Georgia Leader Appeals for Russian Peacekeeping Force

Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze, his army disintegrating along with his country, asked Russia on Monday for a peacekeeping force to help stave off an armed rebellion that threatens to topple him.

Shevardnadze sent his prime minister to Moscow a day after rebels loyal to a former president seized the western city of Samtredia and severed the last rail link between the capital, Tbilisi, and Georgia’s Black Sea coast.

The appeal underscored new respect for Moscow’s power to settle regional disputes since President Boris N. Yeltsin used the Russian army to crush an internal rebellion two weeks ago.

It marked an about-face for Shevardnadze, who had opposed the idea of Russian peacekeepers on his soil because he feared that they would covertly aid his enemies.

Some Russian army officers have never forgiven Shevardnadze for “losing” Eastern Europe in the late 1980s when he was foreign minister under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Russian troops were widely suspected of helping armed separatists three weeks ago expel the Georgian army from Abkhazia, a western Georgian province that wants to join Russia, after more than a year of fighting.

Desperate for Yeltsin’s help, Shevardnadze this month enrolled his nation in the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States, which now groups 12 former Soviet republics. That move--similar to one made by war-weary Azerbaijan--meant that Shevardnadze had abandoned two years of nationalist policies aimed at taking Georgia out of Moscow’s political and economic orbit.

The talks in Moscow between the Georgian and Russian prime ministers is the first test of how Georgia will benefit from the new alliance.

“I pin definite hopes on Russia,” Shevardnadze told Georgian radio Monday in disclosing Prime Minister Otar Patsatsia’s mission in Moscow. “We must decide how to cooperate.”

He said Patsatsia was asking Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin for a joint force made up of troops from Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to protect the embattled rail line and stop the fighting.

Russia gave no official report on the talks. But Russia’s Interfax news agency, quoting unnamed sources, said Moscow promised “all possible assistance in settling the situation in Georgia, excluding military intervention.”

Unlike the Abkhazian separatists, the rebels now fighting Shevardnadze’s army threaten to advance on the capital and overthrow him. They have captured at least nine towns in the western Georgian region of Mingrelia, including the Black Sea port of Poti.

The rebels are led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an intellectual from Mingrelia who became Georgia’s first democratically elected president in 1991.

Ousted in a January, 1992, military coup, he lived in exile in southern Russia until his return to Georgia last month.

Shevardnadze said in his radio address that the Georgian army “has practically disintegrated” in the face of the rebel offensive.

He ordered all troops to defend Kutaisi, Georgia’s second-largest city, 20 miles northeast of Samtredia and 150 miles west of Tbilisi.