Soviet Fighting Grows; Emergency Declared : Ethnic conflict: Armenian-Azerbaijani strife flares into open warfare. Moscow cites attempts at the ‘overthrow of Soviet power.’

As fighting between heavily armed Armenians and Azerbaijanis flared into open warfare, the Soviet Union on Monday declared a state of emergency in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent areas and sent troops there to quell what it called efforts to overthrow the government by force.

Faced with the most violent ethnic conflict in Soviet history, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev ordered combat troops from the army, the navy and the KGB to support the embattled Interior Ministry forces already deployed in Azerbaijan and Armenia.

With the fighting escalating rapidly on Monday after the weekend massacre of more than 30 Armenians in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, both sides were arming themselves not only with pistols and rifles but with machine guns, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, rockets and even armored vehicles and helicopters stolen from the military.

In decreeing the state of emergency, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament, said that the violence had “reached the point of murders and banditry and attempts at the armed overthrow of Soviet power and at changing by force the state and political system established in the constitution of the Soviet Union.”

Under the state of emergency, one of the most stringent actions taken by the Soviet government since the 1918-20 civil war here, officials in the region will have sweeping powers, including the authority to impose curfews, prohibit rallies and strikes, ban political organizations, censor the news media and even to require people to work, either at their jobs or other assignments.

The decree also gives officials the authority to detain people for up to 30 days without charge if they are believed to be “provoking violations of public order, spreading provocative rumors, actively preventing citizens and officials from exercising their lawful rights or public duties or violating the state of emergency.”

While the decree applies directly to Nagorno-Karabakh, to adjacent areas in Azerbaijan and Armenia where the fight has been heaviest and to the border zone along the Soviet Union’s frontier with Iran and Turkey, where Azerbaijanis have also rioted recently, the Presidium called upon the Azerbaijanis and Armenians to take urgent steps to restore order in other parts of the region, including their capitals.

The Presidium called for the imposition of a curfew in Baku, which remained troubled on Monday evening, and similar measures in Azerbaijan’s other riot-torn towns to ensure the security of Armenians living there. And it demanded that Armenia “take the most resolute steps” to halt “instigating actions” by nationalists there that Moscow believes have led to the current crisis.

Authorities in Azerbaijan and Armenia, two neighboring republics in southern Soviet Union, had by all accounts lost control of the situation even in their own capitals, Baku and Yerevan, and nationalist movements in both had begun recruiting and arming militia forces numbering in the thousands.

Horrified by the mounting carnage, correspondents for the official Soviet news agency Tass and other Soviet news media sketched a conflict chillingly reminiscent of the start of the Lebanese civil war 15 years ago, a precedent that has long worried the Soviet leadership.

Clashes Escalate

What had been skirmishes last week around Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave of Christian Armenians in Muslim Azerbaijan, turned over the weekend into battles involving hundreds of heavily armed men--and thousands more were reported moving into the area from both sides.

The number of dead was uncertain. Official reports put the figure at 37 since Saturday--mostly as a result of the anti-Armenian pogrom in Baku--but Tass correspondents and other Soviet journalists in Azerbaijan and Armenia reported that dozens of people had been killed and wounded in the most recent fighting.

Scores of hostages were taken over the weekend and again on Monday, according to reports from Yerevan and Baku, as Azerbaijani and Armenian militias raided each other’s villages.

In a dispatch from Baku, two special Tass correspondents reported Monday evening that Azerbaijanis there had continued their attacks on Armenians overnight and that the outnumbered police and internal security troops had to fight to save their own lives as they were assaulted by the mobs and police stations were stormed.

“Once again, the bonfires of pogroms were visible in the city,” N. Demidov and V. Gondusov wrote from Baku, a city of 1.7 million, recounting with palpable horror the attacks they had seen. “Again, innocent blood was being spilled.

“Right in front of us, soldiers manage to save a woman who was being dragged by two hulking men into an inner courtyard. . . . Within 20 yards of the police station, on a heap of refuse, lay two charred corpses, like two burnt dolls. People were also burned alive in square at the railway terminal. . . .

“Despite the outward calm, the city remains tense,” the Tass correspondents wrote. “Toward evening, big groups of people were beginning to assemble. This is what preceded the tragic events of the previous two days, but still troops patrol unarmed.”

Armenians Evacuated

Ferries evacuated 660 Armenians, mostly women and children, from Baku across the Caspian Sea to the city of Krasnovodsk, in Soviet Central Asia, Tass reported, and they were then flown to Yerevan. About 20,000 Armenians had continued to live in Baku despite earlier anti-Armenian violence.

The core of the trouble is not in Baku--it is the future of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Part of Azerbaijan since 1923, Nagorno-Karabakh is claimed by Armenia largely on the basis that more than 80% of its 160,000 residents are Armenian. Both sides contend, however, that the region historically has belonged to their people.

The central government, in a compromise effort, tried to administer the area itself, but three months ago it returned full control to Azerbaijan, prompting a series of Armenian political and legislative moves to annex the region and leading to countermoves by equally nationalistic Azerbaijanis.

The fiercest clashes on Monday were reported from outlying districts, where Soviet correspondents reported that the fighting already amounted to civil war.

The central government had sent a division of internal security troops to Baku on Sunday as well as units to other trouble spots in Azerbaijan, but they found themselves outnumbered, under attack and even unable to leave one military airfield where they had landed.

In a dispatch from Nagorno-Karabakh, Tass described the scene as strongly resembling that of the front line in a war zone.

“Trenches are being dug in the villages,” the report said. “Many roads are being blocked. Self-defense units are fortifying their position. Transport is halted. Stockpiles of food, fuel and essential supplies are extremely low.”

In Khanlar, near Nagorno-Karabakh, Tass described the conflict as “open warfare,” with Azerbaijani guerrillas attacking Armenian villages, an Armenian militia moving to protect kinsmen there, hostages being taken by both sides, a helicopter strafing ground forces and anti-aircraft guns firing on army helicopters.

A correspondent for Gudok, a Soviet railways newspaper, found himself going into battle with a squad of internal security troops whose helicopter was so badly hit by anti-aircraft fire that it had to make a forced landing. Ten more helicopters had to bring reinforcements so that the troops could fight their way through Azerbaijani lines to safety.

Interior Ministry troops, mostly conscripts commanded by officers with little combat experience, have been caught in the middle of the conflict. Four apparently were killed when their car was ambushed by Azerbaijanis. Its crumpled, burned-out shell was found on Monday with a large pool of blood beside it.

With both Armenians and Azerbaijanis heavily armed--one garrison in Azerbaijan lost 80 assault rifles, two heavy machine guns and a mortar--military commanders warned that any escalation would mean unprecedented bloodshed.

In Yerevan, the headquarters of the Karabakh Committee, which has led the nationalist movement there, has become a command center on a war footing. Trucks were loaded throughout the day Monday with arms, some volunteered by Armenians and some apparently supplied from military arsenals.

The recommendation for the imposition of a state of emergency had come not only from military commanders on the scene but also from two teams of senior Communist Party and government officials who arrived in Baku and Yerevan on Sunday and found that local officials had lost control in both capitals.

Red Army Ready

Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov also called earlier Monday for the use of the Soviet Red Army if necessary to restore order.

“This conflict seems to be hard to resolve, but Soviet authorities will not allow this to become a civil war between the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians,” Ryzhkov told Norwegian journalists before meeting with a visiting Norwegian delegation. “The conflict . . . must be settled with the help of military power.”

Evgeny M. Primakov, a close Gorbachev aide and a non-voting member of the party’s Politburo, and other party officials met with representatives of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, which has grown with the upsurge of Azerbaijani nationalism, to discuss the measures needed to restore order.

Soviet authorities are also increasingly concerned about the possible paralysis of the country’s railway system because of the conflict.

According to the government newspaper Izvestia, no trains reached Armenia through Azerbaijan on Monday, and a total of 224 trains are immobilized on Azerbaijani territory, with another 109 without locomotives to move them. For the fifth day, no freight cars carrying food or fuel reached Stepanakert, the administrative center of Nagorno-Karabakh.

A previous Azerbaijani rail blockade of Armenia nearly brought the whole rail system to a standstill as hundreds of trains heading to or leaving Armenia were stalled around the country.

On Monday evening, the Soviet Foreign Ministry advised Western correspondents that both Azerbaijan and Armenia would be closed indefinitely to foreign journalists.

BACKGROUND

The antagonism between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Soviet Caucasus has several sources. Armenians claim that after the Soviet takeover in Azerbaijan under Josef Stalin, the republic was given large chunks of territory that was historically part of Armenia. Azerbaijanis note that the Soviet constitution gives them control over Nagorno-Karabakh and that it cannot join Armenia without Azerbaijani consent. Also, most Azerbaijanis are Shiite Muslims; most Armenians are Christian. In 1915, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman Turks. Many Armenians today refer to Azerbaijanis simply as Turks, showing they do not distinguish between them and the authors of the genocide against their people.

Esther Schrader in Yerevan contributed to this story.