Azerbaijani Demonstrators Said to Be Leaving Border

A protest organizer said Azerbaijani demonstrators began drawing back from the Soviet-Iranian border Thursday after trying for four days to force open the frontier crossing and reunite with their brethren in Iran.

The KGB reinforced its border troops in the area Wednesday to stop protesters from smashing guard towers and security alarms.

The newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna, or Workers’ Tribune, reported Thursday: “The border posts themselves are under threat, and the rampaging ruffians have gone so far as to promise retribution against the soldiers of the border patrol and their family members.”

But dissident writer Yusif Samedoglu reported by telephone Thursday from Baku, capital of the republic of Azerbaijan: “The situation is stabilizing. People are gradually going home.”

Samedoglu leads the grass-roots political Azerbaijani People’s Front, which organized the protest.

Savili A. Perets, deputy director of the official news agency Azerinform, also said in a telephone interview from Baku that the border area was calming down. He said Azerbaijan party chief Abdul-Rakhman Vezirov and other officials traveled Thursday from Baku to the border area to investigate.

The Azerbaijanis began demonstrating Sunday for unification of their Soviet republic with Iran’s northern Azerbaijan province, a region peopled by their ethnic kin. They threatened to remove all barriers along the nearly 500-mile border if authorities failed to do so themselves.

The disturbances were the latest flare-up in two years of ethnic unrest among Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Abkhazians and other ethnic groups in the Soviet Caucasus region. More than 300 people died nationwide in ethnic unrest in two years.

Iran has protested the unrest, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said Thursday, “It’s not a big international issue.”

Five young men from Soviet Azerbaijan cut barbed wire border fences on the Aras River that forms the border with Iran and four managed to swim to the Iranian side, Iran’s TV network reported in a broadcast monitored in Cyprus. The fifth drowned in the incident Wednesday, it said.

It marked the first time the unrest was reported in Iranian news media.

The Soviet Azerbaijanis, who are largely Shiite Muslims, want freedom to trade with their ethnic kin in Iran and cross the frontier, practices that dictator Josef Stalin suspended.