Turmoil in Soviet Union

In the past three years, the Soviet-Azerbaijani conspirators have repeatedly violated all civilized norms in the Caucasus. They have uprooted 200,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan (the massacres of Sumgait and Baku are well known), and now they are doing the same with the 180,000 Armenians living in Karabakh (Part A, May 10-11).

And Mikhail Gorbachev, whose hands are stained with Armenian blood, has the audacity to shamelessly claim his “choice for a fundamental democratic transformation of the Soviet state.” There cannot be a fundamental and especially a democratic transformation of any state if basic human rights and the right of self-determination are continuously violated. The Soviet state does not meet any norm of a civilized world, and no financial help or other aid will liberate that state until it truly represents the will of the people. Armenians were the first to believe in Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika , and they were the first to be suppressed. Seventy years of terror was not enough, it seems.

HAROUT BRONOZIAN, Glendale