The World - News from July 22, 1988

Workers in the Soviet republic of Armenia ignored activists’ calls for a strike to protest the government’s rejection of their demand to annex a region in neighboring Azerbaijan, residents and the state-run media reported. The reports indicated that the government may be gaining the upper hand in the five-month labor unrest. Earlier this week in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, residents protested Monday’s ruling that transferring Nagorno-Karabakh, whose population is mostly Armenian, would violate the Soviet constitution. Strike organizers in Nagorno-Karabakh, where labor unrest was reported continuing, came under fire, three days after the Kremlin ordered a crackdown. The official Soviet news agency Tass denounced 12 strike leaders and said four others had been arrested.