Word: baltic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...force in January. Now the building looks like a command post in a war zone, and those who inhabit it view themselves as besieged defenders of the Soviet empire. In its unofficial role as armed protector of the republic's non-Lithuanian minorities, many of whom fear Baltic independence, the OMON unit has become a kind of partisan brigade determined to prevent Lithuania's secession at all costs. "We are drawn together by our attitude to the future of Lithuania and the Soviet Union," says Major Boleslav Makutinovich, commander of the unit. "When others talk to us of independence...
...eight Lithuanians manning a customs post on the border with Belorussia were shot in the head. Seven died; the eighth is still fighting for his life in a hospital. The Lithuanian government immediately blamed the Black Berets, who have been accused of attacking and burning down more than 20 Baltic customs posts this year. In a law passed last March, the Soviet parliament banned the establishment of independent border posts, making them convenient targets in OMON's campaign to enforce Soviet...
...running out for them. Party hard-liners have been defeated in almost every major election that has been held during the past two years. While communist rule goes unchallenged in the conservative Central Asian republics, the party is virtually a marginal opposition group in Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic republics. Rank-and-file members across the country are deserting the fold in droves. Some 4 million have left the party during the past 18 months, reducing total membership to 15 million...
What worries many is that the spectacle of violent disintegration in one multi-ethnic federation may increase the pressure for separatism in other amalgams, like Czechoslovakia, as well as the Soviet Union's Baltic republics. That is one reason Moscow last week backed "the unity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia...
...bloody Sundays in January, when Black Beret special forces and other Soviet units killed at least 18 people in Vilnius and Riga. Last Friday, Black Berets burned a Lithuanian customs post on the Latvian border and severely beat an unarmed guard. The entrances to official buildings throughout the Baltics are barricaded with concrete slabs, some decorated with patriotic murals. Now Moscow is threatening to impose economic sanctions on any republic that secedes, and the general staff of the armed forces is insisting that the Baltic governments pay "financial compensation" for any of their citizens who resist the draft...