UCI Professor Returns, Says Armenians Fear Massacre : Ethnic strife: The mood was one of ‘utter desperation, a feeling of complete abandonment by Moscow and the world.’

As friends called Friday to welcome him home, UC Irvine assistant chemistry professor V. Ara Apkarian answered their questions with a mix of sadness and relief.

“Yes, I got out,” he would say, brow furrowing, his dark eyes growing intense. “But it’s a mess. A real mess.”

Apkarian, 34, returned Thursday night from his first trip to the land of his ancestors, Armenia, on the Soviet Union’s southern border.

His research and chemistry lectures went well, Apkarian said.

But he hadn’t expected to visit Armenia during a time of strife, when its Christian militias clashed with Muslim militias from neighboring Soviet Azerbaijan.

During 10 days in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Apkarian did not see any fighting, but nearly every day he heard about it.

On his second night in the city, Apkarian joined 100,000 people at the city’s central Opera Square. In bitter 20-degree weather, they stood together until well after midnight, trading rumors about the fighting and passing the word that in the border city of Baku, Armenians had been massacred--tossed from windows, burned alive.

Everywhere, he said, the mood was one of “utter desperation, a feeling of complete abandonment by Moscow and the world”--as well as fear that “any day a massacre could start” in Yerevan.

Apkarian also watched as, again and again, bands of residents armed themselves. In one case, Apkarian recounted, a group of men stopped a Yerevan police officer and “demanded he give them his gun--and he did.”

He also watched, sometimes taking pictures, as young men with hunting rifles gathered at central points around the city and prepared for a march on the border.

As a U.S. visitor, Apkarian stood out, so “lots of people came up to me,” he said, “saying the one thing I could do was to send arms.” He refused but usually added “that I could sympathize with the need for self-protection.”

Ironically, although the atmosphere in the city was tense, teaching and research went on as usual at the University of Yerevan, where Apkarian lectured on solid-state lasers and the photo dependency of solids.

Also, Apkarian said, he set up the beginnings of an exchange program between Armenian scientists and U.S. scholars, a project he had long planned.

Still, reminders of strife were always there. The night before he left, Apkarian said, he heard plane after plane landing at the airport, bringing what turned out to be 6,000 Soviet troops to Yerevan.

And when he finally left Yerevan on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow on Jan. 19, he was one of 25 people who didn’t have a seat. He had paid for his ticket, Apkarian said, but some of the other extra passengers, he suspects, “were people trying to get out . . . running for their lives (from the threat of bloodshed, and) had bribed their way onto the plane.”

A sympathetic stewardess found room for him and 11 other passengers by “sending us down the food elevator into the food preparation area of this Airbus. I moved some tin cans and sat on them” all the way to Moscow, Apkarian said.

Before returning to California this week, Apkarian spent another 10 days researching and lecturing at the University of Jerusalem. He talked to Israeli scientists about the Armenians’ plight but was surprised to find little sympathy.

“When I got out (of Armenia), the world had its attention on the bigger issues. They weren’t interested on a little skirmish in Armenia,” Apkarian said.