Calm Belies Border Tension in Armenia

In a hut without heat on the Armenian-Azerbaijan border, 10 men sat around a table Sunday, their faces stony and their words as sharp as the daggers they left behind at their respective camps.

There was a Soviet army general in the hut, where the warring sides of a violent battle were negotiating for a second day, but he was not doing much. He was sitting some distance away from the table, jotting an occasional note on his pad and looking bored with the whole business.

“I don’t care much about this problem,” said Alexander Bibko, a Soviet army major posted outside the hut waiting for the talks to end. “It is the temper of nations. The people of the Caucasus are hotblooded, you see. This whole thing is their problem.”

It is three days now since 200 Soviet soldiers rolled into Yeraskh and broke up the fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that started here last Thursday. It is calm here now in comparison with the violent battlefield of several days ago. The Azerbaijani machine guns are silent, and there are no rockets being fired by the homemade launchers built by the Armenian side.

But it is a false calm, the people of this region say. Here and in towns all along the tense dividing line between the two republics, the predominantly Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azerbaijanis are fighting an ethnic dispute that goes back hundreds of years.

They say they have been waiting a long time for a battle to break out here and now that it has, they don’t expect to stop within a few days.

“Now the army is here and I think for some time it will be quiet,” said Sergei Barserian, 29, a factory worker from a village called Ararat not far from the border.

“But the army can’t stay all the time. And then we will wait for them to come again. Until the end of our lives, we wait. Only through our dead bodies can they enter our territory,” he said.

So far there have been at least four people killed and 20 wounded in the fighting in this town, just across the border from the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhichevan. Both sides claim the other has taken hostages. And both say they just want to live in peace.

But there is no peace here.

Yeraskh, 35 miles south of the Armenian capital of Yerevan, is a village of about 1,000 people on a plain in the shadow of the mountain where Noah’s Ark is said to have rested. There was a wine factory here and the people of the area are farmers and factory workers. In summer it is hot and dry. Now the wine factory is demolished--hit hard Thursday by an Azerbaijani rocket.

The women and children who live here left last week. The village now is a battlefield. The only people here are men, and nearly everyone is carrying a gun.

The fighting began Thursday afternoon when forces from the Azerbaijani Popular Front began firing rockets at the village from the hills across the border, Soviet army spokesmen said.

The Armenians of the village fought back with whatever weapons they could find--shotguns, muskets and other weapons that are normally reserved for hunting small game. Within a day, they were reinforced by more than 500 armed men from Yerevan sent by the Armenian nationalist leadership.

Even so, the Armenians fighting here are a ragtag bunch, camouflaged in the snow with butcher’s coats and white sheets. They are mainly middle-aged men and they are woefully unprepared to wage war.

Many of them have gone without sleep since the fighting began. They have two or three AK-47s among them, one armored personnel carrier they said they stole from a Soviet army barracks and homemade tanks fashioned from dumpster trucks.

The Armenian headquarters here is in the office of an auto repair shop. It is crowded day and night with chain-smoking men with rifles slung over their shoulders. It is littered with bread crumbs and bullet cartridges and equipped with a radio that crackles with news from the nationalist leadership in Yerevan.

It is unclear how well armed their enemies across the border are. There is talk that the Azerbaijanis fighting here have tanks and armored personnel carriers and that they are well-stocked with AK-47s and American-made M-16s.

But their headquarters are somewhere in the rocky hills on the Azerbaijan side of the border, and they are not talking.

There are about 30 Soviet soldiers to be seen in Yeraskh now, lined up along the border road. The man in charge is Maj. Gen. Nikolai Surkov, Yerevan commander of the Soviet troops. He came down the road to Yeraskh on Saturday with 20 personnel carriers carrying 200 soldiers. He has told the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis that if the fighting here doesn’t come to an end, he is prepared to roll in all his troops.

So far, neither alternative has come to pass. Last Monday, talks broke off after both sides agreed to continue the cease-fire until today.

Soviet officials say they are just trying to keep things calm here, to loosen the tensions that have led to death. But the dispute remains unsolved. And as night falls, the sniper fire starts again, breaking the still, dreary whiteness of the Caucasus winter.