Rebel Republics Say ‘Nyet’ to Gorbachev’s Unity Plan

The republics of Moldova and Uzbekistan today delivered a powerful double blow to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s plans to save the Soviet Union from breaking up.

Most of the Moldovan delegates stalked out of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, the national legislature, while Uzbek President Islam Karimov lashed Moscow for what he called decades of mismanagement and exploitation.

Gorbachev said he wants Soviet citizens to vote this winter in a referendum on whether to sign a unity pact.

“I introduced a suggestion to hold a referendum, and those who don’t want a union, let them go and secede,” Gorbachev told reporters in the Parliament building’s lobby. But he reiterated his demand that any secession must take place within the framework of Soviet law. “It’s a divorce process,” he said.

The Moldovan delegates said they were furious the Kremlin was ignoring their call for a crackdown on the southwestern republic’s breakaway ethnic minorities.

“We are leaving for good,” Moldovan Deputy Dumitru Matkovsky told reporters outside the hall, saying only a few Russian-speaking deputies had remained inside for the second day of debate on Gorbachev’s state-of-the-union address.

He said Moldova would not sign Gorbachev’s planned new Union Treaty, designed to redefine relations between the central government and the 15 increasingly rebellious republics and restore some order to the crisis-ridden country.

Matkovsky said Moscow had interfered in Moldova’s internal affairs by encouraging the republic’s separatists.

“We are not being allowed to sort out our sovereignty by ourselves. We won’t sign the Union Treaty. There is no chance of that now,” he said.

Karimov raised the specter of a powerful Central Asian coalition against the treaty when he echoed criticisms of the document made by the head of neighboring Kazakhstan.

“The center should not limit the rights of the republics but it should be the other way around. . . . We support Kazakhstan on this point,” Karimov said.

Delegates from Estonia, meanwhile, rejected Gorbachev’s plan for a referendum on the union treaty.