A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : LETTER FROM YEREVAN : Fury Recedes in Weary Armenia

Those first days, it was all fury and rumor and marching in the streets.

Word came early on Sunday morning, Jan. 14, over Radio Yerevan and from urgent telephone calls from friends--murmurings about victims and massacres in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, and about battles being fought with Azerbaijanis, who as Turkic Muslims had been the foes of Christian Armenians for hundreds of years.

The details came later, broadcast by loudspeaker to a crowd of more than 200,000 gathered in Yerevan’s Opera Square. The speaker was Ashot Manucharyan, a leader of Armenia’s nationalist movement, and he told the crowd of the anti-Armenian violence in Baku the night before. In rousing patriotic tones, he appealed to Armenians to take up arms to defend their people and their land.

For Armenians, the pogroms in Baku were a provocation too bloody to ignore. The anger was palpable as men grabbed the guns they had been keeping in their houses in preparation for just such a moment, joined paramilitary units in Yerevan and headed off to war.

About 4 a.m. that Sunday, Dr. Araik Papian got word he might be needed to treat the wounded. He did not wait for another call. He donned his overcoat and went to the headquarters of the Armenian All-National Movement here, expecting to immediately get on a helicopter and head for the battlefront.

But Papian never went to the battlefront. For a week he sat at home, waiting by the telephone, expecting at any minute to be called to help his people. When the call did not come, he went back to work. He still listens anxiously each evening to the news and talks with a quiet intensity about the fate of Armenians in Azerbaijan, but he says that he does not expect there will be a need for more doctors any time soon. The imminent threat Armenians saw to their national survival has receded. And life has resumed its usual pace.

This has been the story of the Armenian capital over the last two weeks. It began with angry demonstrations--attended by tens and even hundreds of thousands of people--and with buses at midnight carrying heavily armed men off to battle. But now the demonstrations have been replaced by funeral marches and the fierce anger has been muted into a certain stunned calm.

There is none of the sense of apocalypse here in Yerevan that there has been in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, where about 200 people have died in recent weeks, first in the anti-Armenian pogroms and then in the Soviet Army’s effort to restore order.

There is instead a feeling that Armenia is helpless, besieged and betrayed by Soviet central authorities. And there is the exhaustion of a tiny republic of 3.3 million people trying to assimilate yet another tragedy into the past two years.

“You feel that you can get crazy because of the helplessness,” Karine Selimian, a soft-spoken woman of 36, said over tea in her Yerevan apartment. “We don’t know what to pay attention to. We have this Karabakh movement, we have our people there and we know that if we don’t help them they will be killed. We have the aftermath of the earthquake, and all the personal tragedies from it to cope with. We have Turkey on our border, and our people are terribly frightened of the Turks. We have this very specific situation, you see, this very specific danger. And we don’t know what to do. We are tired of tragedy, and we have no one to help us.”

The fatigue in this city may partly be the result of the surge of activity in the first few days of the current crisis with Azerbaijan. In those days, the headquarters of the nationalist movement here was open around the clock. Men crowded into conspiratorial groups in front of the building, smoking furiously and waving guns. Work in the city’s offices came to a virtual halt as employees gathered around televisions and radios to listen to the latest news. The square in front of Yerevan’s Opera House, the forum for opposition rallies, filled daily with as many as 200,000 people, rallying against Azerbaijan.

As the days wore on and a cold spell settled on the land, vocal public enthusiasm for battle flagged. The crowds in Opera Square dwindled. Many of the young men who had left their jobs to go to Armenia’s borders and even to the embattled villages in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, came home as tensions cooled. Some had been killed, however, in the brief but intense skirmishes with the Azerbaijani militias, and their somber funeral processions were a terse reminder of the realities of war.

Now there is only exhaustion for the majority of people here. Residents have become used to the sound of Soviet Army helicopters flying overhead and to the presence of armored vehicles in the street.

Talk has turned to how to manage in the face of severe fuel shortages caused by a railroad blockade of Armenia, the third in six months, organized by the Azerbaijani Popular Front in Baku. The fuel shortage means little or no hot water in Yerevan homes, and only a trickle of warmth from furnaces in a city where buildings are customarily overheated. It means buying gasoline on the black market at five times the cost of what it was two weeks ago. It means no candles in the stores as people buy in quantity, fearing electricity will soon be cut altogether. It means factories so short of raw materials that they are working at half their normal rate of production. It means waits of 36 hours or more for a flight out of the city. And it means that Armenia is so short of paper that its most popular daily newspaper, Evening Yerevan, is published only three times a week.

Add to that the more than 8,000 refugees who have arrived here from Azerbaijan in the last two weeks and the thousands more fighting to rebuild their lives from the devastating earthquake of December, 1988. It is enough to make Armenians throw up their hands in despair.

But they don’t. Problems are the norm here--and so is hope.