Armenians in Soviet Enclave Call Off Strike

Armenian residents of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan have called off their monthlong general strike demanding the area’s incorporation into neighboring Armenia, Communist Party officials reported Sunday.

In Stepanakert, the regional capital, a party official said by telephone that some local factories had begun work again Sunday but added that it would not be clear until today how many of the strikers would return to work.

Thousands of Stepanakert residents voted at a weekend rally to return to work, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda reported Sunday, despite their earlier vows to continue the protests until the region was affiliated with Armenia.

Appeal for Reform Policies

The paper said that local party leaders had appealed for a display of confidence in Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and in his reform policies.

Meanwhile, Pravda on Sunday corrected an earlier report that the Nagorno-Karabakh regional government had voted to secede unilaterally from Azerbaijan in violation of the Soviet constitution. That report, which was widely quoted by the foreign news media, had resulted from the Pravda correspondent’s misunderstanding of the resolution, the paper said.

The resolution, adopted last week, had actually called for Nagorno-Karabakh’s temporary transfer to Armenian administration, since a central government decision resolving the region’s future could take considerable time.

The continuing strife, not only in Nagorno-Karabakh but elsewhere in Azerbaijan and Armenia, has embarrassed the national government, which has long contended that the Soviet Union had no serious ethnic disputes, and has opened it at the same time to criticism that Gorbachev’s radical reforms were destabilizing the country.

The labor union newspaper Trud on Sunday called the strike “a stab in the back for perestroika, “ Gorbachev’s reform program.

“If the working people of Karabakh want perestroika, they should be working with their sleeves rolled up for a long time to come,” T. Kasumova, one of the newspaper’s correspondents in Azerbaijan, wrote.

The strike had already cost $50 million in lost production, she said, and some factories were on the verge of bankruptcy as a result.

Although some Armenian militants called for continuation of the strike, which has paralyzed the region for a month, most speakers at the Stepanakert rally reportedly called upon residents of Nagorno-Karabakh to demonstrate their support of Gorbachev in advance of the special national party conference that opens in Moscow on Tuesday.

Pravda and other Soviet newspapers reported earlier that the strike was so successful that transport in and out of the region, including food shipments, had been halted, that communications with Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, had been cut and that virtually all shops, offices and factories were closed.

Troops Deployed to Keep Peace

Troops have been deployed in Stepanakert and other towns in the region, as well as a number of cities in both Azerbaijan and Armenia, to maintain peace and prevent further communal strife.

According to official reports, 35 people have been killed in ethnic clashes resulting from the conflict; most were Armenians living in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait. But dissident sources contend that the death toll is higher, including 12 people they say were killed 10 days ago southeast of Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

Earlier reports in Pravda and other Soviet papers said that local government and party officials had lost control of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh some weeks ago, and the rally on Saturday in Stepanakert appeared to be their first success in reasserting their authority.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have been closed to foreign correspondents since the trouble began in Nagorno-Karabakh in late February. While Western correspondents in Moscow can reach the capitals of the two provinces and major towns by telephone, their dispatches largely depend on reports in the official Soviet press.

Three-quarters of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 184,000 residents are Armenians and want the region, which they consider to be part of their ancestral homeland, to be incorporated into the neighboring Soviet republic of Armenia. They claim that under Azerbaijani administration, the mountainous region has been deprived of funds for economic development and that their language, culture and history have been neglected. They also say that as Christians, they suffer religious discrimination in Azerbaijan, which is largely Muslim.

But Azerbaijanis, a Turkic people for whom Azerbaijan is their national state in the Soviet system of federated republics, assert that Nagorno-Karabakh is important to their history and culture and that tearing the region out of Azerbaijan after 65 years would cause great political and economic disruption.

The Armenian republic’s legislature has called for the region’s transfer, the Azerbaijani legislature has opposed the move and the issue has been sent to the Supreme Soviet, the national Parliament, to resolve. The issue is one of great sensitivity here, particularly in advance of the party conference, and Soviet officials have been sufficiently concerned to put the dispute in the context of the overall reforms under way here.

‘A Totality of Problems’

“Underlying the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh is a totality of problems rooted in insufficient economic and cultural development of the region and questions of intercommunal relations,” Mikhail P. Vyshinsky, the deputy minister of justice, said Sunday. “Responsibility for the current situation there shall not be born by the residents but by the organizations and people who were called upon to ensure the development of that area in accordance with the requirements of life and the Soviet nationalities problems.”

While the Supreme Soviet would work to resolve the problem, Vyshinsky said that settlement of the conflict would be difficult since the Soviet constitution requires the agreement of both the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics to transfer Nagorno-Karabakh. On such issues, “every republic in the Soviet Union is a sovereign union state,” he added.

The overall question of national minorities will be discussed at a special meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee to be held later this year with the view toward revising the country’s policies as part of the reform program.