Unrest in Soviet Georgia Brings Out Troops

Troops and armored personnel carriers were sent onto the streets of the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Friday as a wave of nationalist strikes and demonstrations hit the city, the Georgian news agency Gruzinform said.

A Gruzinform journalist said more than 100,000 people gathered in front of the government and Communist Party headquarters in central Tbilisi to show solidarity with 100 people staging a hunger strike there.

Local television and many factories were on strike, including the republic’s biggest--the Dimitrov industrial plant, he said.

Interior Ministry troops and three armored personnel carriers surrounded the TV center.

“More than 100,000 people are demonstrating in front of the government and (Communist Party) Central Committee buildings,” the journalist said.

Many held banners calling for Georgia to secede from the Soviet Union and urging the full integration into the republic of an area along the Black Sea coast called Abkhazia, which has the status of an autonomous republic within Georgia, he said.

There has been growing tension in recent weeks over demands by Abkhazians that their homeland, which has a population of half a million, should be allowed to secede from Georgia and made into a full republic.

Ethnic Georgians, who form a majority of Abkhazia’s population, have opposed the idea, as has the Georgian party leadership. The leadership on Thursday fired Abkhazia’s Communist Party leader, Boris Adleyba, who backed secession.