Azerbaijan Rejects Transfer of Disputed Region : Armenian Issue Has Grown Into Constitutional ‘Collision,’ Kremlin Concedes

The legislature of the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan on Friday rejected a request by residents of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region that the region be transferred to neighboring Armenia.

The action presents the Soviet leadership in Moscow with an explosive ethnic question and forces it to search for a solution that will prevent more violence in the area.

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the dispute has grown into a constitutional “collision” between Armenia and Azerbaijan and appears to be deadlocked.

The Armenian legislature earlier voted to annex Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian Christian area within Muslim-dominated Azerbaijan.

Searching for Compromise

A clear-cut decision for or against transfer of the region is likely to bring renewed protests, other government officials said. The central leadership in Moscow is searching for a compromise that will avert violence without creating precedents that could bring turmoil to other areas.

“Time is what we need, and putting the question in the hands of the central party and government for resolution should ease the local tensions,” a senior party official commented, asking not to be quoted by name. “A compromise must be found, but it is hard to say what it will be or when it will come.”

At least 33 people, most of them Armenians living in Sumgait, the second-largest Azerbaijani city, have been killed in ethnic clashes over the last four months. Armenians have called a general strike in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian republic, and in other principal towns.

Tension is high in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, according to officials in the two republics, and Nagorno-Karabakh is in the fourth week of a general strike that has paralyzed its capital and outlying district towns.

The Azerbaijani legislature, meeting in Baku, the capital, “endorsed the decree of its Presidium on the unacceptability of the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region from the Azerbaijani republic to the Armenian republic,” the official news agency Tass reported.

Elchim Bagirov, an Azerbaijani government spokesman, said the legislature “considered that the departure of Nagorno-Karabakh . . . contradicted the Constitution of the Soviet Union as well as the traditional ties of friendship between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples.”

The Azerbaijani position, as stated in the resolution, is that the grievances of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 184,000 residents, three-quarters of whom are Armenians, can be resolved through greater political autonomy, additional investment in economic development and increased emphasis on the Armenian language and culture.

The Azerbaijani legislature, citing provisions in the Soviet Constitution, also argued that any territorial changes must be approved by both republics and the central government in Moscow.

But the Armenian legislature, which voted Wednesday to incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh, has contended that another section of the Soviet Constitution guarantees “the free self-determination of nations and the voluntary association of equal Soviet socialist republics” and takes precedence.

Armenians consider the mountainous region to be a traditional part of the historical Christian kingdom of Armenia. They have long resented the Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-speaking Islamic people, and tend to associate them with Turkey’s massacres of Armenians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless, the region has been considered part of Azerbaijan for 65 years.

To prevent renewed violence, Soviet troops earlier this week sealed off the Armenian district of Baku, a third of which is Armenian.

Kremlin Undecided

In Yerevan, local officials said most of the demonstrators had gone back to work, ending a brief general strike this week and a round-the-clock sit-in outside the Armenian legislature.

Gerasimov told a Foreign Ministry briefing here that the central government has not decided how to resolve the tricky constitutional question.

“There is a legal dispute going on about how these articles should be implemented,” he said. “And so, we have to wait to see how the events develop, and a fuller answer, therefore, will be given later.”

The Soviet Supreme Court has rarely been called upon to decide constitutional cases. The national Parliament, known as the Supreme Soviet under Communist Party leadership, has traditionally been regarded as being in direct charge of all such problems.

Some Soviet conservatives have blamed the freer political atmosphere under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for the breadth of the turmoil.

Urgent steps are needed to prevent the situation from degenerating beyond repair or spreading to other areas where local minorities want more autonomy, a history professor wrote in the Communist Youth League newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“The bureaucracy in the national republics is especially dangerous, and the results of its activities could be catastrophic,” Prof. Ruslan Khasbulatov wrote.

He accused conservatives, especially those in provincial parties, of attempting to use inflamed ethnic feelings as a weapon in their campaign to slow Gorbachev’s reforms of Soviet society and the economy.