MOSCOW: In the tiny ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, flaring political unrest and a sputtering regional war are threatening to bring down the pro-Western regime of President Eduard Shevardnadze.

Late last week, Shevardnadze sacked his entire government in a bid to assuage thousands of protesters surging through the streets of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, to demand the president’s resignation. The demonstrators were protesting violent attempts by Georgian security police to shut down an independent, outspoken TV station.

But experts say Georgia’s national malaise runs much deeper, and has been pushed into a potentially shattering crisis by post-Sept 11 international intrigue. “Things are changing very rapidly in the Caucasus,” says Alexander Konovalov, director of the Institute of Strategic Assessments, an independent Moscow think tank. “The pieces are all re-arranging themselves.”

Ever since Georgia became a separate country in 1991, it has had a troubled relationship with Russia, which has vital interests in the Caucasus region. “Before Sept 11, Shevardnadze was able to appeal to the US for aid and political support to counter Russian influence,” says Alexander Iskanderyan, director of the independent Centre for Caucasian Studies in Moscow. “Now there are new realities in the world, and this option is no longer available to him.”

Iskanderyan says that the fledgling nation’s internal weaknesses, combined with pressure from its meddlesome powerful neighbour are adding up to “the collapse of Georgia.”

As political unrest has heated up in Tbilisi, a murky war in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has flared over the past month. No one can say who or what is behind the escalating violence. Moscow and Tbilisi accuse each other of stirring the pot in Abkhazia, a lush former Soviet mountain and beach- resort zone that won unrecognized independence from Georgia with Russian help, after a bloody civil war, in 1993.

Moscow, which regards Georgia as part of its historic sphere of influence, has watched with growing irritation over the past decade as Shevardnadze parlayed his personal good relations with Western leaders - in the late 1980s he was Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet foreign minister, credited with dismantling the cold war - into generous aid infusions and other marks of special interest from the US.

Shevardnadze has even talked of bringing Georgia into NATO and the European Union eventually, and has offered to let Western oil companies build a pipeline across Georgian territory to carry Caspian oil to world markets, bypassing Russia. Experts agree that the Kremlin has covertly backed separatist movements in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as a way of warning Shevardnadze that his country’s security depends on Russia’s goodwill, not on faraway Washington.

Georgia has infuriated Moscow by allowing Chechen rebels to take refuge in the Pankisi Gorge, which abuts Georgia’s frontier with the secessionist Russian region of Chechnya. Russia has threatened to launch military strikes against what it terms ”terrorist bases” in the Pankisi Gorge, but was restrained by fears that the world, especially the US, would react angrily.

A Russian peacekeeping force has protected Abkhazia’s quasi-independence since 1993, and is the most obvious sign of Moscow’s continuing interference in the region. Georgia has demanded that the peacekeepers be withdrawn. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.