3 Soviet Soldiers Killed in Ethnic Riots; 126 Hurt

Three soldiers were killed and 126 people injured in a new wave of ethnic riots in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, officials there reported Wednesday.

A state of emergency has now been declared around the towns of Kirovabad and Nakhichevan, curfews have been imposed there and more troops have been sent to quell the growing disturbances and to maintain order elsewhere in the republic, they said.

The violence appeared to be the most serious in Azerbaijan since communal riots erupted there in February and March over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and further clashes were feared in what could become a renewal of the strife in which more than 40 people were killed earlier this year.

The three soldiers were apparently beaten to death Tuesday with clubs and stones as authorities brought in combat troops in an attempt to restore order in the mountain town of Kirovabad, according to an Azerbaijani government spokesman; most of the reported casualties, Armenians as well as Azerbaijanis, occurred there. No further details were available.

More people were injured in the smaller town of Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani enclave in neighboring Armenia on the Soviet border with Iran, local officials said, after police there failed to intervene in street fighting. They said city leaders were “taking immediate measures” but gave no further details.

“The situation in Nakhichevan and Kirovabad seriously worsened today,” Radio Baku reported later Wednesday evening. “Hooligan elements attacked public and administrative buildings. Measures are being taken to uphold the law and ensure the safety of citizens.”

Azerbaijani journalists said from Baku late Wednesday that the situation in Nakhichevan--the administrative center of an autonomous region that is predominantly Azerbaijani and is part of Azerbaijan although within the Soviet republic of Armenia--was especially serious, with widespread violence and much looting.

“The situation remains acute around the two cities of Kirovabad and Nakhichevan, and it is very tense in a number of other localities,” Musa Mamedov, chief of the information department of the Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry, said by telephone from Baku, the republic’s capital. “Efforts are under way to restore normality as soon as possible, but we cannot say when we will succeed.”

Huge Capital Protest

More than 400,000 people took part in anti-Armenian demonstrations in Lenin Square in the center of Baku on Wednesday, according to local journalists, and the protests, including widespread strikes begun nearly a week ago, were spreading to other cities in Azerbaijan.

While no violence has been reported in Baku, authorities confirmed that a large contingent of special riot troops were sent to the city by the Soviet Union’s Interior Ministry.

In Moscow, Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the unrest in Azerbaijan continued, apparently unabated, on Wednesday but he said he could provide no details.

In what appeared to reflect a quandary by the country’s top leadership over what action to take, the violence was not reported Wednesday by the official Soviet news agency Tass, central television and radio or the major Soviet newspapers.

With Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev facing demands from a number of the country’s constituent republics--notably Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the Baltic coast--for greater political and economic autonomy, the renewed unrest in Azerbaijan could seriously limit his maneuvering room before the debate next week on revision of the country’s constitution.

The violence will be taken by Gorbachev’s conservative critics as evidence of the danger the country faces from relaxation of central controls, although liberals will undoubtedly use it to argue for even greater autonomy in order to deal with difficult local problems.

The immediate focus of the protests in Azerbaijan is construction by Armenian authorities of an aluminum plant in a forest in Nagorno-Karabakh--a desecration, Azerbaijanis contend, of a national shrine commemorating an ancient victory over Persian invaders. The demonstrators also contend that Armenia, which wants to annex the territory, is using the project to increase its Armenian population, which is now about three-quarters of the estimated 184,000 people there.

Instead of greater self-government for Nagorno-Karabakh, they want it stripped of its present autonomy, limited though it is, and integrated fully into Azerbaijan.

But the emotional heart of the violence seemed to be the death sentence passed by the Soviet Supreme Court last week on an Azerbaijani youth who was convicted of murdering several Armenians in what Soviet authorities describe as an Azerbaijani “pogrom” against Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait in late February.

“Freedom to the Heroes of Sumgait,” proclaimed a banner at an Azerbaijani rally in Baku. Of the 32 people killed in the Sumgait riots, 26 were Armenians, according to official reports.

Religion is an important, though unspoken, element in the conflict for both sides. The Armenians are largely Christian and resent the administration of Nagorno-Karabakh by the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Azerbaijanis, whom they see as related to those Turks held responsible for the 1915 and earlier massacres of Armenians. For the Azerbaijanis, Islam is a central part of their national identity, and they regard the Armenians’ profession of Christianity as an assertion of unwarranted superiority.

As part of the demonstrations Wednesday in Baku, many residents were seen driving their cars through the city waving both national flags and green Islamic banners.

Counterdemonstrations were being organized, meanwhile, in Armenia on Wednesday, according to Armenpress, the local news agency, as rumors spread through the republic that many Armenians, attacked by Azerbaijanis, had been among those injured in the riots on Tuesday.

In Yerevan, the Armenian capital, the central Opera Square, the scene for scores of demonstrations this year, was reported filled with tens of thousands of demonstrators Wednesday night, and a number of enterprises were closed during the day by protest strikes.

Special Interior Ministry troops were deployed in Baku to protect the homes of Armenians, and police reinforcements were stationed in Azerbaijani neighborhoods in Yerevan and in other Armenian towns. About 550,000 Armenians live in Azerbaijan, which has a population of about 7 million, and about 300,000 Azerbaijanis live in Armenia, which has a population of 3.5 million.

A meeting of the Armenian Parliament was suspended abruptly late Tuesday in the midst of a debate over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh--which Armenia has already voted to annex--so that the deputies could return to their constituencies and help calm the increasingly volatile situation.

“What has already happened is very bad, but what we fear could happen is much, much worse,” a senior editor at the Armenian newspaper Kommunist said by telephone from Yerevan. “Because our people are afraid of another series of attacks by the Azerbaijanis, they are taking defensive measures and might even strike first. . . . The situation is extremely tense.”

In the neighboring Soviet republic of Georgia, tens of thousands of people demonstrated on Wednesday in the capital Tbilisi against proposed constitutional changes that they believe reduce the autonomy of the country’s 15 constituent republics.

Georgian nationalists, speaking by telephone from Tbilisi, said that more than 200,000 people had gathered in the streets outside the republic’s parliament as deputies debated the amendments and eventually decided to take preliminary steps to introduce legislation to assert Georgian “sovereignty.”

Such action was taken in the Soviet Baltic republic of Estonia last week, and considered, but deferred, in Latvia and Lithuania, two other Baltic republics. Georgia attempted to avoid a confrontation with the Kremlin by voting, in the words of the official news agency Tass, to “inform the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. that the Supreme Soviet of Georgia deems it necessary to introduce in the draft laws those changes that are demanded by the public of Georgia.”

The rally, the largest in Tbilisi in many years, reflects a resurgence of strong Georgian nationalism, similar to that in the Baltic republics and in Armenia. Nationalists are now threatening to call a general strike in the republic to underline their demands for greater autonomy.