Georgia on alert after rebel region bars leader

Georgia put its army on alert yesterday after border guards in its semi-tropical Muslim province of Adzharia on the Black Sea fired shots in the air to deny entrance to the newly elected Georgian leader, who led a successful revolt last year.

The crisis over the fate of Adzharia, which has long enjoyed de facto independence in Georgia, is likely to rapidly draw in Russia and the US, which have long fought a covert "cold war" over the future of Georgia and the two other former Soviet republics in the south Caucasus.

Aslan Abashidze, the ruler of Adzharia for more than a decade, is allied to Russia and was yesterday trying to get a plane back to Batumi, the port city which is the capital of the province, but he said the Georgian leader had threatened to shoot it down. He has enjoyed absolute power in the enclave since the early 1990s, financing himself with customs duties on goods crossing border with nearby Turkey.

The confrontation began yesterday when President Mikhail Saakashvili, accompanied by officials and 30 bodyguards, headed out of the mountains from the Georgian capital Tbilisi to Adzharia to campaign for Georgia's parliamentary election, to be held on 28 March. He later said his motorcade was stopped by about 100 gunmen who refused them entry. "I was ready to go to Adzharia without bodyguards, with just several people escorting me, but received a refusal," Mr Saakashvili said on Georgian television.

The President twice tried to cross the border into what is theoretically his own country, only to be met with a warning shot on the first occasion and a chanting crowd on the second. "We want Babu. Long live our President," the crowd shouted, referring to Mr Abashidze's nickname of "grandfather".

"My dear people, calm down," Mr Saakashvili countered. "I came here to meet you and to negotiate. Are you part of Georgia? Why don't you let me enter Adzharia? Why is the road mined? Why are there grenade launchers here? I'm your president."

Earlier Georgia's Rustavi-2 television showed soldiers blocking Mr Saakashvili's convoy at a checkpoint into Adzharia. "No way. We will not allow you to enter," one soldier told Georgia's prosecutor, General Irakly Okruashivili, and the Interior Minister, Georgy Baramidze when they approached his post on foot.

After a savage civil war in the early 1990s. the Black Sea coastal region of Abkhazia drove out Georgians with the backing of Russia.

Adzharia, with a population of 450,000 and much wealthier and better run than the rest of Georgia, has never sought absolute independence.

Mr Abashidze, who was in Moscow yesterday, claimed that during a phone conversation with him, Mr Saakashvili threatened to shoot down his plane if he tried to return to Adzharia. "I responded by promising to personally tell him the hour of departure and the number of my flight," Mr Abashidze told the Interfax news agency. "Let him do it."