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2022-03-23 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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Chronicle of the civil war in Georgia. Mutiny of the National Guard
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Borislav Agadzhanov
[Regnum] On August 19, 1991, the federal government finally remembered the need to restore elementary order in a number of national republics. In particular, it was necessary to fulfill the already very old decrees of the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev"On the prohibition of the creation of armed formations not provided for by the legislation of the USSR, and the seizure of weapons in cases of illegal storage" of July 25, 1990 and "On some acts on defense issues adopted in the union republics" of December 1, 1990.
Continued from Page 4
These very decisive legal acts existed only on paper for many months, and the separatist authorities in the republics did not pay the slightest attention to them. But from the very first day of the formation of the State Emergency Committee, it was decided to put an end to the already very numerous nationalist armed formations in some union republics that had managed to obtain legal status.
Therefore, Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR General Vladimir Shuralev arrived in Tbilisi in order to eliminate the Georgian National Guard . Together with the commander of the ZakVO, General Valery Patrikeev , he met with Zviad Gamsakhurdia .
"The Saddam Hussein of the Caucasus"
At the meeting of Gamsakhurdia, in a very tough form, a demand was put forward for the immediate dissolution of the national guard. Gamsakhurdia immediately went to the envoys of the State Emergency Committee for all possible concessions.
The National Guard was "reorganized" into a special police unit under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. It should be noted that the police special unit of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, designed, following the example of the OMON, to detain especially dangerous criminals and fight riots, already existed at that time. It numbered only about 100 people. And how Gamsakhurdia intended to transfer the highly specialized functions of police special forces to the large guard, which has signs of a largely formed national army, is completely incomprehensible. Besides,
It should be noted that by August 1991, the Georgian National Guard already had 16,000 people in its ranks. The guard was formed both by calling up recruits and by entering the service of volunteers. A significant part of those who entered on a voluntary basis were officers - ethnic Georgians who deserted from the Soviet army and allied internal troops. In particular, among these deserter officers was the famous Georgian "field commander" and the future Minister of Defense of Georgia Giorgi Karkarashvili .
The commander of the national guard and the chairman of the government commission on defense was the deputy of parliament from the "Zviadist" bloc Tengiz Kitovani .Kitovani was formally subordinate to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia, but in reality, by the summer of 1991, he had largely become an independent political and security figure. Rumor considered the previously convicted Kitovani one of the "godfathers" of Georgian organized crime.
It was believed that he invested significant financial resources, including personal ones, in the formation of the National Guard. Therefore, Kitovani was extremely dissatisfied with Gamsakhurdia's decision to actually disband the National Guard and liquidate both of his power positions. Therefore, Kitovani announced that he would not obey the order of Gamsakhurdia, and withdrew a significant part of the national guard from their places of deployment to the mountains, to the Rko Gorge. Several other factors joined Kitovani's political ambitions and financial losses. The already mentioned deserter officers in the amount of 300 people fled to the mountains together with their commander. They quite reasonably assumed that the GKChP would bring all of them to the most severe trial of a military tribunal.
In addition, some of the guardsmen were extremely dissatisfied with their financial situation and living conditions of service, accusing Gamsakhurdia of not fulfilling the promises made to him. In addition, just in mid-August, the head of the Georgian government resigned. Tengiz Sigua, who had irreconcilable differences with Gamsakhurdia on the policy of personnel appointments and therefore immediately publicly supported the guardsmen who had gone to the mountains.
In essence, a full-fledged rebellion broke out in the Georgian National Guard. However, Gamsakhurdia and his propaganda apparatus for quite a long time assured the Georgian public that there was no rebellion in the guards and that the guards were just on a planned mountain exercise. An absolutely false story on this topic was shown even in the Vremya program of Central Television. However, in a small republic, of course, it was not possible to hide such a glaring fact for a long time.
Kitovani directly accused Gamsakhurdia of personal cowardice. “Our president turned out to be a hare!” Kitovani publicly stated. In addition to accusations of the dissolution of the guard, Gamsakhurdia recalled his official call of August 19, 1991 to the population of the republic with a request to "show high civic consciousness and responsibility, ensure civil peace and political stability, not succumb to provocations and not allow unauthorized actions", which, according to in essence, meant any refusal to resist the GKChP.
In turn, Gamsakhurdia and his supporters accused the rebels of acting in the interests of the State Emergency Committee and the union center. Kitovani and Sigua, allegedly “agents of the Kremlin”, deliberately destabilized the situation in Georgia in order to give Moscow a reason to apply the most severe repressions. It was very curious that the “Zviadists” even showed some documents on Georgian television, allegedly incontrovertibly testifying to the fulfillment by the rebels of the direct orders of the State Emergency Committee.
Meanwhile, it quickly became clear that Gamsakhurdia and the “Zviadists” actually remained loyal to only one of the units of the national guard - the Zugdidi battalion stationed in Western Georgia, staffed by ethnic Mingrelians. Therefore, this battalion was urgently transferred to Tbilisi. In addition, Gamsakhurdia, purely formally, could count on the Georgian police, which, as subsequent events showed, was very unreliable.
The rebels, in turn, also moved to Tbilisi. The Kitovani detachments occupied the previously mentioned former Komsomol town of Shavnabada, located in the vicinity of the Georgian capital.
It should be noted that after the failure of the State Emergency Committee, the allied authorities and the army units stationed in the republic stopped taking any measures to restore law and order on the territory of Georgia and turned into absolutely passive observers, completely helpless looking at the drama unfolding before their eyes, which very quickly outgrew into a real tragedy.
(To be continued) 
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Posted by badanov 2022-03-23 00:00||
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