Soviets May Curb Armenia Activists : ‘Traitors’ Hinder Quake Aid for Own Ends, Premier Says

While relief work continues in the aftermath of the Armenian earthquake, Soviet authorities appear ready to crack down hard on Armenian nationalists who have added criticism of the government’s relief efforts to their other political complaints.

Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, calling them “traitors” and “renegades,” said Friday that their incitement of the population in the earthquake region is now seriously hampering the relief operation. “It is high time you rebuffed them,” Ryzhkov said. “This cannot go on.”

The toughness of Ryzhkov’s words, following equally harsh denunciations earlier this week by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, suggests that the authorities are preparing to move against the nationalists, particularly the outlawed Karabakh Committee, on grounds that they are using the earthquake to mobilize people against the central government.

“Whispering, inciting passions in the minds of those still recovering from the shock of the tragedy, the loss of their near and dear ones and the destruction of their homes,” the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said, “they guide their listeners to further unjustified suffering.”

Tried to Block Bulldozers

Convinced that their homes were about to be demolished with relatives possibly still alive inside the ruins, people had flung themselves before bulldozers to prevent relief workers from clearing the rubble, Ryzhkov said. The relief workers had to withdraw while the confrontation--which he blamed on nationalists--was resolved, he said.

Other nationalists, he said, are slowing government efforts to evacuate 100,000 more people--mostly children, their mothers and the elderly--from the earthquake region to house them elsewhere in the country while the region is rebuilt.

“Once again, the provocative voice of the disbanded Karabakh Committee can be heard,” Pravda said.

Last Sunday, 12 soldiers were wounded in turning back a nationalist-led assault on the police headquarters and jail in an attempt to free a half-dozen dissident leaders.

Five members of the outlawed Karabakh Committee, which has led the fight for recovery of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan, were arrested last weekend. Two more were arrested on Thursday, according to committee officials.

Spitak, the hardest-hit town, has been sealed off in preparation for demolition, according to international relief workers, who are leaving the city and, in some cases, Armenia entirely.

Armenians, shouting death threats, had earlier attacked a relief convoy from neighboring Azerbaijan, the Soviet press reported Friday. Armenia is locked in a bitter and prolonged debate over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.

“If you start working, we will kill you!” Armenians reportedly shouted at relief workers on the convoy, according to the newspaper Socialist Industry.

“Go back to Azerbaijan--we don’t need your help,” an Azerbaijani said they were told by surrounding groups of Armenian men carrying wooden clubs. Twenty-two people were arrested after the melee.

Government officials did not report finding any more people alive in the rubble of the major towns of the earthquake region on Friday, though they said the search was continuing.

Most of the Western search-and-rescue teams continued withdrawing from the area, however, in preparation for their return home. The French team, by far the largest, with about 450 members, is now leaving.

Eduard Aikazyan, the Armenian government representative in Moscow, said Friday that plans have been made for each survivor to receive $800 in compensation and each family an additional $3,200 plus more money for property losses.

The compensation program was approved Thursday by the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo in an apparent effort to reassure the earthquake victims of government assistance.

Meanwhile, Suren Arutyunyan, the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, praised the officials sent by the party leadership to help cope with the earthquake.

“I cannot imagine what would have happened in the republic if comrades from Moscow had not arrived here to coordinate the overall effort,” he said Friday.

“We need perfect organization and discipline,” he continued. “The demagogues and windbags who are now trying to make political capital on the disaster must be called to order once and for all. . . . An end must be put to this demagogy in our republic.”

Armenian nationalists have continued their protest demonstrations in Yerevan, the republic’s capital, despite the earthquake, according to the Soviet press.

“They are just blindly follow the will of the 10 or 12 ideologues of the year-old Karabakh Committee,” a correspondent for the official Tass news agency said. “By organizing mass gatherings to demand demagogically that Armenia be proclaimed ‘sovereign,’ they effectively act in opposition to the perestroika reform drive, whose success depends in many ways on the united and cohesion of all the ethnic groups within this country.”

The nationalists have spread one rumor after another, Tass said, in an attempt to discredit the government’s relief effort. The Karabakh Committee was accused of suggesting that Moscow planned to weaken the Armenian nation by resettling earthquake victims in far-away places and arranging for the adoption of orphans from the earthquake region by Russians.

In other dispatches, the nationalists are accused of forging an alliance with local criminal gangs, of trying to panic people with rumors of another earthquake and of gathering caches of weapons in order to mount attacks on the police and soldiers in the area.