Gas Killed Some in Soviet Georgia, Party Chief Says

The Communist Party leader in the southern Soviet republic of Georgia said Monday that some of the 20 civilians who died this month in a clash between nationalist demonstrators and soldiers were victims of a gas used by the troops.

Givi G. Gumbaridze, the new first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, told Western journalists in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, that some of the deaths resulted from a stronger, potentially lethal gas used in addition to tear gas.

“That gases were used is the truth,” Gumbaridze said, “and, yes, some people died from poisoning.”

Gumbaridze’s comments, after two weeks of charges and official denials that a kind of nerve gas had been used, were the first clear, high-level acknowledgement that troops had used a potentially lethal gas in dispersing a nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi on April 9 and that some of the deaths resulted directly from it.

But confusion persists over what type of gas was used, what its ingredients were, how many died from it and who ordered its use.

“We are still seeking answers to these questions,” Gumbaridze told a group of Western journalists taken to Tbilisi by the Soviet Foreign Ministry. “There can be no justification for the tragedy that occurred. You cannot talk to people from a position of force.”

Members of a public commission formed by the government to investigate the incident said the gas appeared to induce skin rashes, nausea, vomiting, severe headache and memory loss. In some victims, the symptoms have persisted for two weeks, physicians said.

60 Still Hospitalized

Specialists brought from Moscow and Leningrad had been unable to identify the gas, they said, and consequently were struggling to treat 60 gas poisoning victims who were still hospitalized.

Georgian physicians have complained repeatedly that they are handicapped in treating the injured because military authorities, perhaps fearing a public outcry over the use of chemical weapons against largely peaceful demonstrators, have refused to cooperate.

Malkhaz M. Zaalishvili, a molecular biologist at the Georgian Academy of Sciences and a member of the commission, told the journalists that the gas “causes paralysis of the nervous system.”

“We do not know its chemical composition,” he said, “and (the military authorities) have refused to tell us.”

Concentrated Tear Gas

Zaalishvili said that in addition to the poisonous gas, tear gas--while not normally fatal--also may have been used in much larger concentrations than usual, and “in bigger concentrations it becomes very poisonous.”

Commission members told the Western journalists, the first permitted into Georgia since the incident, that they were writing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev asking that the military be ordered to identify the chemical agents used and to cooperate in the investigation.

After repeated denials that anything other than normal tear gas was used, and then only sparingly in two places, the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Red Star quoted a senior officer on Saturday as saying that another chemical incapacitating agent, called cheremukha , had been used.

Its main ingredient is chloroacetophenone, the paper said, and Western military attaches said it appeared to be similar to tear gas but stronger.

Earlier, Irakly Menagarishvili, the Georgian health minister, had told the government newspaper Izvestia that senior Soviet toxicologists investigating the poisoning had found that the chemical substance used had “an irritating and atropine-like effect,” suggesting that it was a combat weapon.

Paralysis and Delirium

Atropine is a poisonous crystalline alkaloid that in large doses can induce nerve paralysis and delirium and can cause death through combined cardiac and respiratory failure.

Other commission members said there was incontrovertible evidence now that the troops had beaten and hacked demonstrators with sharpened shovels normally used for digging foxholes and trenches. Of the 700 people treated in Tbilisi hospitals, many had wounds inflicted by blades, they said.

According to the changing official accounts of the incident, Interior Ministry troops and regular army units, supported by tanks and armored cars, moved into the square in front of the principal government buildings in Tbilisi before dawn on Sunday, April 9, to disperse an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 nationalist demonstrators.

The soldiers used staves, shovels and, it has now been confirmed, gas to break up the crowd. Nineteen people, most of them women and some as old as 70, were killed in the melee, according to official accounts, and one man was shot later that day as a curfew violator. Dissidents put the number of dead and missing at more than 50.

Although the all-night rally had been peaceful, Georgian authorities explained later that they were afraid that those calling for the republic’s secession from the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent government might storm the government offices.

Georgian nationalists, who noted that the protest was one of a series organized by dissident groups in recent weeks and that all have been peaceful, have described the action as “an unprovoked attack” and “a heinous crime.”

Gumbaridze, 44, elected first secretary to replace Dzhumber I. Patiashvili, who accepted responsibility for what is now known as “the tragedy of Tbilisi,” said that a small group within the Georgian party leadership made the decision without consultation to send troops into the square.

“This was a very serious mistake,” he said. “Not everyone participated in this decision. The law should be enforced, but it should be enforced without victims.”

Although he headed the KGB, the Soviet security police, in Georgia, Gumbaridze said that he knew of the decision to send troops into the square only moments before they entered and when it was too late to recall them.

Although Tbilisi is now quiet and tension is diminishing, the situation remains difficult, Gumbaridze said. “There was a crisis of confidence in the party, and we do not think that crisis is over,” he said. “There is still a deficit of trust by the people--this is in no doubt.”

Because of the continuing controversy over what happened and fears of a cover-up, the 40-member commission said it will also ask Gorbachev to bring the International Committee of the Red Cross into the investigation to ensure its thoroughness and honesty.

At Gorbachev’s urging, the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo last week ordered a criminal investigation by the central government of the incident to prevent any cover-up or appearance of one.

Hundreds of people are now maintaining a 24-hour vigil at the scene of the clash, and participants said they will remain for 40 days in keeping with Georgian tradition.

Relatives of the dead are standing on the steps of the government headquarters, surrounded by wreaths and black-ribboned pictures of the victims. The sidewalk is covered with flowers. Along the road, young men hold aloft black flags. At night, the whole scene is illuminated by thousands of candles.

‘Victims of Genocide’

In neighboring Armenia on Monday, hundreds of thousands of people commemorated the 1915 massacre of Armenians in Turkey as “the victims of genocide” in the first such official observance there.

Long lines of men, women and children made their way in processions through Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to a hill outside the city to place flowers at a monument commemorating the massacre and other tragedies of the Armenian people and their nation’s rebirth.

But some combined the memorial service with protests against the continued detention of 14 leaders of a nationalist Armenian group, the Karabakh Committee, and gathered in crowds outside government and party office buildings to chant, “Liberation, liberation!”