2 More Soviet Republics Make Sovereignty Moves

The legislatures of Georgia and Uzbekistan took cautious steps toward sovereignty on Wednesday but followed a different path than the one blazed by the Baltic republics.

These were the latest challenges to face President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who has been offering greater autonomy in an effort to persuade the Soviet Union’s increasingly restive republics to remain within the fold.

Uzbekistan’s Supreme Soviet passed a “Declaration of Sovereignty of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic Within a Renewed Soviet Federation,” the official Soviet news agency Tass reported. It was the first of the five Soviet Central Asian republics to move toward a break with Moscow.

The “Renewed Soviet Federation” referred to in the declaration does not currently exist. Gorbachev has spoken often of revamping the relationship between the Soviet government and the republics. Last week he offered to establish a new, looser union of “sovereign states” joined under a treaty.

About 1,200 miles away, the Georgian Supreme Soviet decided to create a legal mechanism for restoring the republic’s independence, Tass reported.

Neither step was as radical as the declarations of independence approved by the Soviet Baltic republics, but they showed how the spirit of breaking from central rule is spreading across this vast, multi-ethnic country.

Gorbachev imposed economic sanctions against Lithuania after it declared its independence March 11. He called the declaration illegal and demanded it be suspended.

Some deputies of Uzbekistan’s legislature, meeting in the republic’s capital of Tashkent, wanted to postpone consideration of the sovereignty declaration until the new union treaty is completed, Tass said. But they were overruled and the declaration was approved by a majority.

“The declaration proclaims Uzbekistan’s state sovereignty and the supremacy of republic laws on its entire territory,” Tass said. “The declaration puts all issues of domestic and foreign policy under the authority of Uzbekistan.”

The Tass report made clear that Uzbekistan is not considering seceding from the Soviet Union, but one Uzbek official said no options are being ruled out.

“If it (the union) doesn’t support the well-being of the workers, doesn’t get us out of the crisis, then we will be obliged to think it over with deputies,” Uzbek Prime Minister Sh. Mirsaidov told Soviet television.

Georgia’s Supreme Soviet decided to form a commission to create a legal mechanism for restoring the independence the republic lost after Red Army troops occupied the area in 1921.

Tass said that lawmakers in the mountainous republic of 5.3 million people also gave preliminary approval to a law on economic independence and appealed to the Russian federation’s legislature to establish ties with it as a sovereign government.

On March 9, the Georgian Supreme Soviet condemned the republic’s annexation by the Soviet Union and urged negotiations on independence, becoming the fourth of the 15 Soviet republics to begin a parliamentary struggle for secession.

Wednesday’s session was held a month ahead of scheduled in response to demands from hunger-striking university students in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Tass said.

BACKGROUND

Uzbekistan, a cotton-growing republic of 20 million people in Soviet Central Asia, is home of the region’s best-organized grass-roots political movement, Berlik. And it is a center for activism by the majority Muslim population. Unemployment is the highest in the nation, overfertilization has polluted waterways and ruined crops and ethnic tensions are boiling over.