Press accounts of meeting between General Secretary Gorbachev and Armenian representatives, leading to temporary halt of demonstrations in Yerevan
Armenian activists, responding to a second appeal for calm from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, called for a month-long suspension of street protests in the Armenian capital of Yerevan today, according to Armenian dissident sources.
Gorbachev, who held a meeting in Moscow yesterday with two leaders of the protests, urged them to calm the demonstrators and promised to do what he could to respond to their concerns, according to one of the sources who maintains close contacts with the key organizers of the protests.
The two activists who met with Gorbachev were Armenian poet Silva Kaputikian and writer Zori Balayan, the sources said. Both are popular figures in Armenia who had spoken before crowds in Yerevan during the street protests.
The two activists, returning to Yerevan today, had met with other leaders of the protests, and they decided to suspend the demonstrations for four weeks, the sources said.
But many protesters gathered in the streets of the Armenian capital anyway, the sources said by telephone, either because they were not informed about the suspension in the demonstrations or because they disagreed with it.
[…]
Leading Soviet officials have been quoted in the official media as saying they opposed the demands that Nagorno-Karabakh be united with Armenia.
[…]
The original protests in Nagorno-Karabagh had resulted in some casualties, Vladimir Dolghikh, a non-voting member of the ruling Politburo, indicated in an article in the Wednesday issues of the Armenian Communist party daily, Komunist. “The affair in Nagorno-Karabagh has gone as far as clashes between groups of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and there have been victims,” Doghikh was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
Dolghik’s comments, published in the magazine’s issue that reached Moscow by mail today, were the first official report of deaths involved in the dispute.
[Washington Post, February 28, 1988]
The Karabagh File, Documents and Facts, 1918-1988, First Edition, Cambridge Toronto 1988, by the ZORYAN INSTITUTE, edited by: Gerard J. LIBARIDIAN, pp. 94-95.
