Georgian Troops Fight Off Rebels in Separatist Province

The Georgian government maintained its tenuous grip on the separatist province of Abkhazia on Monday when troops beat back a rebel assault on the region’s capital in bloody house-to-house fighting.

The separatists had broken through Sukhumi’s outer defenses earlier in the day, said Zhiuli Shatava, Georgia’s prime minister for Abkhazia. He said the city was shelled from land and sea and sustained heavy damage.

More than 100 people were killed and more than 800 wounded in the day’s fighting, said Shatava, without giving a breakdown of casualties from each side. Georgian TV showed scenes of bodies and house-to-house fighting.

Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze, meanwhile, visited the front lines and encouraged his soldiers on the outskirts of the city, Georgia’s last stronghold in Abkhazia.

Shevardnadze has vowed to remain in Sukhumi, issuing orders and appealing for outside help from the bomb-damaged regional parliament building in the center of the Black Sea town.

The fall of Sukhumi would be a major blow to Shevardnadze’s government, which has been fighting three civil wars and economic turmoil since breaking from the Soviet Union in 1991.

The government fears that the loss of Abkhazia could encourage other ethnic separatist movements in Georgia and southern Russia. It also could strengthen the hand of Shevardnadze’s ultranationalist opponents--particularly supporters of ousted President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who have been leading an insurgency in western Georgia.

Fighting in Abkhazia broke out a year ago after the region’s nationalist leaders declared sovereignty. More than 2,000 people have been killed in the war.

Early Monday, Shevardnadze had struck a deal with a powerful warlord in Gamsakhurdia’s camp to strengthen Sukhumi’s defenses. But the warlord’s forces were reportedly unable to get through to the besieged government troops.

Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev said Monday that Shevardnadze had agreed to a Russian offer to send peacekeepers into Abkhazia--a proposal the Georgian leader had once described as an occupation.

But Grachev himself backed away from the offer Monday, telling the Interfax news agency that “essentially a street war is going on there now. The introduction of peacekeeping forces . . . is already impossible.”