Georgian minister urged to resign his post

GEORGIA’S new interim president met security officials and told a key minister to quit yesterday after a “velvet revolution” toppled Eduard Shevardnadze.

A source close to the family of Mr Shevardnadze, and opposition officials, were quick to quash a report from Germany that the veteran leader had fled into exile there and said he was still living in Georgia.

Interim President Nino Burdzhanadze, former speaker of parliament, blamed Minister Avtandil Dzhorbenadze for Georgia's dire economic plight and for an election discredited by irregularities which triggered the anti-Shevardnadze protests.

"The state minister is responsible for this economic crisis into which the country has been led and also for holding the November 2 parliamentary elections," the steely-eyed 39-year-old lawyer told state television.

A senior economic advisor close to Ms Burdzhanadze said Georgia would ask Washington, which has backed the new leadership, for $5 million to stage new elections.

Developments are being watched closely by Georgia's big neighbour Russia, and by Western powers who want political stability to avoid problems with a pipeline being built through the territory to take Caspian oil to the Mediterranean Sea.

Oil majors BP and Statoil said the power change would not threaten their plans to build the pipeline.

Russian President Vladimir Putin who sent in his foreign minister to mediate the crisis said he was concerned that Mr Shevardnadze, 75, had been ousted under the threat of force.

But he added that the overthrow followed "systemic errors in foreign, domestic and economic policy" under Mr Shevardnadze, who had ruled for 11 years in the volatile mountainous state.

"Relations between Russia and Georgia in recent years had been quite difficult," Mr Putin said. "We assume the future legally elected leadership of the country will do everything possible to restore the tradition of friendship between our countries."

Russia has two military bases in Georgia, which has a border with Russia's conflict-racked region Chechnya.

American security advisers have also been working in Georgia under Washington's "war on terror."

Ms Burdzhanadze went straight into a meeting with military, state security and police chiefs to be briefed on security in a country that has two secessionist provinces and was racked by civil war a decade ago.

"The situation in the country is stable," Security Council member Jemal Gakhokidze told reporters ahead of the meeting.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Colin Powell called Ms Burdzhanadze to offer support, the State Department said.

Mr Powell also spoke to Mr Shevardnadze, and praised the former Soviet foreign minister a hero in the West for his role in overseeing the end of the Cold War for standing down "in the best interests of (Georgia's) people".

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana had sent an envoy to Tbilisi to meet Ms Burdzhanadze, a spokeswoman said.

Under the constitution, presidential elections must be held within 45 days in the Caucasus state of five million, but the status of the contested new parliament is ambiguous. A strong candidate to replace the snowy-haired Mr Shevardnadze is Mikhail Saakashvili, a 35-year-old American-trained lawyer who, with Ms Burdzhanadze, led the protests that toppled him. Early yesterday, only small knots of protesters huddled around the dying embers of fires outside parliament.