Kremlin Dispatches Thousands of Troops to Battle-Torn Region

The Kremlin today sent thousands of soldiers to enforce a state of emergency in parts of the southern Caucasus, where fierce battles raged between hundreds of well-armed Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

At least 56 people have been killed and 156 injured in ethnic strife in the republic of Azerbaijan since Thursday, Interior Ministry spokesman Vladimir A. Yanchenkov said today.

Yanchenkov said at a briefing that authorities had recorded 167 pogroms and cases of arson. Civilians, mostly Armenians, are said to have been murdered at random in ethnically motivated attacks that provoked the gun battles.

Soviet TV reported today that more than 5,000 Soviet army soldiers and 6,000 internal security troops had been dispatched as reinforcements to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and in the neighboring republic of Armenia.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the Soviet Presidium proclaimed a state of emergency Monday night, empowering the government to use units of the Soviet army, navy and KGB to put down the ethnic unrest. It was not known how many troops were sent to the region since ethnic clashes began Saturday.

“We can’t bring ourselves to pronounce it aloud, but what is happening now in Karabakh, in northern Azerbaijan, can be termed unambiguously a civil war,” correspondent O. Shapovalov wrote in the youth daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.