Armenians, Azerbaijanis OK Cease-Fire

Armenian and Azerbaijani nationalists, seeking to end their two-year feud that threatened to escalate into a civil war, agreed tentatively Saturday to a cease-fire and the return of hostages held by each.

Delegates from the Armenian All-National Movement and the Azerbaijani Popular Front also agreed in a joint statement on further consultations and eventually on permanent contacts between the groups.

“We have made the right first step,” Sabit Bagirov, one of the two Azerbaijani delegates, said after the negotiations in Riga, the capital of the Soviet republic of Latvia. “We believe this will help stop the fighting, and with that we can look for peace.”

Jusif Samed-ogly, a member of the governing board of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, said in an interview here: “It’s a highly positive development because I am sure, as are many others, that the time has come for the two sides to talk with each other without mediators.”

The agreement, which calls for exerting all efforts to settle the conflict peacefully, must be ratified by the leadership of both movements, and the delegates in Riga expressed confidence that it will win acceptance even along the still tense border between the two southern Soviet republics.

Moreover, comments by Samed-ogly and Arif Yunisov, an independent Azerbaijani journalist and member of a social democratic group here, suggested that the Riga agreement may represent a genuine breakthrough in what has been one of the Soviet Union’s most intractable ethnic conflicts.

If so, it will be welcome news for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose domestic political standing has been damaged by the conflict.

Baku remained under a state of emergency Saturday night, with heavily armed troops in bullet-proof vests guarding key intersections and enforcing a nightly curfew.

A taxi driver trying to deliver two recent arrivals from the distant Baku airport to the city center before curfew roared at speeds up to 85 m.p.h. through red lights and down one-way streets the wrong way.

Later, the new arrivals learned that the nerve-racking drive had been unnecessary. The curfew had been shortened by an hour, begining at midnight instead of 11 p.m. and extending until 5 a.m. daily.

Still, few civilians could be seen on Baku’s deserted, late-night streets, and the biggest crowd consisted of two troop carriers full of soldiers outside a district Communist Party committee building taken over since Jan. 20 by the local military commander.

Azerbaijani leaders have demanded that the army be pulled out of Baku, and according to official figures, 152 out of 255 factories in the capital remained on strike through Friday in support of that demand.

Both delegations in Riga pledged to exchange information on all the hostages, believed to be several hundred on each side, and to arrange their safe return within the month.

“There is a certain success--less than we would both like, more than most expected,” Ashot Manucharyan, one of the Armenian delegates, said, “and we know each other better now.”

Samed-ogly stressed here that while the Riga accord is encouraging, it is still only a beginning. “There remains a long and tedious process,” he said.

Reached with the help of mediators from the Baltic Council, which groups popular front movements from Latvia and its neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, the agreement represents an important step in the de-escalation of a conflict that has cost more than 300 lives in the past two years.

Further talks were under way late Saturday in Riga on questions of the 500,000 refugees created by the conflict and other humanitarian problems.

The agreement was negotiated and concluded without the direct participation of the Soviet government or the Communist Party, and it could become an important milestone in the development of alternative political structures in the Soviet Union and in a new relationship among the country’s constituent republics.

No progress was reported on the fundamental issue dividing them--the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Christian Armenians within predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan--but this had been kept off the agenda at the insistence of the Azerbaijani Popular Front.

In their joint statement, the Armenian delegation proposed the inclusion of representatives from the enclave in future talks and resolution of the question on the basis of “self-determination of its population,” contending this would be “an important factor in the stabilization of the region.” But the Azerbaijani delegation argued in the statement that recognition of present borders would be such a factor.

The delegations did agree, however, in assessing the prospects for further talks, that their conflicting territorial claims to Nagorno-Karabakh were the principal source of their conflict and not religious differences or past enmities.

Samed-ogly said here that the next meeting between the two sides will probably take place in Tbilisi, capital of neighboring Soviet Georgia, on a date still to be determined.

In the first round of talks, held separately with the Baltic mediators on Friday, both delegations condemned Moscow’s decision to send troops into Baku, following a week of anti-Armenian violence in which 72 people died.

The Azerbaijani delegation called Moscow’s move an act of aggression that cost even more lives and a violation of the republic’s sovereignty. The Armenian delegation said that the move had clearly been a “destabilizing factor” for the whole of Transcaucasia, a region that includes Soviet Georgia as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Fisher reported from Baku and Parks reported from Moscow.