Word: tbilisi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
International concern was heightened last week by heavy fighting in the center of Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, where political rivals of the high- handed President Zviad Gamsakhurdia were trying to blast him out of government headquarters. More than 50 people were killed and 200 wounded. Surprisingly, the fire fight did not spread from the downtown area of the city, and most of Tbilisi went about its normal business, apparently out of exhaustion or indifference...
...also worth remembering that those first two world-transforming events, the conflagrations of 1914-18 and 1939-45, resulted in the loss of approximately 60 million lives. The political miracle of 1989-91 has also had its victims: scores were killed in the crackdowns in Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius and Riga, and three young men were martyred in the August coup. But large- scale outbreaks of violence have been fairly isolated everywhere except in the ethnic conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. By and large, the Soviet Union has given up the ghost of the totalitarian idea with...
...night flight from Cairo taxied to a spot between two El Al jumbo jets that were already disgorging onto the tarmac a profusion of joyous, exhausted humanity. Standing in line for customs, I was engulfed by a sibilant jabber that I recognized from other journeys -- to Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Tbilisi, Tashkent, Baku, Irkutsk...
...protesters. The next week Gamsakhurdia jammed all Soviet and Russian broadcasts to the republic. Last week, as some 30 opposition groups brought more than 20,000 people into the streets, police arrested three opposition leaders after their Moscow-bound plane was ordered to return to the capital city of Tbilisi. Angry Georgians responded by occupying the state's radio and television center, cutting off Gamsakhurdia as he broadcast a presidential address...
...turn out to be a dictator. He denounced as "traitors" his own countrymen who dared to disagree with him on virtually any subject. "We cannot tolerate collaborationists." The more he talked, the more inclusive that category became. Those non-Georgians who questioned how they would fare if ruled from Tbilisi rather than Moscow were "nothing but tools of the ((Soviet)) state and will be dealt with as such...