The Killing Zone

By Jill Smolowe

"Don't believe the reports that only 50 have died. The number is not less than 1,000."

"They raped 90-year-old women and flung children from balconies."

"This is no ethnic clash. It is genocide."

"It shouldn't be called perestroika ((restructuring)). It should be called perestrelka ((cross fire))."

Or perhaps grazhdanskaya voina -- civil war. That certainly was how the hostilities were seen by the 13,000 Armenians who were forced to flee their homes in the embattled southern republic of Azerbaijan last week, first crossing the Caspian Sea by ferry to Turkmenistan, then flying on to Moscow or the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Many of those who landed in Moscow huddled around the building that houses Armenia's representational office, transforming the quiet street into an encampment of shock, grief and rage. As a refugee put it, "What civilized country would allow its own people to be murdered?"

Moscow's failure to grasp the potency of the ethnic antagonisms in Azerbaijan became shockingly apparent as festering tensions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis erupted into the worst known outbreak of violence in the Soviet Union since World War II. But what began as an ethnic blood feud quickly turned into a popular revolt against Soviet rule.

In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, crowds blockaded the Communist Party headquarters and the republic's television studio, while impassioned speakers called for the secession of Azerbaijan and its reunification with regions of northern Iran in a single Islamic state. Demonstrators aligned with a group identified as the National Front Defense Committee used buses and trucks to barricade streets and keep troops from entering the city. Along the southern frontier with Iran, the scene of nationalist protests earlier this month, thousands of Azerbaijanis illegally crossed to the other side and staged rallies calling for a joint struggle to liberate Nagorno-Karabakh.

After hesitating for four days, the Kremlin was finally compelled, in the words of the official news agency TASS, "to take the measure of last resort" and declare a state of emergency. Early Saturday morning, Soviet troops stormed the center of Baku in tanks and armored cars, smashing through makeshift barricades of buses and trucks. The troops exchanged fire with extremists, armed with submachine guns and sniper rifles. Eyewitnesses described streets awash with "pools of blood" and corpses strewn on the road to the highway; there were even unconfirmed reports that Soviet tanks had opened fire on the demonstrators.

Popular Front activists put the minimum death toll at 120, but during a hastily called press conference in Moscow, First Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh claimed that 40 civilians and eight soldiers had been killed. The troops moved quickly to secure party headquarters and the republic's television studio, while military officials appealed over the radio for order. The Popular Front responded by calling for three days of mourning and a three-day strike in an effort to mobilize the public against the state of emergency. A fragile calm settled over the city, but neither side pretended that peace would last for long.

On Saturday evening a grim-faced President Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on nationwide TV to defend the crackdown. Noting that two years of negotiations to resolve the conflict between the Azerbaijanis and Armenians had failed, he said flatly, "This had to stop." Yet many Soviets wondered why Gorbachev let the ethnic violence spin out of control last week before sending in troops. At the same time, there was an uneasy feeling that the country's army might find itself bogged down in another Afghanistan, within its own borders, fighting a people just as ferociously dedicated to defeating Moscow. Those fears were illustrated last week when the Kremlin called up army reservists; after a public outcry, the term of service was shortened.

The matchstick that ignited the powder was struck the previous Saturday when a rally, staged in Baku by Azerbaijanis demanding independence from the Soviet Union, gave way to anti-Armenian rioting. Marauding bands of Azerbaijanis armed with guns and makeshift weapons ransacked Armenian homes, beating and sometimes killing the residents. Within days, vigilante groups from both sides were organized and dispatched to assist their ethnic brethren in the contested autonomous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and along the border with Armenia.

Initially Moscow declared a state of emergency in parts of Azerbaijan, banning strike actions, rallies and demonstrations; inexplicably the restrictions did not extend to Baku. Then the Kremlin dispatched 11,000 troops from the army, the navy, the KGB and the Interior Ministry to assist the nearly 6,000 troops already in the region.

Through the week, as Azerbaijanis put up ferocious resistance, blockading roads and railways and sabotaging waterlines, the number of troops and police cadets swelled to 29,000. At first, government forces were told to exercise "maximum restraint." But when Azerbaijani militants turned on the soldiers, troops were instructed to fire in self-defense and to protect army weapons caches. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov said the conflict was "almost civil war."

Some Azerbaijanis and Armenians snatched whatever they could find to mount their attacks: pitchforks, metal bars, hunting weapons. However, the arsenal quickly expanded to include such armaments as surface-to-surface missiles and rocket launchers after extremists in both republics stormed military depots and police stations to pillage arms. Many of the combatants are veterans of the war in Afghanistan and know how to use sophisticated weaponry. "I fought in Afghanistan," said an army helicopter pilot. "I know what combat experience is, and it looks like those guys have it."

The official press reported that in one incident alone in Armenia's Artashat region, some 3,000 people raided police headquarters and seized 106 automatic weapons, 30 carbines and more than 3,200 cartridges. In the Azerbaijani city of Kirovabad, extremists stormed the local agricultural institute, capturing 80 automatic guns, two machine guns and 27 rifles with bayonets.

Most mysterious was the appearance of orange helicopters without identification marks that suddenly materialized from the hills of the Shaumyan and Khanlar regions outside Nagorno-Karabakh and strafed Azerbaijani villages with gunfire and even rockets. The government daily Izvestia ominously reported that there was evidence of preparations to smuggle a large batch of weapons and ammunition across the border from Iran.

Through it all, Gorbachev gamely struggled to maintain an appearance of normality. Just back from his vexing three-day visit to Lithuania, where he failed to persuade nationalists to curb their secessionist demands, he aimed to project the air of a competent crisis manager. He received former Japanese Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe and met with U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who encountered protesters in Moscow holding up signs that read GORBACHEV, HISTORY WILL NOT FORGIVE YOU FOR THE BLOODSHED IN AZERBAIJAN.

At a Kremlin conference on Friday, Gorbachev described the combatants as "a handful of militants, irresponsible adventurers and shadow economy dealers" and cast the conflict partly as an effort to undermine his policies. "Perestroika is like a thorn in their flesh," he said. "They are unable to launch a frontal attack on it, so they cling to tension on an ethnic basis."

The most recent round of fighting began in February 1988, when ethnic hatreds erupted in the port town of Sumgait, north of Baku, resulting in an official death count of 32, most of them Armenians. Over the next two years, more than 220,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan. Those who remained behind in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh have lived under a virtual state of siege, relying on supplies airlifted from Armenia. Last month the Supreme Soviet voted to return administrative control over the region to the Azerbaijanis. Enraged, the Armenian parliament voted two weeks ago to include Nagorno-Karabakh in its next five-year economic plan, a move that may have prompted Azerbaijanis to seize government buildings in the Caspian Sea port of Lenkoran.

Although most of the 220,000 Armenians living in Baku fled after the 1988 pogrom in Sumgait, up to 20,000 Armenians still remained. But even as their numbers shrank, Azerbaijani refugees flooded the city. Most of them were unemployed farmers and goatherds who claimed they had been chased from Armenia. These 130,000 new Azerbaijani settlers transformed the once cosmopolitan capital into a city ringed with slums and squatter districts. Their simmering rage against the Armenians triggered the riots that led to last week's battles.

Moscow gave the impression that it had been caught unawares, but it might be more accurate to say that officials turned a blind eye. Last August, for instance, the Central Committee responded to peaceful protests in the Baltics with stern warnings. But the simultaneous railroad blockade of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis met with official silence. Armenian activists in Moscow claim that in the weeks leading up to the crisis, they bombarded Gorbachev, the KGB and the Interior Ministry with telegrams and letters warning of an imminent war.

That hesitation was in part due to Moscow's fear of repeating last April's crackdown in the republic of Georgia, which resulted in 20 deaths. It also stemmed from the absence of any clear signal from the Azerbaijani government that it wanted assistance. Local authorities have been paralyzed in recent months by strikes, blockades and rallies, all but ceding power to the Azerbaijani Popular Front. This movement, founded by intellectuals calling for greater autonomy, soon attracted the loyalty of the seething Azerbaijani refugees. Now the intellectuals have been eclipsed by the militants, who find the answer to their ancient enmities in violence.

As yet, Gorbachev's determination to finally act has met with no resistance outside the contested republics. His proclaimed state of emergency received a sympathetic endorsement from Washington and was warmly applauded in Moscow. But even if Russians, and Soviets elsewhere, accept Gorbachev's crackdown in the Caucasus, they are not likely to forget their own demands, whether they concern self-determination or soap on the shelves.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow