Police and protesters clashed in Georgia on Wednesday during a month-long opposition campaign to oust President Mikheil Saakashvili, stoking fears of unrest after a failed military mutiny.
Police accused protesters of trying to storm their base, while television pictures showed police and demonstrators trading blows with batons and sticks across a metal gate dividing them.
Police denied opposition accusations they fired rubber bullets as several hundred people converged on the base. Police said 22 protesters and six policemen were wounded. The opposition said several of its leaders were treated in hospital.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“This president has dug his own grave,” opposition leader and former Saakashvili ally Nino Burjanadze told supporters rallying outside parliament after the violence. “We’ll be standing and fighting until the very end.”
Georgia said it put down a brief, bloodless mutiny at a tank base on Tuesday and accused neighboring Russia of plotting a wider rebellion against Saakashvili nine months after a war between the former Soviet neighbors.
NATO began military exercises in Georgia on Wednesday which Russia had condemned as “muscle-flexing” on its southern border.
Georgia has been braced for unrest since the opposition began daily protests on April 9. The protesters have blocked streets in downtown Tbilisi and demanded Saakashvili quit over his record on democracy and last year’s war, when Russia crushed a Georgian assault on breakaway South Ossetia.
Several hundred people had surrounded the police base demanding the release of three opposition activists being held over the beating of a journalist on Tuesday. Masked riot police took position in the grounds.
The West has been watching for a possible repeat of a 2007 police crackdown against the last peaceful mass demonstrations against the 41-year-old president.
Deputy Interior Minister Eka Zguladze told Georgian radio that police had been attacked.
“The police received an order to protect the perimeter,” she said.
At a meeting of the 28 NATO states and their Georgian counterpart in Brussels on Wednesday, NATO called for dialogue between Georgia’s government and the opposition, for reforms to ensure freedom of media and assembly, and for the government to avoid violence against protests, a NATO spokeswoman said.
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