 During Gamsakhurdia's presidency in the early 1990s, the Azeri-sounding names of 32 villages were changed overnight to Georgian ones by a special decree.Their Azeri population has expressed dissatisfaction with this decision and addressed their concerns in writing to president Mikheil Saakashvili, but the problem has not been resolved.In 2009, the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities qualified the renaming of Azeri-populated villages as violation of principles of Article 11 of the Framework Convention, to which Georgia is a signatory, and urged the government of Georgia to co-operate with the local ethnic minority to reintroduce the traditional names.