Legislature in Armenia Backs Annexation Bid

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.

The transfer will be strongly opposed by Azerbaijan, whose own legislature is scheduled to consider the issue Friday.

Postpones Showdown

The likely impasse will permit the Kremlin to put off its decision for a time, postponing a showdown over the fundamental issues. But at the same time, it could place the central government in the vortex of the complex and heated debate over the resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh’s future.

The news agency Tass reported the vote by the Armenian legislature as a request to the central government that the country’s Parliament “study this question,” reflecting the hope that this will ease the tension that currently surrounds it.

No resolution is expected, however, until much later this summer or perhaps the autumn, informed political sources said Wednesday. The Communist Party leadership intends to use the time to search for a compromise, which perhaps would give the region greater autonomy and more development funds while leaving it under the Azerbaijani government.

But liberal supporters of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev expressed concern Wednesday that the conflict is already undermining his policy of broad reforms, known as perestroika.

The situation in Armenia, where hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in recent political rallies and launched a general strike on Monday, and in neighboring Azerbaijan is the “heaviest blow to perestroika yet,” a commentator wrote in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“This is a challenge to the ideals of glasnost (political openness) and a chance for conservatives to strengthen their point of view,” the head of the newspaper’s propaganda section, Raphael Guseinov, said. His remarks represented the first analysis that put the question firmly in the context of the country’s overall priorities.

The situation has become so dangerous in the two republics, he said, that the region could become another Northern Ireland, where sectarian rivalries would bring endless bloodshed.

On Wednesday, tens of thousands of Armenians, jamming the main square of the capital, Yerevan, and the surrounding streets, cheered as the results of the legislative debate were announced.

A mountainous region of about 184,000 people, three-quarters of whom are Armenian, Nagorno-Karabakh has been under Azerbaijani administration for 65 years. Residents who believe they had been ignored by the Azerbaijani government, particularly in the allocation of development funds, voted early this year to seek the district’s transfer to Armenia.

The issue is complicated by the centuries of religious animosity between the Armenians, who are Christians, and the region’s Muslim Turkic peoples, among them the Azerbaijanis, as well as by the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1895 and again in 1915 in Turkey.

Although Communist Party officials initially rejected the transfer, declaring the country’s internal borders to be settled, Gorbachev later pledged in “theses” to be considered by a special party conference later this month that “inter-ethnic issues shall be settled on the basis of genuine democracy and in the spirit of perestroika. “

But the situation has major political and constitutional considerations.

Soviet officials have expressed serious concern that a compromise favoring the Armenians would encourage other ethnic minorities to pursue their own grievances.

The Soviet constitution, at the same time, requires that any internal border changes be approved by the affected provinces and then by the central government. Armenia and Azerbaijan are likely to take opposing positions, leaving the central government in the middle.

The weekly Moscow News reported, meanwhile, that troops have blocked roads leading to Armenian neighborhoods in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku in an apparent effort to prevent more violence.

Most of the victims in earlier rioting--33 people have been officially reported to have died--were Armenians killed in late February at Sumgait, Azerbaijan’s second-largest city.