Soviet Troops Die in Ethnic Fighting : Soldiers Sent to War Zone Allowed to Fire on Combatants

Soviet forces have been killed and wounded in Azerbaijan and Armenia and their comrades have been authorized to fire on militants to defend themselves and to protect arms and ammunition dumps, Soviet central television said today.

An announcement read on the nightly news bulletin said the order was issued after a series of attacks on government weapons stores. It said the troops had exercised “maximum restraint” until now.

“But as these situations have become unbearable, the leadership of the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and KGB have given instructions to their personnel to use their weapons in strict accordance with military rules and applicable laws,” it said.

The announcement said that in Armenia and Azerbaijan there had been attacks on units of the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and the KGB “with the aim of carrying away weapons, ammunitions and explosives.”

It blamed “criminal extremist elements” for the attacks and said there were dead and wounded among Soviet servicemen. It gave no other details.

The move came as thousands of Soviet troops fanned out across Azerbaijan in a bid to restore order after bloody ethnic clashes between rival Armenians and Azeris which have claimed more than 60 lives.

Thousands of troops had to be helicoptered over roadblocks set up by militant Azeris today in an effort to quell an orgy of stabbings, beatings and burnings of minority Armenians verging on civil war.

Officials said troops sent in by Moscow under an emergency decree signed by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev fanned out in the main trouble spots of Azerbaijan and had eased the level of tension, despite the roadblocks set up outside major cities.

Eyewitness accounts of a week of confrontation in the Soviet Union’s deep south said Azeris had hurled Armenians out of windows, stabbed them, clubbed them with iron rods and burned them to death, mostly in the Azeri capital, Baku.

A spokesman for the Soviet Interior Ministry reported 60 dead and said detachments from the more than 11,000 soldiers sent into the Transcaucasus on Tuesday had now “made it into the areas of highest tension despite the roadblocks.”

“We were expecting (the roadblocks) and knew it wouldn’t be easy,” the spokesman said. “They have considerably reduced the level of confrontation between the two sides.”

Vadim Birkin, a spokesman for the Moscow-appointed committee overseeing Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave at the center of the trouble, said troops were sent in by helicopter to circumvent roadblocks outside Baku and near the cities of Gyandzha and Yevlakh.