Visitor Says Soviet Troops Keeping Azerbaijan Peace

An eyewitness who traveled to Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan, where violence flared late last month between Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians, said peace is being kept in the tense city by heavy concentrations of Soviet troops.

“It is a colossal military presence,” Andrei Shilkov, a member of the Glasnost independent publishing group, told Western reporters in Moscow. “The troops are wearing bullet-proof vests and steel helmets and patrolling the streets in groups of four.”

Shilkov said that he spent six hours in Sumgait, an industrial center north of the Azerbaijan capital of Baku, after hitching a ride with a local resident to get into the closed city. No foreign journalists have been allowed to travel to Armenia and Azerbaijan since disturbances broke out there Feb. 28.

Soviet officials have said that 32 persons died in the violence in Sumgait, which stretched over most of three days and was brought to a halt after the arrival of troops on March 2.

Shilkov said the people he talked with in Sumgait indicated that what had happened was “no ethnic conflict but a blood bath.”

“Armenians were sought out and indiscriminately killed,” he asserted. “No one I spoke to believes the official figure of 32 dead. Most of them believe the number is at least 350, maybe 600.”

Shilkov acknowledged, however, that he saw no physical proof of such a casualty toll. He said that he tried to get to the town cemetery but that it was sealed off by a military cordon. He also said that of the residents of the city he talked with, none was Armenian.

U.S. officials say the death toll in Sumgait exceeded 100 but they have no precise count.

Troops Guard Armenians

He said the city had 18,000 Armenian residents, and that 16,000 of them were being kept, apparently for their own protection, in three large buildings heavily guarded by troops.

“The situation is quiet, but extremely tense,” he said. “There are even separate queues at the shops, one for Azerbaijanis, one for Armenians.’

He said he was told that the authorities had hurriedly repaired signs of damage in the city, replaced utility poles that had been torn down and removed burned automobiles from the streets. He said some windows that had been broken in the city’s center were still out.

Factories, businesses and schools are operating normally, he said, but added that the underlying tension was obviously regarded as explosive by the authorities.

“I have never seen in the Soviet Union such a concentration of steel-helmeted soldiers,” Shilkov said. “On one street alone, I counted 47 light tanks.”

He said there were also large numbers of military trucks and armored personnel carriers, and “civilian buses crammed full of soldiers.”

Atrocities Alleged

He said residents of the city told him of numerous atrocities allegedly committed by the Azerbaijanis. He said he was told that Azerbaijani youths entered the maternity ward of a hospital and mutilated at least one pregnant woman and several babies.

Stories of such atrocities have been circulating through the Armenian community in Moscow for days, but there has been no independent verification of them.

Shilkov said he was told that many Azerbaijan residents of the city sheltered and hid their Armenian neighbors at the height of the violence. Many Azerbaijanis told him the violence was caused by people who entered the city from towns nearby.

The tension in the neighboring Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan began to mount last month over the issue of the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan that is populated mainly by Armenians.

Several hundred thousand Armenians in the Armenian capital of Yerevan took to the streets, in a demonstration that went off peacefully, to demand that Nagorno-Karabakh be reunited with Armenia.

The demonstrations spread to several other cities in Armenia and was answered by protests in Azerbaijan. The violence in Sumgait erupted after a deputy prosecutor from Moscow, sent to report on the issue, spoke on Azerbaijan Radio and, while appealing for calm, decried the deaths of two citizens. His mention of the victims’ names--both clearly Azerbaijan, apparently triggered a mood of reprisal. The violence in Sumgait began the next day, Feb. 28.

Challenge to Glasnost

The “nationalities issue,” as it is known here, is becoming a major problem for the central government in the Soviet Union, and is regarded by some analysts as a strong challenge to the policy of glasnost , or openness, of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Ethnic and nationality issues have long been present in the Soviet Union, but the new spirit of openness has brought them rushing to the foreground as long-suppressed national grievances are being aired.

Gorbachev himself made a calming speech to Armenia and Azerbaijan last month, noting that a party plenum, scheduled for March 26, will take up the nationalities issue. He suggested that some sort of solution would be forthcoming.

However, Gorbachev indicated in an address to the Communist Party leadership Wednesday that no change is likely to be made in the status of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. He suggested that the party leadership in both republics “work out a series of long-term measures to improve the internationalist education of the workers.”

The current problem in Armenia and Azerbaijan is just one of the nationalist sore spots in a nation with more than 100 nationalities.

Ethnic Issue

Riots broke out in Alma Ata in Kazakhstan in 1986, in protest of the appointment of an ethnic Russian to the party leadership post. This was the first nationalist protest to be aired publicly in the Gorbachev era.

Since then there have been peaceful nationalist protests in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The demonstrations were remarkable, in the view of some observers here, in that the authorities appeared to have tacitly recognized the legitimacy of the protests. Crimean Tatars, demanding that they be allowed to return to their homeland, from which they were deported to Central Asia by Josef Stalin in 1944, have carried out noisy demonstrations at the Kremlin wall in Moscow, although their more recent protests have been broken up by the police.

The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is the most urgent nationalities problem to confront the Gorbachev government so far. Press reports here on the problem have been evasive and sketchy, suggesting that glasnost is being applied in this case with particular caution.