Armenians, Azerbaijanis OK Talks : Ethnic strife: Pullbacks begin. Latvia will host negotiations. Nagorno-Karabakh, scene of the bloodiest feuding, will not be on the agenda.

After two weeks of skirmishes that threatened to lead to civil war, militias from the two southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan began withdrawing from one battlefront on Sunday and agreed to talks on extending the truce to other areas.

The Armenian All-National Movement said it has accepted the conditions demanded by the Azerbaijani Popular Front for talks on a broader disengagement of their paramilitary forces, further steps to avoid clashes, the exchange of hostages, resettlement of refugees and other humanitarian concerns.

But the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Armenian Christians within Muslim Azerbaijan, will not be on the agenda, although it has been the focus of bitter and bloody feuding between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the last two years.

Artis Erglis, a leader of the Latvian People’s Front, said the Armenians and Azerbaijanis have accepted the offer of his group and popular fronts in the two other Baltic republics to sponsor the talks and mediate when necessary.

The talks, to begin Wednesday in the Latvian capital of Riga, effectively exclude the central Soviet government, reflecting the deep mistrust of Moscow that the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis share.

Yusif Samed-ogly, a member of the governing board of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, said by telephone from Baku that preliminary negotiations are already under way on disengagement between the two militias around Nagorno-Karabakh and in two nearby districts of Azerbaijan, Khanlar and Shaumyan, where the fighting had been heaviest.

He said that the militias pulled back without incident along the border between Armenia and the Azerbaijani region of Nakhichevan after the Soviet army had arranged a truce there late last week.

The two sides have agreed to patrol roads near the border of Armenia and Nakhichevan with groups of no more than 10 unarmed men, with the government’s internal security force separating them and maintaining security in the region.

The two nationalist movements appear to have accepted the Latvian offer of mediation in preference to settlements imposed by Moscow.

The key condition, demanded by the Azerbaijanis, was that the future of Nagorno-Karabakh not be discussed.

“The only basis for peace talks can be the Armenians’ total renunciation of any territorial claims,” Samed-ogly said. “For our part, we will guarantee full political and cultural rights in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

In Yerevan, a spokesman for the Karabakh Committee, which constitutes the core of the Armenian All-National Movement, said: “We will never renounce Karabakh, . . . but the point is to step back from this very dangerous confrontation and to deal with the human problems that have resulted.

“Karabakh is not forgotten or renounced--it is simply not on the agenda of this meeting.”

Samed-ogly said the Soviet government has not responded to a proposal by the Azerbaijani Popular Front on Saturday for negotiations on restoring normality to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, where the Soviet army remains deployed in force under a state of emergency decreed to halt a week of anti-Armenian riots.

The front, which had won wide popular support over the last year, had proposed to take over policing of the city, to end the general strike and to ensure that lost production was made up in return for withdrawal of the troops and an end to the state of emergency.

The military command, appearing to reject such talks, instead intensified its crackdown on the front, hunting down more of its officials and supporters in their hiding places in the city and outlying areas. At least 200 were detained under the state of emergency over the weekend, according to the independent news bulletin Glasnost, including Abulfaz Aliyev, chairman of the Popular Front.

Lt. Gen. Vladimir Dubinyak, the Baku military commandant, described the city, the fourth largest in the Soviet Union, as quickly returning to normal, although his troops continued to come under sporadic attack.

The body of a soldier, apparently killed by nationalists, was found in the basement of a building in Baku, Dubinyak said, warning that his troops had been specifically authorized to use their weapons in self-defense.

Although a number of deaths were reported over the weekend, the official death toll for the past week of fighting in and around Baku remained at 125, including 27 soldiers and police.

In addition, 72 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in previous violence, officially described as an anti-Armenian pogrom in Baku and several other areas of Azerbaijan. But Soviet officials have never provided comprehensive figures on the number of people killed and wounded during a week of extensive skirmishing that occurred before Soviet troops were ordered into the area to separate the two warring militias.

Those clashes, which began late on Saturday, Jan. 13, led to the mobilization of thousands of men for the hastily established militias of the two nationalist movements.

Moscow contends, however, that the Azerbaijani Popular Front was trying to seize political power in the republic. It had already supplanted Communist Party and local government officials in many areas, Soviet officials say, and it was planning to take over the republican government in Baku on Saturday, Jan. 19, prompting Moscow to send troops into the city overnight.

In its nightly situation report, the official Soviet news agency Tass said that military task forces had succeeded in restoring Communist Party and local government administration in a number of Azerbaijani districts, including Gyandzha, Lenkoran and Khanlar, where they had been effectively supplanted by the Popular Front.

“But some of the masterminds of terror are still in hiding,” Tass added.

Opposition groups, which have urged the population to continue the general strike, are now attempting to mount a campaign of civil disobedience in Baku to thwart the restoration of the local government there, Tass said. “A destabilizing influence is being exerted by militant groups that continue to spread false rumors and are trying to undermine the prestige of local government bodies,” the agency said.

Military commanders were using troops, including army engineers and construction battalions, to return public services and some industrial plants to operation in Baku, Tass said, and extensive efforts are being made to do the same in outlying districts.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Tass said, the army has begun expelling people without proper residence permits for the district, a measure that Armenians fear will mean the deportation of thousands of Armenians from the region as Azerbaijani officials determine who may and may not live there. About 80% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s present population of 160,000 is Armenian.

In Yerevan, Armenian state television reported that a militia member was killed when Soviet troops, attempting to recover arms stolen by the Armenian National Army, the paramilitary wing of the Armenian All-National Movement, surrounded its headquarters on Sunday afternoon and firing broke out after an angry exchange between the troops and militia members.

Esther Schrader in Yerevan contributed to this story.