Soviet Georgians Rally for Independence

Thousands of people, shouting nationalist slogans and defying patrolling troops, demonstrated again Saturday in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, to demand independence for the southern Soviet republic.

For the fourth day, more than 20,000 demonstrators massed before government offices and thousands of others gathered in the city’s main thoroughfares, according to Georgian and other Soviet journalists in Tbilisi. A general strike has paralyzed industry there and is spreading outside the capital.

In an emergency meeting, the Georgian Communist Party leadership rejected the nationalists’ demand for the republic’s secession from the Soviet Union, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass from Tbilisi, and decided on “further measures to consolidate discipline and public order.”

Dzhumber I. Patiashvili, the party’s first secretary, warned again that the protests were approaching “the dangerous line” when the central government would feel obliged to intervene and place Georgia under military control as it did with the neighboring republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Combat troops, supported by tanks and other armored vehicles, were deployed Friday afternoon when an estimated 100,000 people massed along the embankment of the Kura River in central Tbilisi, a city of 1.2 million, in support of about 158 people who began an eight-day hunger strike Thursday to press nationalist demands.

But the number of soldiers was reduced after a brief show of strength--an attempt to drive a squadron of 10 tanks and armored cars through the ranks of the demonstrators--only provoked angrier protests.

“Get off Georgian land!” demonstrators shouted, pelting the armored vehicles with stones and smashing the windows of an army command car. “Death to the Russian occupiers! Down with this rotting Russian empire!”

There were also protests reported in Kutaisi, the republic’s second largest city, and in Sukhumi, a Black Sea resort.

With Tass describing the situation in Georgia as “tense” and the government newspaper Izvestia saying the protests had now assumed “a dangerous scope,” appeals for calm are being broadcast on local radio, and leading party members are being sent to factories, schools and other institutions to help restore order.

The leadership appeared from reports of the meeting to be ready to compromise on practical questions, such as greater use of the Georgian language, an enlarged role for traditional culture, stricter measures to protect cultural monuments, greater attention to the environment and closer attention to efficient government.

But there would be no compromise, the reports indicated, on what both the government and the nationalists regard as the central issue--what kind of “sovereignty” does Georgia have as a Soviet republic, what kind of “independence” could it reasonably hope to have in the future.

“Georgia was, is and will remain always a socialist, sovereign republic in the fraternal family of the peoples of the Soviet Union,” the party leadership declared Saturday, rejecting demonstrators’ demands for the republic’s secession.

The nationalists, led by such longtime political dissidents as Zviad Gamasakhurdia, Merab Kostava and Georgy Chanturiya, contend that under Moscow’s central control their culture, language and social traditions have been effectively suppressed and that they have no real voice in Georgia’s political and economic decisions. Their solution is independence.

Party leaders, while granting the validity of many of the complaints, have urged them to place their trust in President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms and not, as Patiashvili said, “turn off the road of democratization that has just been opened to them.”

The protests have increasingly become “anti-Soviet and anti-socialist,” Izvestia said, implicitly warning that the demonstrators were approaching the limit of what is acceptable here even under glasnost, Gorbachev’s policy of political openness.

The conflict has continued to build over the past six months with repeated protests by students and intellectuals, street demonstrations, general strikes and intermittent discussions with the party leadership.

The latest protests were touched off, however, by demands for full republican status from one of Georgia’s autonomous regions, Abkhazia, which has long chafed under Tbilisi’s control.

Tensions have risen sharply, according to Izvestia and other Soviet newspapers, in reaction to meetings this month and last demanding greater autonomy for Abkhazia, which lies along the coast of the Black Sea, and now Georgian nationalists are accusing Moscow of putting forward the idea in an effort to undermine demands for Georgian independence.

The party leader in Abkhazia was replaced Thursday after he had endorsed the autonomy calls.