Less than a month after the failed coup attempt in Moscow gave new power to the Soviet republics, Georgia is on the brink of internal chaos, much of it due to the volatile president. Gamsakhurdia enraged former supporters by appearing to support the Soviet Army and the coup at first. He banned public protests, then ordered the Georgian National Guard out of Tbilisi-to protect them from Soviet attack, he now claims. The guard commander, Tengiz Kitovani, refused to obey. When Gam sakhurdia tried to dismiss him, half the guard balked. Former prime minister Tengiz Sigua, who has taken refuge with Kitovani’s forces, insists the president will have to step down–“or we’ll resort to other measures.” Kitovani says he has 15,000 guardsmen on his side. At his bivouac in the Tbilisi suburbs, there seem to be only a thousand or two-some joyriding in armored personnel carriers they clearly do not know how to drive. “It just makes me sick to

Meanwhile, ethnic violence continues in the troubled Georgian district of South Ossetia-encouraged by Gamsakhurdia, his opponents say, to distract attention from pro-democracy protests. The South Ossetians, an ethnic minority in the Caucasus Mountains, want to leave Georgia to join North Ossetians in the Russian Republic. The 1991 death toll reached 210 last week, and only the presence of Soviet troops keeps some semblance of peace-at least during the day.

The president himself has facile explanations for this state of affairs. Those speaking against him are “gossips Tbilisi is full of them.” Sigua, who denounced his longtime ally as a dictator and resigned, is a “criminal and a liar and a would-be coup plotter.” The accusations against him? “Lies, fairy tales, dreams and hallucinations.” What’s more, Gamsakhurdia says, thousands of KGB agents are stirring up trouble against him. The United States is an enemy, too, he says: Washington is currying favor in Moscow by declining to recognize Georgia’s independence. The result is political paralysis. “Today’s Georgia is not ready for presidential government,” says ex-prime minister Sigua. He wants Gamsakhurdia deposed and his office replaced by a parliamentary system. For Georgia businessman Robert Sulkhanov, that would not help much. “I think what happened,” he says, “is that the Soviet system genetically spoiled our people for democracy.”