Muslims Ussr

Soviet troops deployed along the Iranian frontier with troubled Azerbaijan on Monday to block cross-border movement by Azerbaijanis on both sides, Tehran Radio reported. Tens of thousands of Soviet Muslims reportedly have crossed into Iran in the last week. According to press reports from Moscow, many of them have returned to Soviet soil carrying weapons.

The Communist regime that seized power in Tadzhikistan a week ago began to crumble Monday under the weight of a marathon street protest as the regime lifted a national state of emergency and agreed to consider suspending both the Communist Party and its hard-line leader. With tens of thousands of protesters shouting "Resign! Resign!" from their growing tent city just outside the Parliament building, President Rakhman Nabiyev, who led the coup, announced that he is ready to give up his post.

Amid the chaos of the collapsing Soviet empire, a young Tadzhik man emerged from a crowd of pro-democracy protesters on the troubled streets of this Central Asian capital recently with a tattered poem in his hand. It was titled "Tigris"--the work of an Iranian poet who wrote extensively against the Shah of Iran at the height of the fundamentalist Islamic revolution that changed the face of that country more than a decade ago. "And the rebuilders build again," the poem began.

The ground war in the Gulf has RAISED FEARS AMONG SOME SOVIET OFFICIALS of a pro-Iraq backlash by Muslims in the Soviet Union. One Soviet Mideast analyst said President Mikhail S. Gorbachev undertook his peace initiative "partly to pacify the Muslim population." There are an estimated 80 million Muslims among the nation's 283 million people, and the Kremlin has weathered two years of secessionist and ethnic unrest in its southern Islamic regions.

The thousands of peacekeeping troops sent to the Soviet Union's southern republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia were ordered Wednesday to open fire if attacked, and they met strong resistance from rival militias fighting around the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Carried into the battle zones by helicopters after Azerbaijani residents blocked roads throughout the area, the troops themselves came under fire, according to the Soviet Interior Ministry and the official Tass news agency.

Sirens wailed Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, as hundreds of thousands of Muslims poured into the streets in a massive funeral procession for the people killed when Soviet troops burst into the city to put a bloody end to a nationalist uprising. At the same time, the ceremony was a protest demonstration, with Azerbaijanis burning their Communist Party membership cards or tossing them into garbage pails and holding up placards opposing the Soviet party and President Mikhail S.

The legislature in the southern Soviet republic of Armenia voted Wednesday to annex the Nagorno-Karabakh region from neighboring Azerbaijan as the ethnic dispute between the neighboring republics continued. Grant M. Voskanyan, chairman of the Armenian Supreme Soviet, said the republic's legislature voted overwhelmingly to incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh, but added that the issue now goes to the country's central authorities in Moscow for a decision.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis armed with rifles, handguns and knives engaged in "mass-scale" street fighting in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, wounding 25 people in one of the bloodiest such incidents there in seven months, Tass said Monday. The official Soviet news agency said Armenians rushed from a rally Sunday in the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert to the nearby village of Khadzhaly after reports of Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes there.

In a hut without heat on the Armenian-Azerbaijan border, 10 men sat around a table Sunday, their faces stony and their words as sharp as the daggers they left behind at their respective camps. There was a Soviet army general in the hut, where the warring sides of a violent battle were negotiating for a second day, but he was not doing much. He was sitting some distance away from the table, jotting an occasional note on his pad and looking bored with the whole business.

The youngsters at the local Armenian school had just finished their daily prayers this week when principal Lillie Merigian delivered what had become an all-too-grim update on the bloodshed in their homeland. From out of the group marched one determined second-grader with a message for his instructor: "I'll go over there and be like Superman and help my people out," he told her.