Shevardnadze's fall from grace

Shevardnadze was forced out of parliament by opposition protestors who overran the chamber demanding his resignation.

Bodyguards hurried the 75 year-old leader out of parliament mid-sentence as he was addressing the assembly's first session since the November 2 general earlier, which the opposition and foreign governments say was rigged.

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Shevardnadze, an former Soviet foreign minister who used to be the darling of the West, remained defiant in the face of demands for him to step down.

"I will only resign by constitutional means," he said. "Civil disobedience in Georgia is not acceptable."

The opposition invasion of parliament marked the culmination of three weeks of near daily street protests over the election that have mobilised tens of thousands of Georgians.

The United States, a long-standing Shevardnadze supporter, delivered a particularly stinging blow earlier this week when it voiced disappointment in his leadership.

As Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, Shevardnadze had been one of the architects of perestroika and a key player in negotiations with the United States over arms reductions.

But when he took over at the helm of his home country, Shevardnadze fell hostage to vested interests. He turned a blind eye to corruption and, in recent years, has appeared increasingly helpless to prevent Georgia sinking into poverty and chaos.

Eduard Ambrosiyevich Shevardnadze was born on May 28, 1928, in the town of Mamati, near Georgia's Black Sea coast. At age 20, he joined the Communist Party and began a rapid climb through the ranks.

He made his name working in the interior ministry in charge of "public order", a euphemism for the sometimes brutal repression of his fellow Georgians under the Soviet regime.

Shevardnadze was rewarded in 1972 with his appointment as first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, and in 1988 he was promoted again, this time to the Politburo in Moscow.

He arrived just as Gorbachev was starting to implement his perestroika reforms in the face of resistance from hardliners.

Shevardnadze sided with the reformist camp. As foreign minister, he was at Gorbachev's side for a series of historic US-Soviet summits on nuclear disarmament.