Nagorno-Karabakh Leader Quits

The Communist Party leader of Nagorno-Karabakh is retiring, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia said Friday, following sharp attacks by his superiors on the “nationalistic” policy of officials in the disputed region.

Genrikh Pogosyan, 58, who strongly defended demands for Nagorno-Karabakh to be transferred from Soviet Azerbaijan to the neighboring republic of Armenia, is retiring for health reasons, the government newspaper said. His name was not on a list, published by Izvestia, of members of a new Kremlin-picked committee ordered by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to replace local government in Nagorno-Karabakh.

At least 78 people have been killed in 11 months of ethnic violence in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian-populated region.

Pogosyan, an ethnic Armenian, announced that he was retiring at a recent meeting with workers at a factory in the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert, Izvestia said. It did not describe his medical condition or say who would replace him.

His retirement follows a verbal assault on the leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijani party chief Abdul Vezirov.

“The leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh is shamelessly conducting a harmful policy, a frankly nationalistic line,” Vezirov told a meeting of Communist Party activists last week in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital.

Vezirov said the policy had damaged the Kremlin’s reform program and the development of Nagorno-Karabakh.