Lithuania Assails Soviet ‘Kidnapers’ : Secession: Gorbachev is accused of abandoning ideals in seizure of deserters. Republic asks West to help.

Lithuanian leaders, outraged at the first use of military force since their declaration of secession, demanded Tuesday that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev surrender deserters brutally “kidnaped” by Soviet army paratroopers and appealed to the West for help.

As relations between this would-be independent nation and Moscow entered a dramatically more hostile phase, one marked by the first spilling of blood, Lithuania’s president accused Gorbachev of betraying the ideals he professes by using the Red Army to manhandle the small Baltic republic, its citizenry and property.

“Gorbachev says very nice things about new political thinking to the rest of the world,” Vytautas Landsbergis told reporters. “You can see how his words differ from his deeds.”

He said he fears a possible full-scale military crackdown, since Soviet troops obviously now have permission to use force.

Before dawn, paratroopers clad in camouflage uniforms and toting Kalashnikov assault rifles raided psychiatric hospitals in the republic’s major cities of Vilnius and Kaunas, hunting for Lithuanian youths who had fled the Soviet army and gone into hiding since the March 11 independence declaration.

Tass, the official news agency, said dragnet operations led to the arrest of 23 deserters. It quoted the chief of the Soviet land forces, Gen. Valentin Varennikov, as claiming that the Vilnius hospital was being used to train deserters for Lithuanian paramilitary units.

Rita Dapkus, spokeswoman for the Lithuanian Bureau of Information, said the troops beat a dozen deserters and two police officers who tried to come to their aid at the Vilnius hospital.

A trail of blood led down the steps and out the front door of the crumbling building.

At the Kaunas regional psychiatric hospital, soldiers shoved aside staff members, broke down doors, cut telephone lines and finally took away two people--not deserters but patients, according to an official report filed by the hospital.

Meanwhile, other Soviet soldiers were taking up stations at the republic’s opulent Communist Party headquarters in the center of the Lithuanian capital, making it the fifth party building seized by soldiers since Sunday.

In a sharply worded protest note addressed to Gorbachev, Landsbergis and Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene denounced “blackmail by means of armed interference, unlawful occupations of civilian buildings by military personnel and especially the kidnaping of Lithuanian citizens.”

The protest, approved by the Supreme Council, or Parliament, demanded the return of Lithuania’s “kidnaped citizens,” whose whereabouts are still unknown, and urged the Kremlin to agree to start negotiations “in neutral territory.”

But Landsbergis acknowledged that his small homeland could not expect to force its views on hostile Soviet leaders, who have branded the secession drive illegal and refused to consider formal negotiations. He called on the West for help.

“We raise this question to democratic nations: Is the West once again willing to sell Lithuania to the Soviet Union?” Landsbergis asked.

Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors of Estonia and Latvia, all formerly independent, were forcibly absorbed by Josef Stalin’s Kremlin in 1940 under terms of a secret agreement with Nazi Germany.

A Soviet official, however, accused Americans of meddling in his country’s affairs by voicing concerns over Lithuania. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told a Moscow news briefing that a U.S. Senate resolution passed last Thursday “can even detonate the difficult and explosive situation in the republic.”

The Senate urged the Soviet Union to halt its intimidation of Lithuania and urged President Bush to consider the republic’s request for official diplomatic recognition.

As the climate with Moscow soured, the Soviet Foreign Ministry announced that all foreigners in Lithuania--diplomats, journalists and business people--are being ordered to leave temporarily, in line with a directive issued last Wednesday by Gorbachev.

“It is often required in a family to ask the guests to leave and let the family settle its problems alone,” Gerasimov said. “Because the situation is volatile, any foreign elements can be considered an intervention.”

His deputy, Yuri A. Gremitskikh, said foreign journalists would have to depart when their permits to stay in Lithuania expire, as implicit in Gorbachev’s decree. That will mean no sudden exodus but a gradual melting away of the Western press corps covering the war of nerves with the Kremlin from Vilnius.

That development will alarm many Lithuanians, who are convinced that only worldwide publicity can deter the Soviets from more aggressive action.

Diplomats, including two visiting officials from the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad, were ordered to leave Friday.

The Presidium of the Lithuanian Red Cross formally protested the treatment meted out to the deserters, claiming that the Soviet army committed “brutal violations of international human rights and the rights of the Red Cross Assn.” It demanded that the Soviet government call off the army.

The fate of the deserters is a highly charged issue in Lithuania, since their status cuts to the heart of the republic’s legal claim to independence. Landsbergis, who has offered deserters the protection of his new government, has said that more than 840 are known to be in Lithuania, meaning that the paratroopers arrested only a tiny fraction.

Activists claim that, because Lithuania was annexed by the Soviets after being overrun by the Red Army, it is an occupied country and the Geneva Convention of 1949 is in force. That agreement outlaws the conscription of soldiers from occupied lands to serve in the occupation army.

Moscow’s view is completely different.

“In many countries, deserters are not thanked but returned to their units,” Gerasimov noted with a touch of sarcasm. For most Soviet young men, military service is compulsory.

Thirty-eight conscripts were hiding at the Vilnius hospital when 25 paratroopers armed with assault rifles marched up three flights of stairs and one, banging on the door of a ward, cried, “Open this door or we will shoot,” said Dr. Konstantas Daskezicius, a hospital employee and eyewitness.

The medics complied, and the grim-faced soldiers arrested at least a dozen deserters in a “very rough operation,” Daskezicius said. He said the paratroopers didn’t try to talk or negotiate but just “grabbed people.”

In an official report, Daskezicius said one police officer coming to the deserters’ aid was pulled from his squad car outside the building, kicked by the soldiers and beaten with their guns as he lay on the ground.

However, nurses alerted by the soldiers’ footsteps on the stairs managed to spirit most of the deserters out a back door, Daskezicius said. Signs of a struggle were clearly visible later: Beds were overturned, and a Red Cross flag was torn from the wall.

“Deserters, who have become militants of the Sajudis nationalist organization, were undergoing special training, and not treatment, in one of the buildings of the hospital,” Varennikov, the Soviet general, charged, according to Tass. The alleged creation of paramilitary units in Lithuania “is an illegal act and can lead to dangerous consequences,” he warned.

Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, speaking at the start of an official visit to Paris, said the Lithuanian deserters must be taken back to their units but that the crisis over their homeland’s status would be resolved without the use of force.

“There has been no armed action on Lithuanian territory,” Yazov said. “Everything will be solved by peaceful means.”

But Communist legislator Bronislovas Genzelis told reporters here that “we can’t have a dialogue while armed soldiers are occupying buildings in the city.”

Landsbergis called attention to comments that Gorbachev reportedly made Monday, when he told Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at the Kremlin that his leadership had abandoned “Cold War methods” and the use of force--comments that seemed to herald the easing of tensions.

Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, told reporters the Soviet leader told him that force would be used in Lithuania only if peoples’ lives were in danger.

“In other words, force will be used, because they could create this threat very easily themselves,” Landsbergis commented.

He also noted there had been no warning of the soldiers’ movements, despite an agreement reached Monday by Lithuanian representatives and two Soviet colonels on sharing information to defuse tensions. That pact, along with Gorbachev’s remarks, gave rise to a short-lived optimism.

Landsbergis had expressed fears that the pretext for the use of force might be an anti-independence rally scheduled Tuesday afternoon near the Supreme Council building. Soviet army helicopters dropped leaflets Monday advertising the rally, which criticized the Landsbergis leadership for leading the republic of 3.7 million people “into an abyss.”

In the end, however, about 5,000 people gathered for less than an hour in a peaceful, even blase mood, carrying slickly produced banners and posters declaring, “Only Soviet Lithuania!” and, referring to Landsbergis, “No to the Dictator!”

Two hundred police officers, armed only with batons, were ordered in to protect the Parliament building.

Police loyal to the Vilnius government were also guarding the television and radio broadcasting center, the central post office and the telephone and telegraph exchange, though what resistance they could offer in the face of an assault by Soviet paratroopers seemed puny indeed.

Algis Zhukas, secretary to Lithuanian Communist Party chief Algirdas Brazauskas, said soldiers equipped with automatic weapons and portable radios entered party headquarters at 7:15 a.m., making it the fifth party building occupied by the Soviet army.

“We can guess that this is perhaps a threat from Moscow, but it is a guess, only a guess,” Brazauskas said. “There are certain people in the government that make decisions concerning the army, and maybe they had orders from Gorbachev. Who knows?”

Vladislav N. Shved, the leader of a smaller rival Communist Party faction still loyal to Moscow, told the Soviet television news program “Vremya” that the buildings no longer belong to Brazauskas’ party.

Times staff writer Dahlburg reported from Moscow, and Schrader, a free-lance journalist, reported from Vilnius.

U.S. REACTION MUTED: The Bush Administration tries to ease tensions. A8