Black Sea Port Falls to Rebels in a Disintegrating Georgia : Unrest: Thousands flee east as web of civil wars racks the former Soviet land. Shevardnadze’s losses mount.

Miserable groups of displaced Georgians fled to the east Saturday as their president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, lost more territory to the rebel forces that have split this once-rich Caucasus republic apart.

Fighters loyal to ousted Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia seized a key port city in Mingrelia, a rebel region adjacent to the rich Black Sea republic of Abkhazia. The Abkhaz rebels drove out the last government troops last week.

After confiscating weapons, troop carriers and tanks from pro-Shevardnadze troops fleeing Abkhazia, ethnic Mingrelians launched a dawn attack that captured the port of Poti. At least six people were killed.

In an interview before the attack, Gamsakhurdia said that Poti is a vital supply route needed to feed 1.7 million Mingrelian Georgians as well as 100,000 new Mingrelian refugees from the Abkhaz fighting, thousands of whom were crowding the main square of the main Mingrelian town of Zugdidi.

Apart from the loss of Abkhazia and Mingrelia, Shevardnadze’s government also has little say in the affairs of two pro-Russian areas of his country, the Adjarian republic on the Black Sea and South Ossetia, northwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

Gamsakhurdia said he did not know whether Georgia can ever be stitched together again but indicated that he would join in a political process only if Shevardnadze resigned immediately and called new elections.

On Saturday, Shevardnadze held little hope that elections could solve Georgia’s troubles. “There’s the threat of the disintegration of Georgia. . . . You see how Gamsakhurdia has appeared and is forming his own regional government. Such regional presidents could appear in other places too,” he said.

Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, said that 200,000 Georgians have been made homeless in his failed, yearlong battle to keep control of Abkhazia. He accused hard-line forces in Russia of seeking to destroy Georgia’s independence by backing the ethnic rebels in a complex matrix of civil wars plaguing his 5 million people.

“It is a fact that the (Moscow military) headquarters took part,” Shevardnadze said, hinting at indirect blame for Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev. “I think Grachev thinks Abkhazia is just a fistful of land. He has interests here. It’s a good place for a naval base.”

Russia has denied any role in the fighting.

Shevardnadze said the U.S. and Western response has been insufficient to prevent the emergence of a new Russian empire on the ashes of the former Soviet Union. “Phone calls won’t help. We need a series of more decisive action, public warnings and condemnations, because this is really a serious threat, and not just for Georgia,” he said.

Shevardnadze spoke in an interview aboard a small jet taking him to Kutaisi, a main town in the western Georgia territory that he still controls. Apparently recovered from the strains of his personal defense of the doomed Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi, last week, he said he was visiting to rally his commanders.

Tbilisi was calm Saturday, and diplomats said there was no obvious threat to Shevardnadze. “Quite honestly, in this situation nobody in his entourage even wants his job,” one diplomat said. There are long lines for bread, the national currency has plummeted in value, the toll of war is measured in funeral after funeral, and the stream of people fleeing the fighting in Abkhazia is unabated.

Most of the homeless are going to Kutaisi, forced to walk for days to get there because of a severe fuel shortage.

“My family slept outside for three nights. Snow was falling,” Vezo Bobokhidze, a 47-year-old train mechanic fleeing Abkhazia, said after arriving in Kutaisi. “It all happened so suddenly. I had got the car ready with petrol and our things. But our house was hit in the shelling and destroyed. Now all we have is this blanket.”

Splintered Nation

A complex matrix of civil wars has broken Georgia apart. In addition to land the government still controls, four regions--Abkhazia, Mingrelia, Adjaria and South Ossetia--virtually govern themselves.