Soviet Troops Rushed to Azerbaijan, Armenia

The Kremlin declared a state of emergency in Nagorno-Karabakh and other areas of Azerbaijan and Armenia today and sent in army, navy and KGB units to quell what it said were attempts to overthrow Soviet power by force.

The decree, the toughest of its type issued in the Soviet Union since the end of the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, said forces of the three services would back up Interior Ministry troops already there.

“At the present moment the situation has become particularly tense in the cities of Baku, Gyandzh (Kirovobad), and a number of other population centers.

“It has reached the point of murders, robberies and attempts at armed overthrow of Soviet power and at changing by force the state and social system enshrined in the constitution of the U.S.S.R.”

Soviet media reports said Azerbaijanis and Armenians with submachine guns battled in ethnic clashes that have claimed at least 32 lives, the worst bloodletting between the two ethnic groups since their long-simmering feud in the Caucasus boiled over nearly two years ago.

“The local authorities are helpless,” Izvestia newspaper correspondent Yuri Orlik wrote from the capital of Baku. “Sometimes they do not even try to stop the extremists as it was in Nakichevan” where Azerbaijanis battered down the barbed wire border with Iran a week ago.

“Literally 65 feet from a police station, two charred corpses had been tossed on a garbage heap like horrible black dolls and bodies were being burned at the train station square,” a correspondent for Tass press agency said in a dispatch from Baku.

“In front of our very eyes, soldiers repulsed two young men who were dragging a woman into the yard,” the correspondent said.

State-run television said 300 Azerbaijanis and Armenians fought in the Shaumyanovsk region of Azerbaijan, near the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. It quoted a soldier as saying Armenians fought back with hunting rifles and Kalashnikov submachine guns when a group of Azerbaijanis tried to set fire to an Armenian farm.

Attacks on the homes of Armenians living in Azerbaijan continue, with more killings and six more bodies found, the TV news program “Vremya” said. Four of the dead were Armenians, it said.

Sevinth Abdulayeva, the chief editor of Azerbaijan’s official news agency Azerinform, said in a telephone interview that Armenians hiding in the woods were firing on passing cars in Shaumyanovsk and an adjoining region. She said the Armenians were receiving guns and ammunition ferried in by unmarked helicopters.

The violence, which exploded Saturday night with an anti-Armenian riot in the oil-producing center of Baku, is “reminiscent of news from the warfront” in World War II, Soviet TV commentator Igor Kudrin said grimly.

Izvestia said at least 32 people had died in the last three days in anti-Armenian rampages in Baku, a city of 1.7 million, alone but that the figure could rise as other ransacked apartments were inspected.

Attacks on the homes of Armenians were continuing, with more killings, Soviet TV said. It said 34 people, mostly Armenians, had been injured.