Soviet Area Put Under Army Rule : Azerbaijanis and Armenians Clash in New Violence; 2 Die

With two more deaths reported from communal violence in the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the government placed most of the region under military authority on Friday in a new effort to restore order.

Amid reports of continuing clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, more troops were deployed and army commanders were appointed to take charge of the worsening situation, according to reports on regional radio stations. The security forces were given special powers of detention and of search.

“The tranquility of citizens and the normal conditions of work, rest and living are threatened by a serious danger,” Radio Yerevan said Friday in an appeal for calm from the Armenian capital.

Rallies Banned in Baku

Meetings and rallies were banned there, and in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, striking workers were ordered to return to their jobs and a curfew was in force through most of the two republics, according to reports on Radio Yerevan and Radio Baku.

Checkpoints were established and patrols stepped up Friday in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, according to reports from Baku and Yerevan on Vremya, the main nightly news program on Soviet television, which also showed one of the huge anti-Armenian rallies of several hundred thousand people in Lenin Square in central Baku earlier this week.

With tanks now guarding government buildings, combat troops occupying city squares and army helicopters circling overhead, both Baku and Yerevan had the look and feel of being under martial law.

Gorbachev Seeks Talks

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, speaking in an interview with French Television on Friday evening, said he had asked Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders to come to Moscow to discuss the problems that had led to the sharp surge of ethnic tension.

Recent political reforms have brought to the surface an old and difficult problem that had remained unresolved for many years, Gorbachev said in his first comment on the violence. He argued that the same reforms, known as perestroika, or restructuring, would also help bring a solution.

“Glasnost (openness) and perestroika have permitted the people to express their opinions on their well-being and on the problems that have accumulated over the years,” Gorbachev said, responding to frequently heard criticism of his reform program.

“And in our country, with so many races, so many nations and languages, we cannot resolve any problem without taking account of this factor, now that perestroika is gathering speed.”

Gorbachev did not mention the casualties or the emergency measures the government has undertaken to restore order, but he made clear that he intends to intervene personally to end the violence.

An Armenian and an Azerbaijani were killed in separate clashes in the Armenian towns of Goris and Kalinin on Thursday, according to Soviet officials.

Earlier, three soldiers were killed Tuesday in the Azerbaijani town of Kirovabad while trying to protect Armenians from rioting Azerbaijanis, and 126 people had been injured in the first clashes, which occurred in the Azerbaijani districts of Kirovabad and Nakhichevan.

The Armenian who was killed Thursday burned to death when a mob of Azerbaijanis attacked his neighborhood and set fire to his house, according to Armenian officials in Yerevan.

The Azerbaijani, killed in another incident, was stoned to death, the officials said, quoting sketchy field reports, after he opened fire on Armenians, wounding several.

An Armenian priest, in a telegram from Kirovabad, charged Friday that Azerbaijani attacks on the Armenian community there were not only continuing but had become more intense despite the efforts of the army to restore order.

The priest, calling himself Father Ter-Saak, pleaded in a message to Gorbachev for more troops to halt a “pogrom” against the Armenians in Azerbaijan, describing it as “a hundred times worse” than the anti-Armenian attacks in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait last February, when 32 people, 26 of them Armenians, were killed.

“There are casualties among the Armenian population and the defending soldiers,” Ter-Saak said in a telegram whose text was released here by Yelena Bonner, a prominent human rights activist and the wife of Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace laureate.

“You are evidently misinformed that the situation has normalized,” the priest’s message to Gorbachev said. “The situation is, in fact, catastrophic. We are waiting for your intervention into events taking place in Kirovabad, where for five days already there have been slaughters and pogroms.”

Soviet officials maintained, however, that the Armenians in Kirovabad are now safe, although more than 60 Armenian homes had been burned down in Azerbaijani attacks. The military units there had been strengthened, they said, and a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew was in force. More than 80 Azerbaijanis had been detained by the military. The officials said they knew of no other victims in Kirovabad except the three soldiers.

But Armenian residents of Kirovabad, reached by telephone from Moscow, insisted Friday evening that the Azerbaijani attacks were continuing, that houses were being set on fire and the casualties, including some deaths, were mounting.

“People are being attacked and killed,” an Armenian woman told newsmen by telephone, her voice shaking with emotion. “There are victims, and today there were funerals.”

Flow of Refugees

Hundreds of Armenian refugees continued to flow from Azerbaijan into not only Yerevan and district towns in Armenia but also into centers like Kirovabad, where reinforced military garrisons were assigned to protect them.

“People arrive here trembling with fear,” an Armenian welfare official said on Radio Yerevan. “They arrive with only what they can carry, knowing that whatever they left behind had been looted or burned. But they arrive happy to be alive. . . . That’s a true measure of how serious the situation has become--it is almost an undeclared war.”

Much of the conflict has centered on the future of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been part of Azerbaijan for 65 years but which has voted twice in the past six months to be annexed to Armenia. About three-quarters of the region’s 184,000 people are Armenians, and all sides acknowledge that it has suffered greatly from neglect under Azerbaijani administration.

The underlying issue consequently is one of national identity and national pride. Both Armenians and Azerbaijanis regard the region as part of their ancient territory, their national heritage, and both have been encouraged under Gorbachev’s reforms to assert their national rights.

Uglier issues--religious bigotry and ethnic hatred--are close to the surface. The Armenians, mainly Christian for centuries, see the Turkic-speaking, Muslim Azerbaijanis as relatives of the Turks they hold responsible for a series of Armenian massacres, including that in 1915 in which more than 1 million Armenians were killed.

Yet the depth of feeling on the Azerbaijani side is also considerable. Printers at a state newspaper plant in Baku refused twice this week to print copies of the government newspaper Izvestia, the paper said in a story on Friday. They reportedly felt that not enough coverage was being given to events in Azerbaijan, and they were displeased with the coverage that was printed.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that a group of Armenian legislators voted to reject political changes sought by Gorbachev.

The AP quoted an Armenian activist who said about 200 members of the Armenian Supreme Soviet, or legislature--enough for a quorum--met Thursday night and “decided that the constitutional amendments do not correspond to the interests of Armenia or of democracy and demanded that new proposals be drawn up in two months that will meet those criteria.”

Gorbachev’s proposed amendments to the Soviet constitution have provoked strong criticism, especially in the Baltic republics.