He traded his pressed suits for combat fatigues and a gun. He ignored the pleas of bodyguards who begged him to go home for his own safety. At one point, Eduard Shevardnadze even vowed to die in Sukhumi rather than surrender to the Abkhazian rebels laying siege to the Black Sea capital of their autonomous region in Georgia. But by last Monday, the battle was lost. Shevardnadze had little choice but to board a plane jammed with wounded soldiers to return, vanquished, to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. "God knows I did all I could so this terrible day would never...
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