Ethnic Strife Sparked by University Plan Leaves 11 Dead in Soviet Georgian Resort

Ethnic violence, which President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has warned threatens the very existence of his reform policies, has left 11 people dead and 120 injured in a Black Sea resort city, Soviet media reported Sunday.

The overnight clashes in Sukhumi, capital of the autonomous Abkhazia enclave in the republic of Soviet Georgia, were over a plan to open a branch of a Georgian university in the city and restrict the Abkhazian enrollment, according to the official Tass news agency and local reports.

Abkhazians bitterly oppose the proposal, and fighting between Georgians and Abkhazians broke out Saturday night and continued until morning in several parts of the coastal city, the reports said.

‘Stones and Firearms’

“Those involved in the fighting used stones, clubs, knives and firearms. According to the information we have, 11 people were killed and 127 hospitalized,” Tass reported, without elaborating on the nationalities of those killed and injured.

The fatalities in the city brought to more than 100 the number of people killed in the last year and a half in ethnic clashes in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which make up the southern Caucasus.

Tensions among some of the Soviet Union’s more than 100 nationalities have heightened since Gorbachev took office in March, 1985. His policy of permitting greater openness in Soviet society spurred first verbal complaints, then demonstrations and sometimes violence among some minorities.

Political conservatives have contended that the inter-ethnic violence is a sign that the new openness has gone too far.

For Gorbachev, maintaining national cohesion in this vast country has become a major challenge. In a special speech to the nation broadcast on television two weeks ago, he appealed for minorities to voice their complaints calmly, warning that ethnic friction could tear the country apart and strangle his program to reform Soviet society.

In Soviet Georgia, tensions have been high for several months. The Muslim Abkhazians, who make up less than one-quarter of their autonomous region’s population of more than 525,000, contend that the Christian Georgians are trying to put an end to their culture and language.

They have demanded that their tiny enclave in the northwest of the republic be allowed to separate from Georgia and form an independent Abkhazian republic.

Earlier Protests

Georgian anger at Abkhazian secessionist demands contributed to nationalistic protests in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in April. Red Army troops broke up the protests, killing 20 people. Public outrage over the deaths led to the removal of the local Communist Party chief.

The city of Sukhumi, founded by the Greeks in the 6th Century BC, is overcrowded this time of year, because it is a popular summer tourist site for Soviets. That simply adds to official concern over the tensions there.

Tass said Interior Ministry troops had been sent to the city to help restore calm, and the Georgian party leaders, including the republic’s party chief, also rushed to the autonomous region.

Party leaders “called on the population to display wisdom, common sense and high responsibility and help . . . stabilize the situation,” said the Tass report, which was read on the evening television news program “Vremya.”

In other ethnic clashes over the weekend, Soviet security forces shot and wounded two people and a police officer was wounded by gunfire in two separate incidents in Tadzhikistan, according to reports Sunday in the Communist Party daily Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Party youth newspaper.

The woundings came after clashes Thursday near the border between Tadzhikistan and Kirghizia left one dead and 18 injured.

The dispute is over rights to a water canal used by farmers on both sides of the border, Pravda said. Three border villages were reported under curfew.