Gorbachev Urges Calm in Armenia : But Thousands Ignore Unprecedented Public Plea, Take to Streets

Mikhail S. Gorbachev today made an unprecedented public appeal for calm in the protest-plagued republic of Armenia, but thousands ignored him and took to the streets in a “sea of banners,” witnesses said.

For the past five days, protesters have jammed the center of Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan to demand that a region of the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, whose population is more than three-quarters Armenian, be made part of Armenia.

The Communist Party Central Committee, over which Gorbachev presides as party general secretary, rejected the call earlier this month. That sparked street protests in Yerevan in numbers without precedent in the 70 years of Soviet history.

Sergei Grigoryants, an Armenian dissident, said Gorbachev’s speech was read on Armenian state-run radio at 11 a.m. by Vladimir I. Dolgikh, a non-voting member of the ruling Politburo. It was later read by Dolgikh on local television.

‘Patient Approach’

“Gorbachev called on the Armenian people to be calm and said there were a lot of unresolved problems, including that of Nagorno-Karabakh, and that a patient approach is required,” Grigoryants told the Associated Press by telephone from Yerevan.

The 15-minute speech was also broadcast over loudspeakers at Yerevan airport and elsewhere in the city, said Grigoryants, a Moscow resident who arrived in Armenia earlier today.

Gorbachev said the Central Committee intends to devote one of its next plenary meetings to examining relations among the country’s more than 100 ethnic groups, and “lay out the ways for a concrete solution of socioeconomic, cultural and other problems” Tass said.

The Soviet Union has recently faced ethnic problems among the Baltic states and in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Grigoryants said Gorbachev’s speech was more conciliatory and soothing than “combative” remarks made Wednesday night in Yerevan by Dolgikh, but he said it failed to sway protesters.

‘A Sea of Banners’

“The numbers in the streets have grown to more than 1 million today,” Grigoryants said. “Columns are marching along the major streets, and there is a sea of banners.”

Another witness, Paruyr Ayrikyan, an Armenian activist, said some of the banners read “Karabakh Is Armenia” and “Karabakh Is a Test of Perestroika, “ the Russian word for Gorbachev’s drive for economic and social reconstruction.

Grigoryants said that factories, scientific institutes and the Armenian telegraph agency went on strike in sympathy with the protest and that Armenians who had served with the Soviet army in Afghanistan and were among the protesters were throwing away their medals and their Communist Party membership cards.