2-Week-Old Strike Reportedly Called Off in Armenian Capital

Armenian activist leaders called off a two-week-old general strike in the republic’s capital of Yerevan late Saturday, according to reports from that city.

Contacted by telephone from Moscow, a Soviet journalist in Yerevan said the strike leaders had called for an end to the stoppage “on tactical grounds” at a mass rally of about 300,000 people there.

It remains unclear whether the decision to return to work would also affect the nearby disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, where a general strike has gripped Stepanakert, the region’s capital, for nearly two months.

The decision to call off the strike in Yerevan followed mounting pressure on the organizers, mainly in the form of an increasingly bitter official media campaign in recent days portraying the unrest as anti-Soviet.

The Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party also had called for “immediate measures” to end the protest at a Friday meeting, the Soviet news agency Tass reported Saturday.

The disturbances in the Armenian capital are in support of the predominantly Armenian population of the small Nagorno-Karabakh region, which has been engaged in a prolonged campaign for political unity with Armenia.

Since 1923, the region has existed as an autonomous enclave of the mainly Muslim Republic of Azerbaijan, and strike leaders assert that the enclave’s Armenians, whose heritage is Christian, have long been culturally oppressed.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the executive of the Soviet Union’s top legislative body, is scheduled to meet here Monday to discuss the issue.

“The committee decided to end the strike . . . for tactical reasons, in the interest of the movement,” the journalist in Yerevan reported. “The demands remain the same.”

The strikes represent the most sustained period of civil unrest in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and are seen as both an embarrassment to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and a serious potential threat to his liberalization program.

In a dispatch from the Armenian capital, Tass cast the crisis in precisely those terms, declaring that the unrest was organized by “open and secret enemies of perestroika (restructuring) while the true champions of perestroika retreated.”

According to Tass, the Armenian Party’s Central Committee castigated local functionaries, accusing them of cowardice and irresponsible behavior for failing to stand up to the strikers. The dispatch carried some of the toughest language yet in condemning the strikers.

The report reinforced the conviction of some analysts here that Moscow is laying the groundwork for a major crackdown if the disturbances do not end quickly.