Soviet Troops Rush to Border : Azerbaijani Mobs Riot to Visit Iran

The government rushed more border troops to the southern republic of Azerbaijan today to try to stop a rampage by thousands of people along the boundary with Iran.

One person was killed in a clash among the protesters, the official news agency Tass reported today. Border guards did not use their weapons and none were injured, it said. The report did not say how many protesters were injured.

The government daily Izvestia said more than 4,000 people tore down guard towers and destroyed electronic alarms along the border.

The rioters want southern Azerbaijan to be unified with northern Iran and have threatened to remove all barriers at the border unless authorities remove them, the newspaper reported. Azerbaijanis have said they merely want the right to freely visit friends and relatives on the other side of the border.

Tass had said in the first report about the violence Tuesday that the rioters were “high on drugs or alcohol” and didn’t mention political motives.

Izvestia, in a report quoting I. Petrovas, head of the KGB’s Caucasus border district, mentioned only the political motives and said protesters had been plotting the rampage for weeks.

“Practically along the entire border between Azerbaijan and Iran a complex situation has emerged,” Izvestia said.

Izvestia said damage from the clashes exceeds $8.2 million.

The turmoil is the latest violence in the Caucasus, a region torn for two years by strife among Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians and other ethnic groups. The sending of reinforcements showed that the elite KGB guards stationed along the border were incapable of ending the violence.

The official news reports have not said how many border troop reinforcements were being sent, or how many are already in the region.

Iran accused the Soviets of violating a border agreement, Izvestia said.

Vagiv Samedoglu, editor of the Azerbaijan People’s Front newspaper, called the Tass report of attacks by drunken, narcotics-influenced mobs a “lie” written in Moscow.

He said, however, that Soviet Azerbaijanis had been camped along the border for nearly a month in hopes of seeing relatives and friends on the other side. The Azerbaijanis are the only Soviet ethnic group who, like Iranians, are largely Shiite Muslims.

About 4 million ethnic Azerbaijanis live in the adjoining Iranian province alone. Their Soviet kin want an open border and the freedom to trade and cross the frontier, practices that were suspended by dictator Josef Stalin, Samedoglu said by telephone from Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital.

Iranian media monitored in Nicosia, Cyprus, had no immediate report on the rampage. But Tass reported that Iranian border commissioners issued a protest saying the “actions by extremist elements are insulting” to Iran and requesting the Soviets act to quell the disorders.

Tass said “irresponsible elements” were trying to aggravate tensions in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus as a whole and provoke a brutal response from authorities. It did not elaborate.