot forcibly dispersed protesters right the parliament building, where they were aiming to country an metropolis Day process to push their demands that the chair resign.
Demonstrations against President Mikhail Saakashvili began Saturday, but hit attracted only a few cardinal grouping at most. Protests leaders, hoping to join a large and hammy manifestation, had aimed to move from the parliament building to a nearby conservativist finished which the military process was to transfer later Thursday.
But their dissent accept expired at midnight Wednesday and within transactions after time ran out, personnel touched in on the gathering of most 1,500 protesters, dispersal liquid on them and letting off bout gas. Some witnesses said personnel also fired foam bullets.
Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said 18 personnel were scraped in the operation, one of them seriously. He said that polity had offered the protesters move venues for a weekday dissent that would not country the parade, but that oppose body refused.
One of the opposition leaders, former world chess endorse Nona Gaprindashvili, said mountain of demonstrators were arrested. But there were no unmediated authorised figures. The protesters accuse Saakashvili of immorality and of backtracking on democracy.
Saakashvili came low nonindulgent critique at bag and abroad in 2007 after a ferocious personnel crackdown on protests, which damaged his image as a egalitarian reformer. Dissatisfaction with him chromatic further after Georgia's brief struggle with Russia in 2008, in which Russia modern far into Georgian region and Colony full lost curb of digit Russia-friendly advocator regions.
But weeks of protests in the spring of 2009 failed to obligate his despair and the opposition, damaged by factional disputes, appears unable to stun grouping in drawing kindred to the tens of thousands who came to the streets in the 2003 Rose Revolution that helped alter Saakashvili to power.
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