Soviets Try to Halt New Strife in Disputed Area : ‘People Are Being Killed Daily’ in Gun Battles Between Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Tass Says

Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the disputed southern Soviet region of Nagorno-Karabakh attacked each other’s villages over the weekend and fought a series of gun battles in a sharp escalation of tensions in the region, authorities reported Sunday.

People are now dying almost daily in the fighting, the official news agency Tass reported from Stepanakert, the regional capital, as the fighting intensified.

And the prolonged road and rail blockade of the region, an enclave of Christian Armenians in Muslim Azerbaijan, continues despite the call by the central government last week that it be lifted immediately to avert what increasingly is portrayed as a local civil war.

Food, Fuel Supplies Gone

“The region has exhausted its stocks of food, fuel and medicines,” Tass said. “There are now signs of an epidemic of viral hepatitis.” The only supplies reaching the region are brought in by military airlift.

“People are being killed daily, houses burned down and cars destroyed,” Tass said. “Mutual hostility blinds the participants of the conflict with dark malice and suppresses their reason.”

The 55,000 special interior troops assigned to maintain order in Nagorno-Karabakh are also coming under fire, according to Tass, and over the weekend they engaged several armed groups, including a band of Armenians said to be assaulting an Azerbaijani village in revenge for similar attacks on Armenian villages.

“A large group of gunmen from Armenia attempted an armed attack on the Azerbaijani village of Lachin,” Tass reported. “The special district garrison of interior troops was forced to use firearms to disperse them.”

A military patrol in Shusha, another predominantly Azerbaijani town in the region, had earlier arrested a number of Azerbaijanis who had been firing at an Armenian village with carbines, Tass said. Those detained included residents of Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, who had come “to boost combat morale,” according to officials.

A major highway bridge leading into Stepanakert was blown up over the weekend, Tass said.

“There are exchanges of fire from both sides, and these have recently become more or less continuous,” a spokesman for the region’s special administration said on Sunday.

In a separate dispatch, Tass said that troops had managed to get several freight trains through the blockade to Stepanakert over the weekend despite attacks on them.

The weekly newspaper Moscow News had reported last week that armed groups had begun setting up camps in the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh and appeared to be training guerrilla bands in them. Officers commanding the detachments of interior troops said that both Armenians and Azerbaijanis had substantial numbers of firearms, including machine guns, and quantities of explosives.

Azerbaijan’s economic blockade of neighboring Armenia also continued on Sunday despite earlier government statements that it had been lifted.

Although the central government reported on Friday and again on Sunday that trains were arriving almost hourly in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, officials there said that the flow was sporadic and the goods which did arrive were largely spoiled.

Tass said that “serious measures were taken to ensure the safety of rail traffic” over the weekend and that 37 trains had been sent to Armenia on Saturday and Sunday, but that “extremist forces, interested in preserving tensions between the two republics, hampered the normal function of the railway.”

Troops Apparently Not Deployed

The Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, authorized the use of troops to break the blockade, but no soldiers appear to have been deployed either along the roads or railway or to be escorting convoys of trucks or trains. Armenia gets 85% of its freight through Azerbaijan, and only a small flow of cargo is reaching it now through neighboring Georgia.

A spokesman for the Azerbaijani Popular Front, which has organized the blockade over the past month to reinforce claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, said Sunday that some trains were being allowed to pass but only during daylight hours.

“They are getting food and building materials for the earthquake zone,” Nazim Ragimov said from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, “but we are not letting them have any fuel.”

Other front officials said that attacks have continued on those trains that travel without their clearance.

The front, which registered as an organization last week, held another of its rallies, this attended by an estimated 400,000 people, in Baku’s Lenin Square on Sunday to warn the republic’s government not to back down in the confrontation with Armenia despite pressure from Moscow not only to end the blockade but to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.