Central Asia Unrest Stirs Soviet Fears : Ethnic violence: The Communist Party warns that ‘civil chaos’ threatens reforms. Its paper hints at a return to old-style force to restore order.

In a sign of growing Kremlin concern over a storm of regional unrest that is rooted as much in social, political and economic neglect as in ethnic hatred, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda warned Saturday that the country’s reforms are threatened by “civil confrontation, chaos and instability.”

The front-page editorial, capping a week in which the latest wave of unrest spread to two of the Soviet Union’s sensitive Central Asian republics, said “the key question” now is whether stability will be restored by democratic means or by “tightening the screws, using the old methods of force from the past.”

The Pravda commentary coincided with a report that six more victims of ethnic violence in the Transcaucasian republic of Azerbaijan had been discovered about 30 miles away from the spot where investigators were reported Friday to have unearthed the mutilated bodies of a dozen, mostly elderly Armenian invalids.

Police Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Nechayev told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that the latest victims were battered beyond recognition, making it impossible to quickly establish their ethnic identity.

While powerful secessionist movements in the Soviet Union’s Baltic republics pose a major political problem for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, they have remained consistently peaceful.

But in the larger Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan, outbreaks of trouble have been getting progressively more frequent and more violent as Gorbachev’s reforms have relaxed some of the iron-fisted control that kept a tight lid on unrest in the south for so long.

At least 22 people died last week during riots in Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan, the republic’s second-ranking law officer told the official Tass news agency Saturday. That is an upward revision in the casualty count.

Meanwhile, Communist Party and police officials in neighboring Uzbekistan denied a report by Radio Moscow’s World Service that a curfew had been imposed in the ancient city of Samarkand after disturbances there. But Tass and two Soviet newspapers reported mounting tension in Uzbekistan as anti-Armenian and anti-Russian leaflets spread in areas adjacent to Tadzhikistan.

The situation remains tense in Dushanbe as well, with Soviet television on Saturday showing large numbers of troops and tanks still on the streets. And a local Communist Party official suggested that the republic will remain a tinderbox.

“The key roots of this conflict are the cultural, social and economic backwardness of the whole region,” said Alexei Sheryakin, spokesman for the party leadership in the Tadzhikistan republic.

Dushanbe’s riots started when rumors spread that thousands of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan were being given scarce apartments. During subsequent rioting, roving Tadzhik toughs reportedly attacked Russians and other minorities living in the city.

Fueling such chauvinism, which was also obvious in earlier clashes in Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, is an exploding population and the grinding poverty of a region where the leadership apparently remains out of step with Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms.

“The republic holds this country’s last place in living standards and first place in infant mortality,” said spokesman Sheryakin in an interview broadcast by Radio Moscow on Saturday. “It is suffering from rampant unemployment.”

Ethnic Muslims represent the Soviet Union’s fastest growing major population group, and the Tadzhiks are the fastest growing among the Muslims.

There are about 55 million Soviet Muslims--just under 20% of the population. But they accounted for fully half the increase in the Soviet population in the last decade. The five principal Central Asian nationalities, plus the Azerbaijanis, who are also mostly Muslims, registered a 71% population growth in the last 20 years, compared to a national increase of 18%. The Tadzhik population doubled in the same time.

It’s no coincidence that virtually every one of at least a dozen violent outbreaks in Central Asia during the last three years have involved mostly young people. The Tadzhik prosecutor’s office said Saturday that most of the 19 people arrested in connection with last week’s disturbances in Dushanbe were unemployed youths.

Largely because of high birthrates, the Muslim republics are at the bottom of the Soviet economic ladder. Of the 41 million Soviet citizens identified as living below the official poverty line, more than half live in the six southern Muslim republics. The average monthly income in Tadzhikistan is about half the national average, and per capita production of goods and services in that republic amounts to less than 30% of that in top-ranking Byelorussia.

Economic mismanagement has been another culprit in the fate of the Soviet south. For example, central planners in Moscow for years decreed that Central Asia should concentrate on cotton production. The area sown to cotton kept expanding while water resources dwindled and yields declined. Food crops were scarce and growing food more profitable, but the plan decreed that Central Asia grow cotton.

Toxic fertilizers meant to counter declining yields poisoned the soil so badly that it is considered a major contributor to the region’s alarming infant mortality rate.

The region is also rich in raw materials, and some leaders, such as Yussif Samed-oglu, a member of the ruling council of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, assert that this is one reason why Moscow is so sensitive to pressures for greater autonomy or even independence among its southern republics.

“A purely democratic movement in the Muslim republics, which are a main source of raw materials for the empire, is extremely disadvantageous for the Kremlin,” Samed-oglu said in a recent interview. “In the (hypothetical) case where Azerbaijan secedes with all the Muslim republics, the empire may collapse,” he declared.

On purely economic grounds, that may be an overstatement. Moscow subsidized the five Central Asian republics with 6 billion rubles ($9.6 billion) in 1989, providing support ranging from 14% of the budget in Tadzhikistan to 21% in Turkmenia. Also, there’s no question that living standards are higher in Soviet Central Asia than in neighboring countries such as Afghanistan and Iran.

Whether the Muslim republics could cut an even better deal for themselves if they were free of Moscow’s control may never be known. But it’s clear in the meantime that the process of decentralizing power--a cornerstone of Gorbachev’s reforms--is going much more slowly in Central Asia than in much of the rest of the country.

In parliamentary elections scheduled in Uzbekistan today, for example, fully one-third of the constituencies have only one candidate on the ballot, more than likely a Communist incumbent. The republic’s prime minister, his two deputies and about 20 heads of local councils are among those running unopposed.

“Many voters face no real choice, just like during the pre- perestroika period of stagnation,” Radio Moscow commented Saturday.

Economically, it’s indicative that only three of the first 188 joint ventures registered under liberalized foreign investment laws were in Soviet Central Asia.

The one democratic form that Soviet Muslims appear to have mastered is the one that Pravda is most nervous about--street demonstrations.

As a rule, it said, such demonstrations remain within the spirit of perestroika. However, it added, “one cannot fail to observe something else: Too often rallies and demonstrations become the form of a kind of legalization of extremism, and too often disruptive calls are issued among other slogans.”

After being accused of failing to act quickly enough last month to head off ethnic violence in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, Moscow has already taken a more aggressive stance against unrest. A state of emergency was imposed in Dushanbe within a day of the outbreak of disturbances there, and last week Gorbachev called for strict new laws against ethnic violence.