Georgia Leader Reportedly Flees Tbilisi

President Zviad Gamsakhurdia fled Georgia’s parliament building with loyalist troops and family members before dawn today after a two-week siege by opposition fighters, the Associated Press reported.

Gamsakhurdia was reported heading for western Georgia.

Gamsakhurdia, accused by rebel leaders of acting like a dictator since becoming the former Soviet republic’s first popularly elected president in May, had been holed up in Government House since fighting broke out Dec. 22.

There was no immediate sign of widespread fighting in the capital this morning, but fire broke out in the parliament building about 6 hours after Gamsakhurdia’s departure and engulfed the building.

Some fighters could be seen firing their weapons into the air in apparent celebration.

Earlier Sunday, the embattled Gamsakhurdia had said for the first time that he might resign, were the people of Georgia to approve such a step in a referendum.

By the president’s own admission, his telephones had been cut off, and he could no longer contact his subordinates around the country, nearly as large as South Carolina, that he was elected to govern.

It became increasingly difficult for loyalists to supply him and his troops with food and medical supplies. And he feared for his wife and his two children, 12 and 15, who were under guard but blockaded in another neighborhood of Tbilisi. He feared they might be seized as hostages.

Gamsakhurdia, 52, the duly elected president of Georgia, its first, has been afraid, in fact, to leave his refuge beneath Government House for weeks now because of the possibility of arrest or assassination.

It is as if an American President were forced to stay in the White House basement and run the country from there.

Above ground, the struggle for the mastery of Georgia’s capital had flickered off and on Sunday.

On an armored vehicle parked in an inner courtyard at Government House, some wit had scrawled in English, “Please pardon the inconvenience.”

The building itself was plastered in another rocket attack early Sunday evening. And after nightfall, opposition forces hammered the building with artillery fire from positions in surrounding hills. Gamsakhurdia loyalists fired back ineffectively with machine guns.

Georgia’s opposition, which formed a Military Council and rival government, went about the business of consolidating its rule, firing 10 ministers judged too close to Gamsakhurdia. The president called such actions blatantly illegal.

Deep in the marble-walled entrails of Parliament, the lanky president had tried to explain Sunday how someone elected Georgia’s leader with 87% of the vote only eight months ago had been driven to take refuge in a bunker.

“This is the work of Moscow--Moscow does not want a free Georgia,” said Gamsakhurdia, who has been denounced by his enemies as a paranoid dictator.

The “inspirer” of the uprising, Gamsakhurdia charged, is none other than former Soviet foreign minister and onetime Georgian Communist Party leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

A fluent English speaker and a translator of Shakespeare, Georgia’s president sat at a table in a room being used by the defenders of Government House as a cafeteria and a place to play chess.

Through an underground corridor, men in battle dress hustled by, toting assault rifles, ancient-looking carbines and machine pistols. One man pushed along a prisoner who seemed to be about 20 and whose dark eyes were wide with fear. In one dim room, men in combat fatigues, some with their helmets tipped over their eyes, dozed on thin mattresses tossed on the floor.

Gamsakhurdia said he had his own private room, one rumored to have been built by Georgia’s Communist leaders to allow them to ride out a nuclear war and which may be linked by a secret tunnel to a nearby mountain.

At lunch time, soldiers in a vast subterranean mess hall chowed down a grayish brown stew and fistfuls of flat Georgian bread.

Gamsakhurdia said the food given the loyalists was bad and that supplying the building was becoming tougher because opposition fighters from the Georgian National Guard and the Sakartvelos Mkhedrioni (Knights of Georgia) militia were no longer trying to invade the building but blockade it.

These new tactics, Gamsakhurdia said, were working. “We are without communication--we are cut off from the rest of the world,” he said.

Asked what his own strategy now is, he had replied: “To keep fighting.”

What kept Gamsakhurdia going in such bleak circumstances is “faith and our love of Georgia,” he said

His ordeal, Gamsakhurdia said, was not really all that different from the prison time he did under Soviet rule for advocating Georgia’s independence.

An alcove in the mess hall screened off with blankets had been made to serve as a first aid station. A few wounded men lying inert on litters on the floor could be glimpsed before an angry woman chased a small group of visiting reporters away.

Gamsakhurdia’s enemies claimed there was a dysentery epidemic raging inside the building as well as a group of 12- and 13-year-olds being held hostage, but visiting journalists saw no sign of either in the part of the huge building they were allowed to visit.

His foes also accused him of holding top officials hostage or even ordering their assassination if they went over to the opposition. One of those supposedly eliminated was a deputy defense minister, Nodar Georgadze, but he turned up last week in the Government House basement to help organize defenses, wisecracking, “I arose from the dead.”

In a surreal way, the machinery of Gamsakhurdia’s government kept grinding. On Sunday, he met with prefects who are supposed to enforce his decisions throughout Georgia, but he later admitted that he could no longer keep tabs on their actions.

Built by German prisoners from World War II over seven years, from 1946 to 1953, Government House is so solid that “as you see, it can take 10 days of artillery and rocket fire and still be standing,” a Gamsakhurdia adviser said smugly.

Roman Kavtardze, a retired Soviet army major who has donned his uniform again to help Gamsakhurdia, said Sunday that he rated the two sides as roughly equal in strength.