`He left us to starve. Now he is gone'

By Julius Strauss in Tbilisi

24 November 2003

SHOUTS of victory and tears of relief erupted across the shabby centre of Tbilisi as the news was broadcast that the velvet revolution had triumphed over Eduard Shevardnadze.

Tens of thousands of men, women and children cheered, whooped and kissed in the Rustaveli Prospect, Tbilisi's main thoroughfare.

"He left us out in the cold to freeze and starve," said Manana Khuntsaria. "Now he is gone."

Young men piled on to cars and drove around the streets at breakneck speed, flags waving from their windows. A middle-aged amputee gave his crutches to a friend to hold and danced a jig on his one leg.

An unemployed engineer, Nino Santeladze, 42, said: "I feel this great relief in my soul that after 15 years we Georgians are once again united."

Anzor Iobashvili, one of many veterans of the separatist war in the north who joined the crowd, said: "We fought and died for this country and look at us now. We can barely afford a set of clothes to stand up in."

Another, Jambul Kurdiani, said: "I am 36 years old and can't remember a time when Shevardnadze was not our leader. Tell me another country in Europe that had to put up with that."

Outside Kashveti Church near the parliament building, dozens were lighting thin yellow candles from a large flame and crossing themselves.

Speeding back to the centre from Mr Shevardnadze's residence, a heavy-set bruiser of a man who is a bodyguard to one of the opposition leaders also crossed himself.

He said: "Today is St George's Day, our national day. It is God's will that has been done. He tested us by making us stand and protest in the rain for so many days. But now we have been delivered.

"And we have done it without bloodshed. This is a first time such a thing has happened in Georgia. It means that finally we deserve our place in Europe."

Irma Merabishvili, 34, and her two sons, 13-year-old Lasha and 12-year-old Georgy, handed flowers to protesters bouncing on top of the military vehicles, which revved their engines but never moved against the crowds.

When asked what she was feeling, she was so overcome she could only utter one word: "Freedom." It had been a day when Georgia's leaders had played a game of brinkmanship that took the country to the edge of civil war.

At the same time no one wanted bloodshed. At lunchtime, in the Georgian government building, dirty opposition supporters in black woollen hats were eating cold sausages and smoking cheap cigarettes.

Beside them sat unarmed presidential guards, looking on with bemusement. "It's a strange business," one said.

Only 24 hours earlier, the building had been Mr Shevardnazde's centre of power.

Now the woollen-hatted opposition activists were giving the orders and Mr Shevardnadze was in his last hours in office.

The final chapter of the battle to oust him had begun on Friday, when Mikhail Saakashvili, one of the two main opposition leaders, led a convoy of anti-government protesters into the capital from the west of the country.

By mid-afternoon on Saturday they had been joined by tens of thousands of ordinary Tbilisians who gathered in Freedom Square waving the flag of St George - the country's patron saint - and chanting anti-government slogans. Declaring a "bloodless revolution", they marched on the parliament building.

For a while, the granite-faced men who were Mr Shevardnadze's storm-troopers held firm as protesters crowded the streets around them.

But their slow-burning anger gradually began to build as Mr Shevardnadze, in a gesture of grand defiance, convened a new parliament based on the election results condemned by international monitors.

The Georgian student movement, which models itself on the Serbian Otpor which helped to bring down Slobodan Milosevic, chanted its trademark slogan: "Enough is enough."

Eka, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate, waved roses with one hand and held an opposition banner with the other. "The flowers I have brought for Shevardnadze's funeral," she said.

Then some MPs emerged, Shevardnadze loyalists who must have realised the regime was in its dying minutes. "Oh it's really nothing," one explained in refined English. "There's just a little unacceptable behaviour going on." But his sang froid was belied by his shaking hands.

Soon afterwards, Mr Shevardnadze's black Mercedes, a gift from the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, appeared behind a black wrought-iron gate. But the street was blocked at both ends by the protesters and it had nowhere to go.

From the other side of the parliament building, protesters began to pour in even as Mr Shevardnadze was being bustled out at the other end on foot.

Shouting and jumping for joy, they scaled the old formica desks, kicked aside the ancient bakelite telephones and stood on the tables waving flags and chanting for their leaders. Outside, the crowd was wild with happiness.

After a night of jubilation and singing many Georgians rose late yesterday. Mr Shevardnadze was still in his post, but only just.

But by mid-afternoon, tens of thousands had gathered outside the parliament, whistling, chanting and clapping to mark the end of a decade of corrupt rule.

As the day wore on the numbers increased until the whole of Rustaveli Prospect was heaving with bodies. As night fell, the mood turned from joyous to determined.

Mr Saakashvili offered a fresh deadline. He said if Shevardnadze did not resign in half an hour, the crowds would drag him out of his palatial residence.

Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, raced to the occupied parliament to try to win more time for Mr Shevardnadze. But within minutes, the first opposition supporters had driven their cars to the base of the hill leading to Mr Shevardnadze's palace.

The sweeping tide of people's power was lapping at the very edges of Mr Shevardnadze's citadel.