100 Injured as 5,000 Storm Town in Soviet Uzbekistan

MOSCOW —  A mob of up to 5,000 people armed with automatic rifles and other weapons stormed the center of the town of Kokand in Uzbekistan, and 100 people suffered gunshot wounds, the head of the Soviet Interior Ministry’s troops said.

Col. Gen. Yuri V. Shatalin said the attack came on the sixth straight day of violence in the Fergana region of the Central Asian Soviet republic. The violence began last weekend with clashes between Uzbeks and the local Meskhetian minority, rival Muslim sects.

“They attacked state organizations and also places where the Meskhetians lived,” said Shatalin, who was speaking on Soviet television. “We saw large amounts of automatic rifles, pistols and other firearms in the hands of the attackers.”

A television correspondent who visited Kokand said troops responded merely by firing in the air, indicating that the injuries were caused by one group, apparently Uzbeks, firing at the Meskhetians.

The correspondent said that helicopters and doctors had been sent to Kokand, about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, and planes were standing by to evacuate the Meskhetians, a minority deported to the area from the Soviet republic of Georgia by dictator Josef Stalin in 1944.

The government newspaper Izvestia, published Friday morning before the latest clashes, said a total of 80 people were killed in this week’s ethnic violence in Uzbekistan and 800 were injured.

Six people were reported killed and 90 wounded Wednesday in Kokand, 60 miles to the west of the city of Fergana, where the violence started.

Television showed film of a charging crowd and burned out cars and buildings. The correspondent said there were not enough police to stop and arrest the crowds of “criminals and jobless.”

He said a local Communist Party leader, identified only as Goncharov, told him he had been “unable to find a common language with the crowd,” who had “moved on him with sticks and stones” when he tried to address them.

The correspondent said he had only been able to speak to Goncharov by telephone. A group of Soviet journalists who tried to reach the city center were prevented from getting through by the scale of the violence.

Shatalin said a detachment of airborne troops had also been sent to the Uzbeksky district, also in the Fergana region, after a group of about 500 young people tried to seize the local police station.

The clashes, the worst reported case of inter-ethnic violence in decades of Soviet history, appear to have been triggered by a mixture of ethnic and religious differences and by high unemployment.