confrontation over national rights
USSR
ESTONIA
Tartue
•: Riga
LATVIA
LITHUANIA
@kaunes
THE SPREAD and radicalization of national movements continue to accelerate. In this respect, the publication of the
Communist Party's new program on the national question on
August 17, and the new campaign launched against the Baltic movements after the demonstration of a million people across the three republics on August 23, seem to be having little effect.
The upsurge has almost certainly gone too far to be halted without a major turn in the situation. In a feature on the Baltic movements in the July 27 issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Bernd Nielsen-Stokkeby quoted a Latvian writer, "An airplane can be stopped while it is still on the runway. But we have already taken off. Now we can only fly or crash."
M
ORE AND MORE nationalities are raising their heads, such as the Gagauz Turks, who live mainly in the Republic of Moldavia. New York Times Service correspondent Bill Keller reported the following remark by a Gagauz farmer in
Komrat in early August, "If the miners in the Kuznetsk Basin can make demands, you think we can't make demands too?"1
It has, furthermore, become evident that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus has not been brought under control by the imposition of direct rule from Moscow. On August 23, Pravda published a TASS dispatch that reflected a continuing radicalization in the region and the nervousness of the Soviet authorities. Strangely, it was not pointed up in the international
The dispatch press.
began:
"The beginning of the week was marked in the autonomous oblast' by a return to work in the enterprises, building sites, buses, organizations and institutions of workers who had been on strike since May 3. However, normal work has not been fully resumed." Thus, apparently a general strike had been going on in the region for four months.
Not only that. The decision to end the strike was made by a body that suggests dual power, and which was treated very gingerly in the TASS dispatch: "The decision of the Congress of Mandated Representatives of the Population of Nagorno-
Karabakh meeting last week in Stepana-
GERRY FOLEY kert for a return to normal work was unquestionably positive. Other decisions of this Congress, as well as the circumstances in which it was conducted, merit more detailed analysis."
What merited "more detailed analysis" in particular was the question of what authority this body could actually wield. Supporters of the Karabakh movement have challenged the assumption of power by central authorities, declaring the measures contradictory to the Statutes of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the constitution.
"Irresponsible actions of rampaging elements"
One of the demands of the strikers was restoration of the rights of the local party and Soviet bodies. As Pravda explains: "In a meeting of the USSR people's deputies from the NKAO and oblast' leaders with the leadership of the country at the end of June, an agreement was reached that the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Special Administration Committee would determine the timing and modalities for a restoration of these bodies....
"However, the continuing strike, the turning away of some local leaders from resolving important socio-economic problems for which they were directly responsible, the irresponsible actions of rampaging elements on both sides and illconsidered statements in the republic and local press destabilized the situation; and this, along with other factors, led to a new
POLAND rise in tension in NKAO, and to a blockade of the oblast.
"Meeting in these conditions, the Congress of Mandated Representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh in fact represented only the Armenian majority. 'In order to stabilize the situation in the region until the Oblast' Soviet and Party Organizational Committee are restored to their functions,' it elected a National Council, endowing it 'in the name of the people with supreme authority in administering the oblast' in all spheres in the period between congresses [of mandated people's representatives].' "In the decisions of the Congress, the National Council is characterized as the 'only people's organ of Communists and non-party people'."
A problem that has become deeply entangled
The dispatch continued: "*This National Council acts independently under the control only of the Congress. Its decisions are meant to be applied on the whole territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.'...It is...hard to understand how relations will develop with the [official] Special Administration Committee, which....holds full power on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh."
The dispatch ends: "Of course, jurists have yet to give their assessments of the legality of the Congress and the compatibility of its documents with state legislation in view of the form of special administration operating in the NKAO. However, it is clear that the leaders of the Armenian part of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh are trying to find new ways to actively express their will in order to remind the authorities and public opinion of the issue they have raised.
"The problem of Nagorno-Karabakh has become deeply entangled. But the knot cannot be cut, as some would like to do. An attempt at such a resolution of the matter would inevitably offend many people. The problem of the NKAO must be resolved in a carefully weighed way, taking no chances."
Furthermore, on September 4, the People's Front of Azerbaijan launched a gen13 1. International Herald Tribune, August 8, 1989.
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Sharpening
International Viewpoint #169 • September 18, 1989 eral strike in the republic's capital, Baku, which seems to have been widely followed, despite the arrival of all-Union troops. The internal Soviet central press said little about these events. However, they were reported prominently in the September 8 issue of Nouvelles de Moscou, which summarized the demands of the Front as follows:
"Registration of the People's Front of Azerbaijan as a social organization.
"Release the prisoners and end the prosecution of those arrested in the mass ral-
"Annul the election results for people's deputies of the USSR held in Azerbaijan
"Lift the curfew and hold new elecOpen national movements in
Muslim republics
It is interesting that the demand for restoring Azerbaijani rule over Nagorno-Karabakh was not mentioned. Defense of Azeri sovereignty over the territory was central to the Baku demonstrations in November 1988 and in at least the first publications of the Azerbaijan People's
A summary of the Azeri People's Front program published by the Radio Free Europe newsletter indicates that it was on the model of the Baltic fronts, with the same headings. (See the translation of the Latvian front program on p. 18) However, it was also notable in the November demonstrations that Azeri nationalist, pan-Turkist and pan-Islamic sentiments were prominently expressed, along with anti-Russian feelings. One of the leaders of the November demonstrations, Nemet Panakhov was attacked specifically in the central Soviet press for threatening attacks on Soviet offices in
An important development this year is the rise of open national movements in the Muslim republics, including, besides the Azeri Front, the Birlik (Unity) in Uzbekistan, which issued an appeal calling for an end to the pogroms against the Meskhetian Turks. If the axis of the Azeri front shifts from opposition to the Armenians to opposition to Moscow, that would be a major turn in the situation.
It should be remembered that the Armenian movement has never put the blame for the Nagorno-Karabakh problem on the Azeris but always on Moscow, which it Armenian protests. In its statement quoted in the TASS dispatch in Pravda of August 23, the Nagorno-Karabakh Congress of Mandated People's Representatives again appealed to the Azeris:
"The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, basing itself on the inalienable right of every people to determine its own 14 Oblast Soviet, has clearly opted for leav- political status, by the decisions of the ing the Azerbaijani SSR and joining the Armenian SSR. This in no way harms the real interests of the Azerbaijani people, because no people can be free if it rules over other peoples."
Clearly, the possibilities tor dialogue could be improved it a democratic organization genuinely representative of the develops. International reports indicate conflict between the Azeri Front and the republic's leadership. The latter has been allied with the Ligachev faction in the CPSU and was guilty of complicity in the anti-Armenian pog roms. It is also interesting that protests have been organized against the treatment of the Turkish minority in the "fraternal socialist country" of Bulgaria.
In the Baltic, where open mass movements have existed now for two years and swept the elections for the Congress of People's Deputies, the radicalization of national demands has been very rapid. In February, the Lithuanian Front, Sajudis, came much closer to demanding effective independence from the Soviet Union. On May 14, a conference of the three Baltic Fronts adopted a joint declaration moving in the same direction. It announced that the aspiration of the three fronts was "the state sovereignty of their nations within the framework of a neutral, demilitarized Balto-Scandinavia."2
Leaders of the Latvian People's Front announced in the first week of September that they expect the congress of the front in October to adopt the demand for complete political independence from the Soviet Union. In all three Baltic states, independence parties exist alongside the people's fronts and seem to have been growing, in particular in Latvia, where one of the principal leaders, Eduards Berklavs, was purged from the leadership of the Latvian CP in 1959 for "bourgeois nationalism." At the time, he was deputy head of government of the republic and represented a majority in the Politburo of the Latvian CP, which was purged along
Tradition of resistance in
Latvian CP
In fact, there is an important tradition of resistance to national oppression in the Latvian CP, marked by the open letter of 17 historic leaders published in 1972. Among other things, it said: "Over time it has become clear that Great Russian chauvinism is a carefully thought out course of the leaders of the Soviet Communist Parassimilation of the small nations of the Soviet Union is projected as one of the most important domestic tasks for the immediate future. "3
The radicalization of the Baltic movements reached a peak with the anniversaries of the Soviet occupation of the three countries in June 1940 and their incorporation into the USSR in August 1940, in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of
August 23, 1939. The anniversary of the latter was marked by a demonstration of a million people joining hands from one end of the Baltic countries to the other, symbolically reasserting the violated borders. The parliamentary resolutions requesting incorporation in the USSR, dictated by the Soviet occupation forces, were repudiated. The Soviet authorities were obliged to acknowledge that the way was opened for occupying these countries by the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Nonetheless, the central press continues to argue that the juridical basis of their incorporation into the USSR remains valid.
The confrontation sharpened as the Estonian parliament passed a law requiring minimum periods of residence for votand running in elections in the republic and the organization of protest strikes by Russian workers against it. These strikes seem intended to put pressure on the central authorities, since, with the exception of transport, the industries involved are considered artificial and unwanted by the Estonians. The numbers of workers involved, according to all were relatively Soviet unionist "Internationalist Front" demanded the suspension of the Estonian government and direct rule from Moscow until new elections could be held.
### Baltic fronts not intimidated
At the same time, the CPSU's new program on the national question was published on August 17. Although it included conciliatory phrases, it offered no substantial new powers to the republics, only administrative devolution and increased cultural concessions.
On August 27, the Central Committee issued a statement denouncing the dangers of "nationalism" and "extremism" in the Baltic republics. It included an attack on the local CPs: "It has to be admitted that some of the party committees and workers have failed to face up to the difficulties.... and some have even played along with the nationalist moods, undermining opposition to the separatist plans."
This statement has been followed by an almost daily rubric in Pravda decrying nationalism in the Baltic, featuring letters from "concerned individuals" and party bodies, reports of actions by "unity" forces, and so on. Statements by Latvian and Estonian CP leaders have been published solemnly acknowledging the tance" of the CC statement and the need to consider the dangers of extremism. But the Latvian front's move toward the adoption of a demand for independence and references in Pravda to supposedly outrageous statements by Sajudis representatives, indicate that the Baltic fronts have not been intimidated. * 2. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 27. 3. Andres Küng, En dröm om frihet, Stockholm, 1972,