Thousands celebrate Shrevardnadze resignation

Launching fireworks and champagne corks into the air, thousands of Georgians revelled today in the resignation of President Eduard Shevardnadze in boisterous street celebrations in the capital Tbilisi, marking what many called a “holiday of freedom.”

The revelry was peaceful, with no visible police presence monitoring the celebrants who poured on to the main Rustaveli avenue in Tbilisi.

People sounded car horns, waved flags, whistled and slapped high-fives during the impromptu festivities that went on late into the night.

“It’s a great day in the history of Georgia,” said medical student Georgy Gosishvili, 21, waving in a wide figure-eight the white flag with red stripes and crosses that is the symbol of the opposition. “Communists can’t rule Georgia anymore.”

At the only sign of a visible security presence in the city, near Shevardnadze’s residence outside the centre of town, opposition sympathisers placed flowers into the machine gun barrels of two armoured personnel carriers blocking a street.

Irma Merabishvili 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 the 34-year-old teacher was feeling, she was so overcome she could only utter one word: “Freedom.”

“After Shevardnadze, everything will be peaceful,” said her husband, Gela, 41, a shoemaker.

The demonstrators themselves maintained order and kept people from flooding the streets as a steady procession of official vehicles drove by, including the motorcade of Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who helped negotiate an agreement for Shevardnadze’s departure with opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili.

But the crowd’s enthusiasm was too much to restrain when Saakashvili himself drove out in an armoured black four wheel drive vehicle. Demonstrators flooded toward the car and chanted his nickname, “Misha!”

“Today is a big holiday for the Georgian people. (Shevardnadze’s) leaving peacefully,” said Georgy Prengishvili, a 64-year-old icon painter wearing the traditional Caucasus folk costume, a flared black tunic and fuzzy cap with a dagger on his belt.

Standing near the president’s residency, he said he had come to Tbilisi from his home in western Georgia a week ago to join the crowds.

“He didn’t do anything for the people,” Prengishvili said of Shevardnadze. “He only paid attention to his those from his own clan.”

Later, a young woman enthusiastically embraced a couple of military officers who had stood down and not acted against the crowds.

A unit of about 100 soldiers wearing green camouflage also marched toward the residency in support of the demonstrators.

After Shevardnadze’s evening resignation, a barrage of fireworks lit up the crowds outside the parliament that has been ground zero for the populist uprising. Opposition demonstrators stormed into parliament Saturday, forcing Shevardnadze to flee the building during a speech – the decisive move leading to his resignation after weeks of protests following November 2 parliamentary elections that were widely condemned as flawed.

Crowds flooded to the centre of Tbilisi, packing the streets and climbing on to cars trying to navigate through the masses.

“There was no blood, no killing, everything was peaceful,” said Nona Ushuilidze, a 60-year-old university teacher who was among a calmer group of women watching the spectacle. “People love each other, they’re meeting strangers and all wishing each other luck.”

One of her friends, Ulnera Akhverdashvili, 45, a captain in the Georgian border guards, said the spirit of celebration wouldn’t turn into violence – as this Caucasus country has seen before amid political instability after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

“I trust in the people, because all the authorities are also on the side of the masses,” she said.