Miners return but ethnic troubles loom

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 8

Miners return but ethnic troubles loom

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Soviet miners are returning to work after a two-week strike that cost hundreds of millions of roubles, but the Soviet leadership is still confronted by ethnic turmoil at opposite ends of the country.

Tens of thousands of miners resumed work yesterday in the Ukraine’s Donbass coalfield, the country’s largest, follow-

ing their comrades in Siberia who went back last Friday having won a package on improved pay and living conditions. The official news agency Tass said 79 pits were still on strike around the country. They included collieries on the Polish border, at Voroshilovgrad in the eastern Ukraine and at Vorkuta in the far north. There was no respite for the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, from ethnic turmoil in the southern republic of Georgia. For the second consecutive evening 20,000 people attended a rally there denouncing the “rotten Russian empire” and demanding independence from Moscow. In Estonia, conflict between native Estonians

and the mainly Russian minority came to a head with Russian-speaking people staging strikes in protest at legislation

promoting local interests. The strikes, the extent and duration of which were unclear, broke out on the eve of today’s debate in the Soviet Union’s inner Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, on the Baltic region’s political and economic development. The mass return to work in the Donbass collieries came after miners’ representatives reported back favourably to their comrades on talks with the Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. Soviet television showed Mr Ryzhkov telling pit workers from the Arctic mines and western Ukraine, “To solve the problems which have accumulated it is necessary to create national wealth. We have to consolidate.”

The television said the Government would issue a resolution dealing with the miners’ dispute within the next 10 days.

The Supreme Soviet appealed to the people for unity in working for radical reform, democratisation and openness. The appeal committed deputies to passing laws on trade unions and labour disputes in the legislative programme. It said the stoppage had cost hundreds of millions of roubles. The appeal said strikes and ethnic conflicts “can aggravate the economic crisis and decelerate perestroika sharply”. In the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, crowds stood outside the Academy of Sciences, where anti-Rus-sian posters were taped on the building’s vast columns. There were no incidents and police did not intervene. The protest came at the end of a day of mourning for the 21 victims of more

than a week of clashes between Abkhazians and Georgians in Georgia’s autonomous Abkhazia region.

Reports from the area spoke of continued tension, but both Tass and television failed to mention the Tbilisi protests. In Estonia, Tass said, a strike by mainly Russianspeaking shipyard workers on Monday protesting against legislation favouring local interests had spread to a second yard and a radio-manu-facturing plant. A representative of a group defending the interests of non-Estonians, about 40 per cent of the population, said 60,000 people from 12 plants had gone out on strike. But Mikk Titma, the Estonian Communist Party’s ideology chief, said shipyard workers had agreed to resume work and attempts to halt work at other plants had failed.