The government rushed more border troops to the southern republic of Azerbaijan Wednesday to try to stop a rampage by thousands of people along the boundary with Iran, a newspaper reported.
One person was killed in a clash among the protesters, the official news agency Tass reported Wednesday. Border guards did not use their weapons and none were injured, it said.The government daily Izvestia said more than 4,000 people tore down guard towers and destroyed electronic alarms along the border.
The rioters want Azerbaijan to be unified with northern Iran and have threatened to remove all barriers at the border unless authorities remove them, the newspaper reported. Azerbaijanis have said they merely want the right to visit friends and relatives across the border.
Tass had said in its first report about the violence Tuesday that the rioters were "high on drugs or alcohol" and did not mention any political motives.
Izvestia, in a report quoting I. Petrovas, head of the KGB's Caucasus border district, mentioned only the political motives and said protesters had been plotting the rampage for weeks.
None of the reports mentioned any injuries or deaths, but Izvestia said damage exceeds $8.2 million.
The turmoil is the latest violence in the Caucasus, a region torn for two years by strife among Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians and other ethnic groups. The sending of reinforcements showed that the elite KGB guards stationed along the border were incapable of ending the violence.
The official news reports have not said how many border troop reinforcements were being sent, or how many are already in the region.
Armenians and Azerbaijanis have been fighting since February 1988 over claims to the enclave.
Iran accused the Soviets of violating a border agreement, Isvestia said.
Vagiv Samedoglu, editor of the Azerbaijan People's Front newspaper, called the Tass report of attacks by drunken, narcotics-influenced mobs a "lie" written in Moscow, 1,200 miles north of Nakhichevan.
He said, however, that Azerbaijanis had been camped along the border for nearly a month in hopes of seeing relatives and friends on the other side. The Azerbaijanis are the only Soviet ethnic group who, like Iranians, are largely Shiite Moslems.
About 4 million ethnic Azerbaijanis live in the adjoining Iranian province of Azerbaijan alone. Their Soviet kin want an open border and the freedom to trade and cross the frontier, practices that were suspended by Josef Stalin, Samedoglu said by phone from Baku, Azerbaijan's capital.
Iranian media monitored in Nicosia, Cyprus, had no report on the rampage. But Tass reported that Iranian border commissioners issued a protest saying the "actions by extremist elements are insulting" to Iran and requesting the Soviets act to quell the disorders.