The rioters swore allegiance to the president
Yesterday, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze put an end to the story of the mutiny of the national guard battalion. He received the officers of this unit at the state office, after which he declared that the incident was over.

The meeting was attended by all, without exception, the instigators of the incident that occurred on Friday. Let us recall that on this day one of the guards battalions refused to carry out the orders of the Ministry of Defense, arbitrarily left its place of deployment in the village of Norio, where it had arrived to participate in military exercises, and occupied the base of the brigade of internal troops in Mukhrovani - the main part of the brigade at that time was in Pankisi gorge on the border with Chechnya.
By the way, as it turned out later, the brigade of internal troops was going to leave the gorge that day and move against the guard (since their families lived at the base in Mukhrovani, who were practically held hostage), but the commander of the internal troops, General Georgiy Shervashidze, at the last moment managed to convince the brigade soldiers to wait until the morning. However, on Friday evening, President Shevardnadze himself arrived at the base, promised to meet with the officers of the guard and discuss all issues in a calm atmosphere, after which the battalion, along with military equipment, returned to its permanent location in Tbilisi.
During yesterday's meeting, the battalion officers swore and swore that they had no intention of staging a coup d'etat, they only wanted to draw the attention of the authorities and the public to the dire social situation in the army, in particular, to the chronic non-payment of salaries to officers.
Guard officers blame journalists, primarily Russian ones, for the emergence of rumors about the political demands of the rebels, and especially about a military coup. Although no one denied that at the beginning of the events, the Georgian Minister of State Security and the Chairman of Parliament described what was happening precisely as an attempt at a military coup. And the rebels themselves initially spoke about “snap elections and a change of government that does not care about the army.” However, other military formations did not support the guards and declared allegiance to the government, so the rioters had to change their tone. That's when they started talking about social demands.
Be that as it may, after a meeting with the officers, the president ordered the creation of a special commission with the participation of the ministries of finance and agriculture in order, together with the Ministry of Defense, to develop a specific plan for solving the social problems of military personnel. The battalion officers stated that they had not and would never violate their oath to the Supreme Commander.
The President refused to accept the resignation of the Minister of Defense, as well as the commander of the National Guard, General Jemal Chumburidze, since the latter made a significant contribution to the peaceful resolution of the incident. After the end of the meeting, President Shevardnadze gave his assessment of what had happened: “the forces that tried to use the social difficulties of officers and soldiers for their own purposes” were not successful.

GEORGE Kommersant-Dvali, Tbilisi

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 92 dated May 30, 2001, p. 11

Authors:

Georgy Dvali