Lithuanian Rally Backs Armenia Claim

MOSCOW — A huge rally in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius has urged Soviet authorities to hold a referendum on self-determination in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Azerbaijan republic more than 1,000 miles away, Lithuanian sources said Sunday.

The Tass news agency said 100,000 people gathered in Vilnius on Saturday evening for a rally called by the Initiative Group in Support of Perestroika, a non-official group formed recently to promote Kremlin reform.

Vytautas Bogusis, a Lithuanian activist, said by telephone from Vilnius that the group read out a memorandum suggesting that Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh vote on self-determination in a referendum.

“The crowd voted unanimously in favor of this,” he said. “The memorandum will be sent to the Soviet government.”

Ethnic Armenians form 80% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population. Their demand that the region be transferred from Azerbaijani to Armenian administration has sparked five months of ethnic turmoil in which more than 30 people have died.

In the Armenian capital of Yerevan, troops were sent in twice last week as residents declared a general strike, shut down the city’s airport for two days--setting off clashes in which a youth was shot and killed--and held a mass protest in the city’s Opera Square.

Armenian Interior Ministry officials contacted Sunday refused to say whether the troops were still patrolling Yerevan. They said the atmosphere in the city was normal.

In Lithuania, a senior Communist Party official told Saturday’s rally that authorities in Vilnius would soon be considering granting official recognition to the republic’s pre-1940 flag--a powerful symbol of national autonomy.

The green, red and scarlet flag flew in Lithuania from 1918 to 1940, when it was an independent state.

Bogusis said speakers at the rally called for Lithuanian economic autonomy, for Lithuanian to be made the republic’s official language and for Lithuanians drafted into the Soviet armed forces to be allowed to serve only in the republic.