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Georgian President fires entire Cabinet
Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze decided Thursday to fire his entire Cabinet, officials said as a security scandal erupted into a full-fledged political crisis.
Zurab Zhvania, the parliamentary speaker, said that Shevardnadze's representative in parliament had informed him that "the president has made a decision to oust the entire Cabinet."
"Our task now is to ease tension in the city and prompt the demonstrators to disperse," Zhvania told the parliament.
The parliamentary representative, Valery Khaburzania, confirmed to The Associated Press that he had conveyed Shevardnadze's decision to sack the Cabinet.
Shevardnadze's government has been under pressure from many quarters, including the country's separatist region of Abkhazia and Russia, which has repeatedly accused Georgia of providing refuge to rebels fighting Russian troops in Russia's breakaway Chechnya region. Georgia is the only foreign country that borders on the violence-wracked region.
While Shevardnadze rose to power in the Soviet era on pledges to curb corruption and has pledged to continue the campaign today, he has managed to do very little. Manyamong the thousands of demonstrators who gathered outside the parliament on Thursday blamed Shevardnadze for the burgeoning corruption and poverty.
The immediate cause of the Cabinet's ouster was the security service's attempted raid on the independent Rustavi 2 television station earlier this week on suspicion of tax evasion. The failed raid brought protests the state was trying to silence critical media and demands for top security officials to step down.
Security Minister Vakhtang Kutateladze handed in his resignation Wednesday, but parliamentary members said that was not enough. They also demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Kakha Targamadze and Prosecutor General Georgy Meparishvili, and some called for the entire government to step down - sparking protests among their opponents that they were trying to engineer a state coup.
Appearing before parliament on Thursday, Targamadze tersely announced that he had submitted his resignation to the president. He then walked out of the chamber.
Meparishvili told the parliament that he, too, was resigning. He was not part of the Cabinet.
Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister, said in a live, late-night broadcast Wednesday that if parliament, which must approve the resignations, forced the interior minister and prosecutor to go, he would consider himself "guilty as well" and step down. But he did not announce his own resignation on Thursday.
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