Armenian City a Staging Area for Warfare

Streets in the center of Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, were closed to traffic by crowds of people Tuesday, and men in combat fatigues carrying rifles shouted instructions to workers loading trucks with arms and ammunition.

Every hour or so, a bus drew up in front of a building and 30 or 40 men, dressed in old army uniforms, armed with rifles and weighted down by bedrolls, clambered aboard. The buses then pulled out and headed for the frontier with the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

Inside the building, leaders of the Armenian nationalist movement pored wearily over lists of people volunteering to defend Armenia’s border towns from attack. Requests for help continued to come in from areas under attack.

In three days, Yerevan has taken on the look and feel of a city preparing for war.

With fighting on the border and in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Armenians feel that they are a nation besieged. And, more than ever, they see themselves as a nation that too often has been the victim of aggressive neighbors.

Now, they are determined not to be victims again.

The determination shows in the dark, sometimes angry faces of volunteers who crowd into the headquarters of the Karabakh Committee, a nationalist group, armed with whatever guns and knives they can find. Some are young, still in their teens. Others are soldiers who have deserted from the Soviet army to fight for Armenia. A few are bearded men from the Caucasus Mountains.

As they wait to be formed into units and herded into buses, they talk intensely, references to Karabakh and Azerbaijan cropping up over and over again. There is no mistaking their readiness to take part in what they, and most Armenians, see as a war that will determine their republic’s fate.

News reached Yerevan late Saturday that dozens of Armenians have been killed and wounded by Azerbaijanis in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and that Armenian villages in Azerbaijan are being surrounded by Azerbaijani nationalists. In the days since, hundreds of thousands of Armenians have gathered in the streets and squares of Yerevan, weeping for the dead and talking of revenge.

“They are killing us,” Alexander Arzumanian, a leading member of the Armenian nationalist movement, told a reporter. “We want to survive. We need to save our nation.”

Appeal to 300,000

On Sunday, leaders of the Karabakh Committee appealed to an estimated 300,000 people in the square in front of the Opera House to bring weapons, ammunition, clothing and medicine to the movement’s headquarters. In addition, they called on young men to volunteer to fight.

Hambartsum Galstyan, one of the committee’s leaders, told the crowd: “If the government does not support us in our struggle--if it does not protect us from this terror and anger--then it is very possible that the movement will take power into our own hands. We fully accept responsibility for what we are doing, but we have no way out.”

The crowd responded with cheers.

Since then, the Karabakh Committee’s headquarters has been deluged by hundreds of volunteers dressed in old army clothing and carrying such weapons as muskets and daggers.

The volunteers are screened and organized and sent off, some to bolster “self-defense units” in Armenian towns and others to Azerbaijan to protect Armenians living there. The committee planned to move some of the volunteers by helicopter to Baku, the Caspian seaport that is Azerbaijan’s capital.

On Monday, about 100 young men in Soviet army uniforms took up positions around the Karabakh Committee’s headquarters. They were not on official duty; they were deserters, Armenians who had come to Yerevan after hearing news of the fighting.

“I have run away altogether,” Hamlet Tigranian, 19, said as he stood guard at the building’s entrance. “I left the army to go to war for Armenia.”

Armenian refugees from Baku and other Azerbaijani cities have begun to arrive in Yerevan with accounts of massacres at the hands of Azerbaijani nationalists.

About 45 Armenian civilians, wounded in Baku, were flown here Monday in government planes. More than 600 refugees, mostly women and children who had fled Baku in ferryboats, were expected to arrive shortly.

Even before the fighting began, Yerevan was crowded with refugees whose homes were destroyed by the huge Armenian earthquake a year ago. Now political leaders are asking residents to take the new refugees into their homes.

With emotions running high, Armenia’s nationalist leaders are attempting a delicate balancing act, trying to keep the people calm while at the same time calling for volunteers to fight.

They have not been altogether successful, however. The state news agency Armenpress reported Tuesday that Armenians had broken into ordnance depots in Yerevan and seized weapons. Karabakh Committee leaders said several Armenian militiamen have given their weapons to the nationalist movement.

“We are attempting to control the situation,” said Galstyan, the nationalist leader. “The people now possess guns, and they must not be without control.”

Political tension also is increasing, and the central government in Moscow is nearly as much a target of Armenian anger as Azerbaijan.

On Monday and Tuesday, an avenue lined with Soviet government buildings was clogged with thousands of people demonstrating outside Communist Party headquarters. The crowd called for the removal of all Soviet government officials from Armenia.

At first glance, most of the rest of the city seems normal, but work has come virtually to a halt. In their homes, Armenians wait glumly for word from Azerbaijan, staying close to their radios and television sets.

“It is very difficult for us now,” Karen Simonian, an Armenian legislator, told a reporter. “We don’t know what is to become of us.