But David Tevzadze also admitted that some in the armed forces remained deeply concerned about Shevardnadze's resignation, raising fears of violence in a country where hundreds of people were killed during a civil war in the early 1990s.

"The minister is working according to plan and coordinates his actions only with the acting commander in chief," Tevzadze said, referring to Nino Burjanadze, who is Georgia's acting president pending elections in early January.

"That is how it was and that is how it will be," he said in televised comments. "The army is an instrument of foreign policy, not of internal one."

"I have not made any political commentaries for six years and I will not start making them now."

On Friday, Mikhail Saakashvili, who spearheaded the protests against Shevardnadze and is a frontrunner in presidential elections due on January 4, said he feared for Georgia's stability because "certain people are preparing a counter-revolution," according to the Interfax news agency.

Saakashvili declined to specify the plotters, but said that Tevzadze, a Shevardnadze ally, had "surprisingly been away in Adjara for several days.

Rumors that armed forces could be planning some actions against Georgia's new leadership have circulated in the Georgian capital for days.

On Saturday Tevzadze said that he had been to bases in the former Soviet republic to gauge the mood among the armed forces following Shevardnadze's forced resignation November 23.

"I have been in practically all bases, met with the soldiers and thanked them for conducting themselves properly," he said.

"The army greeted the revolution in the barracks."

The situation was less clear cut, however, in the semi-autonomous region of Adjara, whose powerful chief has refused to deal with the leadership who orchestrated the protests against Shevardnadze and currently holds power.

"In (Adjara's capital of) Batumi I had meetings at bases," Tevzadze said. "There are different commanders there, some are unhappy, some are not."

But he sought to dissipate fears that armed forces in Adjara may help should the region decide to secede from Georgia.

"Adjara has no armed forces, Georgia has armed forces. I did not have problems in Adjara -- not on the border, not anywhere," he said.

Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister who helped end the Cold War, was forced from office after weeks of protests boiled over.

The overthrow, however, was not supported by all of Georgia's political players, and Adjara, along with the separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, are nervous about the outcome of Shevardnadze's fall.

WAR.WIRE