Azerbaijanis Offer to Restore Order : Ethnic strife: Popular Front says it will ‘stabilize’ the republic if Soviet troops are withdrawn. But the defense minister says his role is to crush the organization.

The Azerbaijani Popular Front on Saturday offered to work with Soviet officials on restoring order to that strife-torn southern Soviet republic in return for an end to the state of emergency there and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the capital of Baku.

The front said that its proposals would provide “the fastest stabilization” of Azerbaijan, including an immediate halt to the continuing guerrilla attacks on Soviet troops, policing of the streets, an end of the paralyzing general strike and additional shifts at all factories to compensate for lost industrial production.

The front’s leadership, confident that its widespread support remains intact despite the military intervention in Baku, said in a statement in the Azerbaijani capital that it is “ready to start talks at a corresponding level with those (officials) who did not compromise themselves” in the crisis.

But the proposal would require Kremlin recognition of the front at a time when Gen. Dmitri T. Yazov, the defense minister, maintains that the primary task of his troops is to crush the organization as a threat to Soviet rule in Azerbaijan. According to Yazov, the front had mobilized as many as 40,000 armed supporters in an elaborate plan to seize power.

Although many of its top leaders have been detained under the state of emergency in Azerbaijan and most of the others driven underground, the front shows no sign of yielding to the mounting pressure.

The essence of the front’s proposal, Yusif Samed-ogly, a member of its governing board, said by telephone from Baku, “is that if the troops are withdrawn and the state of emergency lifted, the Popular Front guarantees order.”

The alternative that Moscow faces, if the front can retain the popular support that brought as many as a million people to its rallies, is prolonged unrest in the country’s fourth-largest city, including a threatened guerrilla war against soldiers seen as an occupation force there.

While Baku is gradually returning to normal, with only isolated incidents of unrest reported by the military authorities, the city is effectively under military occupation, according to dispatches in the Soviet press on Saturday. Troops patrol the streets, armored vehicles guard key installations and major intersections and helicopters circle overhead.

Correspondents for Tass and the Soviet central press said that notwithstanding the military’s assertions that calm has been restored, tensions remain high in the city and popular anger lies just beneath the surface.

“A wedge has been driven between people,” three Tass correspondents said, assessing the mood of Baku, “and it will take a lot of time before life returns back to normal, not only outwardly but inwardly as well.”

The Azerbaijani Popular Front’s proposal, avowedly aimed at healing that wound, was given to Baku’s military commander on Saturday, but there was no immediate response, according to Samed-ogly.

Under its proposal, the front would assume “responsibility of establishing and maintaining order without any help from the army,” Samed-ogly said. “The front will also stop all strikes, and it will ensure that enterprises work double shifts to compensate for the damage resulting from the general strike.”

Two senior Soviet officials, including Interior Minister Vadim V. Bakatin, have called in the past week for such cooperation, and Yevgeny M. Primakov, one of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s closest advisers and an alternate member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, met with front leaders last week before the decision to use troops to restore order in Baku.

But Yazov and other military commanders continue to see the front as led by “extremists” working to end Soviet rule in Azerbaijan and “seize power” themselves. One of the front’s affiliates, the Azerbaijani National Defense Council, was outlawed last week under the state of emergency, and troops have raided the front’s offices and searched the homes of its officials.

On Saturday, military commanders warned that the front had gone underground in Baku and in other places in order to prepare “new mass disorders.”

Nearly 150 people were detained overnight in Baku, mostly for violating the curfew there, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass; among those arrested, was Rakhmi Gadzhiyev, a leader of the front and of the Defense Council. Tass also reported the detention of 80 people in Lenkoran and 22 in Neftechala, both in southern Azerbaijan near the Iranian border, under the emergency decree permitting detention without charge for 30 days.

Bakatin, meanwhile, told the government newspaper Izvestia that although the military action has stabilized the situation in Azerbaijan, it “did not and could not eliminate the causes of the crisis.”

“Tension and, I would say, danger remains because there are thousands and thousands of armed militants,” Bakatin said. “But there are no more fierce, organized actions by extremists. . . .

“For the situation to improve radically, it is best for the party and Soviet authorities of Azerbaijan to determine firmly their political stands.”

Lt. Gen. Vladimir Dubinyak, Baku’s military commandant, told Tass that 125 people, including 27 soldiers and policemen, have been killed in clashes between soldiers and Azerbaijani nationalists since troops pushed into the city a week ago.

The army was sent to Baku to quell anti-Armenian riots and anti-government protests in which 72 people died.

The official death toll after two weeks of unrest now stands at 197, though members of the Azerbaijani Popular Front have claimed that it is at least 400 and could be several thousand. More than 100 people are currently hospitalized in serious or critical condition, according to Azerbaijani health officials.

In outlying areas, the army reported continued progress in its efforts to separate Armenian and Azerbaijani militias, which have deployed thousands of armed supporters along their borders and near the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave under Azerbaijani administration that has been the primary focus of the unrest over the past two years.

A truce along a portion of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border continues to hold, according to Interior Ministry officials, and military commanders in two other areas have worked out exchanges of hostages between the Armenian and Azerbaijani militias.

About 4,000 troops have entered Nakhichevan, an autonomous region of Azerbaijan located in southern Armenia on the border with Iran, to police the truce between Armenian and Azerbaijani militias there.

In some areas of Azerbaijan, field commanders have begun talking with local leaders of the Popular Front.

In Agdam, near Nagorno-Karabakh, the district commandant told the newspaper Sovyetskaya Rossiya that “sober-minded forces occupy firm positions” within the Popular Front there and that they had agreed to lift the blockade of trains moving along the railways there and had accepted the garrisoning of peacekeeping troops in villages in the district.

In the southern Azerbaijani town of Lenkoran, however, a cease-fire that had been worked out between the army and the Azerbaijani Popular Front collapsed when senior military commanders ordered troops to remain in the town despite an agreement that they would withdraw following the restoration of order and the surrender of weapons by the front’s supporters.

Arif Yunusov, a leader of the Azerbaijani Social Democratic Group, said that seven members of the front were killed, four wounded and 54 arrested when troops pursued them as they fled into the forest near the village of Gaftoni, five miles to the west, after the cease-fire collapsed. Tass put the number of Azerbaijanis killed at five. An army officer was also killed in the clash.