TBILISI, Nov 8: About 10,000 protesters staged a vigil in front of the parliament building of the former Soviet republic of Georgia on Saturday pledging they would not move until a disputed parliamentary election was annulled and President Eduard Shevardnadze had stepped down.

The protest was peaceful, despite Georgia’s history of political violence, but large numbers of riot police and special forces were close by monitoring the demonstrators and guarding the nearby presidential palace.

Saturday’s protest was the largest political demonstration since a civil war in 1991 which eventually forced Sheverdnadze’s predecessor, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, into exile.

The demonstration could lead to a show of force between 75-year-old Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister who has dominated political life in Georgia for almost three decades, and the country’s main opposition parties.

“The government is waiting for it to start raining and for us all to go home,” said Mikhail Saakashvili, the opposition party leader who has spearheaded the protests in the capital Tbilisi.

“But we must not leave. Today and tomorrow there will be tens of thousands of people standing here and we will not leave until Shevardnadze is gone and freedom has triumphed.”

It was expected that the vigil outside parliament would swell after busloads of opposition supporters from Georgia’s provinces, who had been held up by police on Tbilisi’s outskirts, were allowed through.

The protests were sparked by Sunday’s parliamentary election, which Sheverdnadze critics say were rigged to cover up for the president’s unpopularity. Results so far give the pro-government bloc and an allied party the biggest share of the vote.

But the election has also become the focus for general discontent with Shevardnadze, who is blamed by many people for allowing Georgia, once the most affluent Soviet republic, to slide into poverty and corruption.

Protesters outside the parliament building waved placards reading “Out with the Satan Sheverdnadze!” and “We want fair elections.”

“People in Georgia are tired. They have nothing to eat,” said 60-year-old Gela, who was taking part in the protest. “They cannot tolerate these rulers any longer and that is why we are here.”

The steps outside the parliament building, on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Prospect, have a symbolic place in Georgia’s volatile history.

Dozens of people protesting there against Soviet rule in the late 1980s were killed when troops released toxic gases. The unrest which led to the civil war in the early 1990s also began in the same place.—AFP