Thousands of people went on strike in the capital of Armenia, apparently unhappy over the Armenian leadership's presentation of an ethnic dispute at the national Communist Party conference, a newspaper said Tuesday. The Soviet government daily Izvestia said the strike began Monday, one day after ``many thousands'' of people met in the Theater Square of Yerevan, the capital of the southern republic. Most flights in and out of Yerevan were canceled, it said. In a Tuesday edition, Izvestia said: ``Like yesterday a series of the city's industrial concerns aren't working, or are working with less than a full work force.'' It said food stores and industries, as well as restaurants and medical services had been working Monday. The newspaper said farm work was going on in Stepanakert, the largest city of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, but that many other industries and institutions there also were shut down. Nagorno-Karabakh is at the center of a territorial dispute between Armenia and the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan, but the mountain enclave's predominantly Armenian population has been agitating since February to be annexed to Armenia. Armenia supports the demand. Azerbaijan is against it. At least 32 people were killed in riots over annexation which broke out in Sumgait, Azerbaijan, at the end of February. Izvestia said the thousands of people who gathered on the Yerevan city square Sunday listened to a television broadcast by delegates to the four-day party conference in Moscow, which closed last Friday. Armenian party leader Suren Arutyunyan said in remarks broadcast on Soviet TV during the conference that authorities could not normalize the situation in Armenia, where large demonstrations frequently have occurred in support of Nagorno-Karabakh's demand. He proposed that the conference take up unspecified amendments to the Soviet constitution. The disagreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan has sent the issue to national authorities, and the constitution specifies no way to solve the dispute. Delegates who spoke on television supported Arutyunyan's call for restraint and went directly to the square to talk to the crowd. But Izvestia said that after a ``stormy debate'' on the square, a committee was formed that called for a general strike after laying down a series of demands, including a quick, favorable resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The committee demanded that the Soviet Supreme Court take over the trials of those charged in the Sumgait violence and demanded full information about the alleged poisoning of workers at a factory in the town of Masis. Izvestia provided no more information about the Masis incident, except to say an investigation was under way. The party conference called for greater attention to republics' calls for economic autonomy, but said authorities would not tolerate efforts to whip up ethnic tensions. Besides Azerbaijan and Armenia, delegates from the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also brought up ethnic questions at the conference. About a dozen protesters demanding freedom for three Estonian political prisoners had gathered more than 6,000 signatures by Tuesday during a five-day demonstration in Tallinn, Estonia. ``We will continue the demonstration until they are freed or until the authorities give us an exact date for their release,'' Eve Parnaste said as she carried a poster at the protest outside the Estonian Supreme Court building. She said the three prisoners had been demanding publication of a secret 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that placed the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia under Moscow's control. All three were arrested this year, charged with spreading anti-Soviet propaganda or slandering the Soviet state. Miss Parnaste's poster said, ``KGB is an evil empire,'' using the initials for the Soviet secret police.
