Batumi (Georgia), May 06: The leader of Georgia's renegade Adjara region resigned and flew out of his Black Sea province bound for exile in Moscow today in the second bloodless revolution to sweep the former Soviet Republic in six months. It had been feared that the standoff between Adjara's leader Aslan Abashidze and the Georgian government could trigger a civil war, but in the end he left quietly and ordered his paramilitaries to lay down their arms.
"Aslan has run away. Adjara is free," said a beaming Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in the capital, Tbilisi, in a live television address. "A new era has begun in Georgia's history". Abashidze, a white-haired former Communist official who had run Adjara for more than a decade, was the last bastion of the old regime of ex-president Eduard Shevardnadze which had been swept away in last year's "Rose Revolution."

Immediately his departure was announced, a crowd of several thousand anti-Abashidze protesters who had been keeping a vigil in Adjara's capital, Batumi, for the past two days, started celebrating deliriously. Bureau Report