Kremlin moves to defuse tension

Press, 7 December 1988, Page 10

Kremlin moves to defuse tension

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Soviet leadership, in new moves to ease tension in Azerbaijan and Armenia, has set up evacuation centres for children threatened by ethnic unrest in the rival republics and ordered an end to the dismissal of workers there based on race.

The Kremlin, in a statement read on Soviet television yesterday, said it was providing accommodation for children whose parents feared for their safety in the unrest which had claimed the lives of at least 28 people in the last two weeks. “State agencies and mass organisations in the Soviet Union consider it their duty to provide urgent assistance to

children in Azerbaijan and Armenia, protect them from interethnic strife and give possibilities to put them up temporarily, at the request of their parents,” the statement said. Up to 24,000 places would be available at trade unions’ sanatoriums, tourist facilities and Pioneer camps run by the Young Communist League. A sharply-worded statement signed by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, meanwhile, threatened criminal penalties and expulsion from the Communist Party for anyone involved in sacking workers on racial grounds.

The joint party and Govern-

ment statement, also read on Soviet television, said the sackings of Armenians in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis in Armenia had occurred on a “massive scale.” It said some officials in the two neighbouring Transcaucasian republics had been directly involved.

The measures reflected a more aggressive Kremlin approach to ending the unrest, sparked by Armenian demands last February for control of the Azerbaijani region of NagornoKarabakh.

Officials say more than 200,000 people — roughly 100,000 from each republic —

have fled their homes to escape persecution or the threat of it. Soviet news media reports said yesterday that the situation had improved in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, and that an all-night curfew had been relaxed there.

The Azerbaijani capital of Baku remained tense. Demonstrators gathered there yesterday, a day after troops dispersed an illegal gathering on the city’s Lenin Square. Mr Gorbachev met Transcaucasian leaders last week and criticised their handling of the dispute, in which more than 60 people have died.