WORLD : Shevardnadze Sent to Georgia
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MOSCOW — Troops fired shots to disperse a rally today in Soviet Georgia, and the Kremlin sent Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to try to end a week of ethnic unrest in his southern homeland that has left at least 18 people dead.
A general strike closed schools, stores and factories and halted some mass transit in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital of 1.2 million people 1,650 miles southeast of Moscow, residents said.
The government has sent in troops and tanks to quell ethnic strife and pro-independence movements in the mountainous Caucasus republic that is the vegetable and fruit basket of the Soviet Union and was the birthplace of dictator Josef Stalin.
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