Soviet authorities airlifted frightened Armenians out of the violence-torn Tadzhik capital of Dushanbe Tuesday after rioting that left six people dead and 108 wounded, the Izvestia newspaper said.
The daily government newspaper said 127 Armenians - 29 refugees from Baku, Azerbaijan, and the rest longtime residents of Dushanbe - left on the first emergency plane for the Armenian capital of Yerevan. It said a second flight with Armenians also had departed and two more were expected to leave Tuesday night.Local authorities arranged the flights in response to appeals from the Armenian community, Izvestia said.
Interior Ministry troops intervened to stop the killings in Dushanbe, firing shots in the air and using special gas, rubber truncheons and water hoses against about 4,000 rampaging Sunni Moslem Tadzhiks in pitched battles late Monday night, the official Tass news agency said.
Interior Ministry troops cordoned off downtown Dushanbe, and "the situation remained tense" in the city of 316,000 people.
Six people were killed and 108 people, including 38 police or soldiers, were seriously wounded in the violence, Tass said.
Tass did identify the dead by nationality but it made clear that rumors of Armenian refugees coming from Baku sparked the rampage Monday and forced authorities to impose a state of emergency and a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.
Soviet television said the rioters, most of them youths, rampaged against Armenians living with relatives in Dushanbe after fleeing last month's pogroms in Azerbaijan.
"The violence was prompted by rumors that thousands of Armenian refugees were arriving in the Tadzhik capital from Baku and were being allocated flats meant for local residents," Tass said.
Tass said about 4,000 Tadzhiks gathered Monday night and "demanded that Armenians be resettled out of the republic."
It said Communist Party leader Kakhar Makhkamov sought to assure them that only 40 Armenian refugees were in Dushanbe and were housed with relatives.
"However, the crowd went on a ramage," Tass said. "Some protesters tried to get into the Central Committee building and when they failed, they threw stones at windows on the grounds and shouted threats."
It said they stormed past Interior Minstry troops, broke windows at several food stores and other shops and set buses on fire.
The killings spread the nationalist-ethnic-religious violence to a Moslem republic in Central Asia where feeling against Christian Armenians runs high. Azerbiajan, although a Moslem republic, is in Transcaucasus.
But like the violence in the sister Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan last summer against Meskhetian Turks, the Tadzhik pogroms appeared linked to or incited by economic, especially competition for scarce housing.