Soviets Act to Curb Unrest in Moldavia After Rioting

Soviet regional authorities, fearing nationalist unrest in the southern republic of Moldavia, took emergency action Saturday to restore order in the capital, Kishinev, after serious rioting overnight.

The Moldavian government banned all mass gatherings, demonstrations, marches and other protests after clashes Friday night between nationalists and police in which about 130 people were seriously injured during attacks on government buildings in Kishinev.

Contingents of internal security troops were airlifted to Kishinev on Saturday to enforce the orders, which appear intended to halt most opposition political activity but do not impose a full state of emergency. As the soldiers moved through the city, armored units took positions on Kishinev’s outskirts, according to the official Moldavian news agency Atem.

Moldavia, troubled by nationalist unrest for much of the past year, became the latest hot spot for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as he attempts to press ahead with his ambitious program for political and economic reforms while dealing with the volatile and often contradictory forces they release.

Meanwhile, two men--said to be “plotters”--were reported killed on the border between the Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan in what Radio Moscow described as an abortive attempt to blow up a monument to the “friendship of the peoples of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.” Two other people were said to have been injured in the attack.

Although Radio Moscow provided few details on the attempt and would not confirm when the incident occurred, it did say that one of the dead was the superior of an Armenian monastery, implying that it was an Armenian plot to destroy the official friendship monument. Two other persons were reported to have been wounded.

A regional headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet security police, in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku added that an attempted truce between Christian Armenian residents of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh with their neighbors in Muslim Azerbaijan was repeatedly broken by attacks on police and on local residents.

“The attacks are linked with attempts by certain forces to foment tension in the region again,” Radio Moscow said, again giving no details.

In a report from Stepanakert, the principal town in Nagorno-Karabakh, the official Soviet news agency Tass said that Azerbaijanis are continuing their blockade of the highways leading into the region, though trains were again bringing in supplies of food and fuel.

Violence within the region had escalated once again with Armenians and Azerbaijanis firing on each other’s villages and on the military patrols and checkpoints that are attempting to maintain peace, according to Tass.

Roads are also being mined now, Tass said with a casualness born of a seemingly unending conflict.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region, in a particularly ominous development, was “swept by a wave of ethnic kidnaping,” Tass added, with “hostages swapped for their ethnic counterparts--or for stolen cattle.”

With the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, expected to debate new proposals for settling the prolonged feud, local military commanders said that passions are running extremely high and that further violence is likely.

The developments last week in Moldavia were even more worrisome to Moscow in many respects, however, because they represented a fundamental challenge to Soviet authority, including the integrity of the Soviet state.

Those events, which began with a protest disrupting the traditional parade on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, had “literally shaken Moldavia,” the local Communist Party and government leadership said in a statement Saturday, and this “alarmed those concerned about their own future and that of their children.”

Political extremists are “destabilizing the situation in the republic, which is now at a critical juncture,” the leadership said. “Those who entice the masses into unlawful actions are playing an extremely dangerous game. Increasing aggressiveness here is political adventurism--and an open struggle for power.”

Ion Hadryka, a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Parliament, and the leader of the Moldavian People’s Front, also called for calm, appearing on Moldavian television to cancel a rally that the organization had planned for today in central Kishinev.

Soviet authorities had accused some members of the Moldavian Popular Front, a mass movement campaigning for greater political and economic autonomy and preservation of Moldavian culture and language, of attempting to overthrow the Communist government there.

“Some supporters of the Popular Front have ignored the proclaimed goals of the movement, joining in open struggle to topple the legitimate government and calling for the escalation of extremist demonstrations,” the Moldavian Communist Party leadership said after a meeting on the crisis.

On the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, protesters from the Moldavian Popular Front disrupted the traditional military parade by preventing the Soviet army from rolling its tanks through Kishinev’s Victory Square.

Filling the square themselves, they forced the local Communist leadership to flee the reviewing stand before they marched through the streets of central Kishinev. Police eventually used heavy rubber truncheons to break up the protests, beating many of the protesters, according to the accounts of witnesses.

In the continuing protests there, more than 5,000 protesters in front of the Moldavian Interior Ministry on Friday hurled rocks and pieces of steel scaffolding at police, overturned cars, paralyzed public transport and set fire to the ministry building.

Police fired warning shots into the air and used tear gas and water cannon to disperse the crowd, which numbered more than 5,000, according to Tass.

The government said that 83 policemen were injured along with 46 civilians, most of them presumed to be protesters. But officials of the Moldavian Popular Front said by telephone from Kishinev that the actual number of injured civilians was probably several times the government’s figure.

Police initially arrested more than 30 people during the protests Friday, according to Tass, but released them after the crowd set fire to the Interior Ministry building from two sides, smashing virtually all of its windows, burning police cars and threatening to rampage through the city.

The other emergency regulations adopted Saturday restrict the entry of motor vehicles into the capital, the sale of alcohol, the use of public address systems and the presence of minors in public places in the evening

BACKGROUND Once a part of the Roman Empire, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic is the second-smallest (after Armenia) of the 15 constituent republics that make up the Soviet Union. Encompassing 13,000 square miles, Moldavia lies in the extreme southwest corner of the Soviet Union bordering on the Ukraine and Romania. It is an important agricultural region and accounts for about one quarter of the Soviet Union’s vineyard acreage. Its population of 4.19 million makes it the most densely populated of the 15 republics. Moldavians make up 64% of the population with Ukrainians and Russians the largest of the ethnic minorities.