Azerbaijanis Planned Revolt, General Asserts

Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov said Friday that the Azerbaijani Popular Front had mobilized an armed force of 40,000 and was preparing to seize power in Azerbaijan when Moscow declared a state of emergency there last weekend and sent in the Red Army to restore order.

The nationalist front had detailed plans to take over the government in the Soviet republic last Saturday--the day the troops moved in--and install its own leadership in the central administrative offices and other key places, Gen. Yazov said. More than 100 people have been killed in the republic since then.

Yazov, contending that the situation in Azerbaijan was far more serious than the public knew, said the troops were deployed to smash the Azerbaijani Popular Front, which he said had supplanted the government and Communist Party in many regions outside the capital, Baku. More than 80 front leaders have been arrested, he said.

“Our task is not to arrest everyone but to destroy the structure of power that has formed at all enterprises and offices,” Yazov told the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia in Baku, where he directed the weeklong operation.

“This is not a slip of my tongue--I mean power . They were preparing to seize it and were so sure of their success that . . . 24 hours before troops were introduced into Baku, they announced (their own) state of emergency.”

The front had planned a mass rally for Baku last Saturday to announce that it had taken full power in Azerbaijan, Yazov said, and only the Kremlin’s move into the city in force prevented it. Moscow had said at the time that it was acting to prevent a usurpation of power in Azerbaijan.

Baku was described Friday as slowly returning to normal. Only occasional clashes between troops and militant nationalists were reported, although more people--147, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass--were arrested for violating the nightly curfew and other regulations under the state of emergency.

Transit Resumed

Stores were reopening, public transport resumed operation, armored vehicles have been largely withdrawn from the center of the city and newspapers have resumed publication, according to reports. Western correspondents have not been allowed into Azerbaijan since the invasion.

“The army’s actions are directed at breathing new life into Baku’s faltering economy, confiscating weapons from the residents and destroying the organization structure of the Popular Front leaders intent on seizing power,” Yazov said. “These measures will speed the relaxation of the state of emergency and lead to its being lifted.”

But the people’s sentiments are clear. Black flags are seen all over the city, red carnations cover the pavement where people were killed and there are widespread graffiti denouncing Moscow and calling for the army’s withdrawal.

Yazov’s denunciation of the Azerbaijani Popular Front as attempting to overthrow the republican government differed sharply with suggestions from other government officials, including Vadim V. Bakatin, the interior minister, that the group had “a number of healthy elements” with whom the government and party should negotiate.

The contrast was so great, in fact, that it suggested serious disagreement within the Kremlin leadership on what has become a key political issue--one that could affect President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s position and his ability to advance his reform policies.

Radical members of the Soviet Parliament on Friday condemned the government’s action in Azerbaijan. They criticized the national leadership for its reliance on force instead of searching for a political solution to the crisis, and also for acting too late in response to the violence there.

Thirteen members of the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies proposed an emergency session of the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, to mediate the underlying dispute between Azerbaijan and Soviet republic of Armenia. They called for the government to set a deadline for the army’s withdrawal from the region.

The Azerbaijani government and party had lost the confidence of the people, the group declared, and Moscow should have accepted this judgment.

“We are categorically against the use of force for the artificial preservation of such regimes,” they said.

Taken together, they said, the heightened unrest in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the government’s slow reaction and its eventual decision to use military force “represent a threat to perestroika ,” Gorbachev’s reform program.

Historian Yuri N. Afanasyev, one of the 13 deputies, recalled previous military interventions in political situations abroad and commented: “This way of taking decisions is the same as those decisions to send troops to Czechoslovakia, to Afghanistan, to Hungary and now to Baku.”

In each case, he said, Soviet troops were sent by a small group of people, “and practically no one bears responsibility.”

“It is important,” he went on, “for the Parliament to meet and decide on all the necessary measures so that this colossal danger from the south not cast doubt on all matters connected with the deep transformation in our country.”

The deputies had earlier met with Anatoly Lukyanov, who serves as Gorbachev’s deputy in the Supreme Soviet, and felt that they had convinced him of the need to negotiate with the Azerbaijani Popular Front.

The military intervention was also criticized by two army colonels who are veterans of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. They warned in a telegram to Gorbachev from Baku, just hours before troops moved into the city, that such an assault would turn the population against the army, against the government and against Russians--predictions that events have proven to be true.

The officers, identified as A. Savalyov, chairman of the officers’ assembly in Baku, and A. Rusakov, head of the political section at the Baku Military Academy, urged Moscow not to turn Azerbaijan into “a second Romania,” referring to the widespread bloodshed there last month when the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown.

The disclosure of military opposition to such a high-level Kremlin decision underscores the significance of the events in Baku--as well as the changes in the Soviet political system that permit such serious dissent.

“The Popular Front controls the situation in the city,” Savalyov and Rusakov said in their telegram, according to an account in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. “We consider that the use of armed force would lead not merely to the isolation of servicemen, but to a complete disruption in relations (with the local population), that it would threaten the security of their families and that it would trigger a growth in anti-Russian feeling.”

In Moscow, armed men--perhaps police, perhaps army commandos, perhaps a squad from the KGB, the security agency--raided the Azerbaijani mission early Friday morning, not once but twice. They searched the building and then, at 3 o’clock, bundled everyone, about 40 people including two members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, into buses and took them to a detention center.

At the end of the affair, the only person held was Ekhtibar Mamedov, a leader of the Azerbaijani Popular Front and its military wing, the National Defense Committee. Mamedov was committed to Lefortovo Prison, apparently under the state of emergency.

On Thursday, Mamedov had told a press conference at the Azerbaijani mission that resistance to the military presence in Baku would continue indefinitely.

“This fight is continuing,” he said, “and if the soldiers are not withdrawn as soon as possible, a guerrilla war will be unleased throughout Azerbaijan.”

The army contended Friday that the Azerbaijani Popular Front had already embarked on such a campaign. Officers in Baku said the army found battle plans, marked maps of the city, military uniforms--with ranks from private to general--and weapons at the front’s offices and at the homes of its leaders.

Yazov, briefing Soviet correspondents, said the Azerbaijani militia had been exceptionally well armed. Some of its fighters were equipped with the latest model of the Soviet army’s Kalashnikov assault rifle, he said.

The militia units deployed in Baku had monitored the army’s radio messages with sophisticated equipment, he said, and had used a fleet of 50 radio-equipped taxicabs to gather intelligence on their movements. They used a merchant ship in the Bay of Baku as their headquarters, he added.

“According to our estimates, about 40,000 militia members armed with submachine guns, rifles of all types, machine guns and pistols are loose in Azerbaijan,” Yazov said, noting that many went underground with the arrival of the troops.

The Popular Front had extensive help from Azerbaijani authorities, including the republic’s Interior Ministry, in resisting the military occupation of the city, Yazov said, suggesting that the Azerbaijanis had been armed, equipped and directed by local officials.

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