Lithuania Says It’s Not Forming Army : Secession: Force is unwarranted, Landsbergis tells Gorbachev. The republic’s president also warns military deserters that he cannot protect them.

Lithuania’s leader assured President Mikhail S. Gorbachev after an extraordinary spate of Kremlin saber-rattling Saturday that his breakaway republic is not forming paramilitary units and warned Lithuanian deserters from the Soviet army that he cannot protect them.

As night fell on this Baltic capital, there were no signs of the early morning armored convoys that had shocked and angered Lithuanians in the tensest 24 hours since their declaration of independence two weeks ago. But there was also no indication that Moscow’s ire over the secession drive is waning.

Two deadlines set by the Soviets also expired Saturday, but it was not immediately clear whether the Lithuanians’ reaction would placate Moscow.

President Vytautas Landsbergis, speaking to foreign reporters outside the Parliament building, said his government’s campaign to restore the independence that Lithuania enjoyed between the world wars would continue.

“We consider us as a part of Eastern Europe, not a part of the Soviet Union,” Landsbergis said, speaking in English. “These processes cannot be stopped.”

Gorbachev, who says the secession is illegal, demanded Thursday that Landsbergis halt the sign-up of volunteers to replace Soviet police officers and KGB border guards and gave him until Saturday to inform him of the steps taken.

Military authorities, similarly brushing off Lithuania’s professed independence, gave deserters until Saturday to return to the barracks, or risk arrest. Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, said the conscripts would be returned to duty whether they liked it or not.

In a telegram to the Soviet president, made available to reporters by the Glasnost group of independent Soviet journalists, Landsbergis said Gorbachev was misinformed if he believed that Lithuania, independent from 1918 until the Kremlin absorbed it in 1940, was again forming an army.

“People are registering who agree, if necessary, to help in the maintenance of social order and controls on the roads,” Landsbergis said in his telegram, which denied that armed groups were being formed.

He concluded that “for the tanks that are now approaching the capital of the Lithuanian republic, there is nothing to do.”

About 100 Soviet military vehicles rumbled through the center of this hilly capital at 4 a.m., their roar bringing legislators meeting in an all-night session of Parliament outside to watch the column speed along the highway.

A duty officer at Sajudis, the grass-roots nationalist group that spearheaded the independence drive, said the 58 infantry fighting vehicles and 50 trucks entered a military base at Siaures Miestelis in northern Vilnius.

For Landsbergis, the display of Soviet military might highlighted the danger that hangs over his government. “This is a constant threat, and no one knows if they are going to use force,” he told Parliament members after they reconvened, bleary-eyed, at 10 a.m.

The previous day, Soviet military helicopters dropping leaflets branding the secession illegal roared over the Supreme Council building, and the Interior Ministry announced it had deployed units loyal to Moscow throughout the West Virginia-size republic.

Soviet officials have repeatedly said they will not use force in Lithuania, and a senior Soviet diplomat Saturday said his government will do everything in its power to resolve the crisis peacefully.

“For the time being, we are not using any force in the republic, and we will try to keep that line, but what will happen I don’t know,” Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri B. Kashlev told reporters in Lisbon.

In Washington, about 200 people rallied in front of the Lincoln Memorial to express their solidarity with the new Lithuanian regime. They carried placards reading “Thanks . . . But No Tanks” and “Give Lithuania Freedom.”

For many in this republic of 3.7 million people, the fate of deserters from the Soviet army is an issue heavy with symbolism. Not only should Lithuanian boys not have to serve in the army of what is now a foreign state, they argue, but conscripts from the Baltic states are often submitted to brutal hazing that has driven some to suicide.

Landsbergis has said that at least 840 deserters have recently come back to the republic. He had said earlier that authorities of his government would try to guard them, but he admitted Saturday that task is impossible, given the might of the Soviet army.

“We cannot physically protect every young man who is trying to hide,” he told Parliament. He advised deserters not to stay at home, since their addresses might be known to military police, and said that if deserters are threatened, “they could seek sanctuary in churches.”

What succor churches could offer, beyond spiritual aid, is unclear, since they are awarded no special status as places of sanctuary by the officially atheistic Soviet state.

The Lithuanian leadership had been concerned that the army and KGB would use Saturday’s deadline for deserters to return to their units as pretext for mass arrests and even violent provocations, the Washington Post reported. But there were few arrests, and nearly all of the deserters stayed at their homes, with friends or at a psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of Vilnius, the newspaper said.

In the midst of the showdown with Moscow, elections were held in Lithuania on Saturday for more than 9,000 posts on city and village councils. The Soviet news agency Tass said that from 50% to 60% of voters had cast ballots by late afternoon, showing that Lithuanians were taking their political responsibilities under independence seriously.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring Baltic republic of Estonia, Communists argued over the future of their party, which local journalists say seems certain to split like Lithuania’s party into a pro-Moscow faction and a group demanding independence.

A decision by the Estonian Communist Party’s extraordinary congress was expected today.

Free-lance journalist Schrader reported from Vilnius and Times staff writer Dahlburg reported from Moscow.