Threats To Use 'mass Terror' In Armenia
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday January 3, 1989
MOSCOW, Monday: An Armenian Communist Party newspaper has published what purports to be an anonymous ultimatum to the KGB, threatening to use American-made Stinger missiles in a campaign of "mass terror" if jailed Armenian nationalist leaders are not set free.
Armenian dissidents said the article was an obvious fabrication, intended to justify a growing crackdown on nationalist groups.
The purported threat was published in the party daily, Kommunist,beside an article accusing two leaders of an independent Armenian political movement of advocating a violent uprising.
Rafael Popoyan, a literary critic and supporter of the independent Armenian movement, said in a telephone interview last night that the publication was widely viewed in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, as a fabrication aimed at discrediting the Karabakh Committee, a popular 11-member council that has led strikes and demonstrations in the past year.
At least seven members of the Karabakh Committee and several other Armenian leaders were arrested last month, and the others have gone into hiding.
The articles, published in Kommunist last Wednesday, did not reach Moscow until yesterday. They were the most serious criticism to date in a growing press campaign that has portrayed nationalist leaders as power-hungry extremists.
Although there have been previous reports that the police had confiscated small arms and homemade explosives in Armenia and neighbouring Azerbaijan, this was the first explicit attempt to paint the leadership of the Armenian movement as terrorists.
"All Armenia knows it's an absurd lie," Mr Popoyan said. "Violence contradicts everything the Karabakh Committee stands for."
At least 60 people have been officially reported killed in ethnic clashes in Armenia and Azerbaijan since a territorial dispute between the two republics erupted into violence in February.
At the heart of the dispute is Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan where the Armenian majority demands unification with Armenia. But in Armenia, the dispute also includes demands for greater independence from Moscow and for tougher action against Azerbaijanis accused of attacking Armenians.
The Kommunist article featured a photograph of a hand-printed letter that read: "We demand the immediate release of the leaders of the Karabakh Committee and all political prisoners arrested in recent days. We give you 24 hours to think it over. Otherwise we will turn to mass terror. We will not set a time or place. We have Stinger missiles, provided by our friends."
Stingers are well known here because the US supplies them to guerillas fighting the Soviet-backed Afghan Government.
In the accompanying article, clearly intended to suggest that the ultimatum reflected the views of nationalist leaders, Kommunist pointedly quoted Ashot Manucharyan, a Karabakh Committee member, as calling for "a second Afghanistan" in the republic.
Mr Manucharyan, who was elected last northern autumn to the Armenian legislature, was detained by the police on December 10, but was later released. Since then, another member of the legislature has been arrested and Mr Manucharyan has gone into hiding.
Mr Popoyan said last night that Mr Manucharyan and other Karabakh Committee leaders had cited armed rebellion as a possible outcome if the authorities did not heed popular demands for transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh.
But he said the leaders had firmly disavowed that approach in favour of peaceful civil disobedience.
* In the midst of the worst shortage of consumer goods in recent memory, the Soviet Government announced yesterday that foreigners would soon be prevented from taking such scarce locally produced items as caviar, coffee, television sets, children's clothing, refrigerators or washing machines out of the country.
The brief announcement by Tass said the new regulations would go into effect on February 1 and remain in force until the end of 1990, and would apply to "consumer goods taken out of the country by persons permanently residing abroad, staying in the USSR as tourists or on business".
The announcement of the decree did not indicate that the new limits would apply to commercial exports of caviar and other goods by Soviet industrial enterprises and official trading organisations. Such exports are a major source of hard currency for the USSR.
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald