Armenians Told to Be ‘Coolheaded’ : Soviet Union: The republic’s president rejects violence as Gorbachev deadline on disarming nears.

Armenia’s new leader called Tuesday on self-defense forces in his republic to pledge allegiance to local authorities and refrain from violence as the deadline neared on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s order to disarm.

“The people will not forgive any adventure that endangers the fulfillment of our statehood,” Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan told his countrymen. Speaking two days before the deadline for disbanding the armed groups, Ter-Petrosyan called on the people to act “coolheadedly.”

Meanwhile, the republic’s Parliament, which elected the prominent nationalist as its chairman and therefore Armenia’s president, was considering three rival draft declarations proclaiming Armenian sovereignty, or independence, and could vote one into law today.

Ovanes Muradian of the Armenian All-National Movement, a pro-independence organization, said the favored proposal declares the re-establishment of the Armenian state that existed in 1918-20 and its reunification with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

On July 25, Gorbachev ordered all vigilante groups to surrender their arms and disband within 15 days. That deadline expires Thursday, but the police and Armenian nationalists like Muradian say it has had little effect in their republic, where armed bands sprang up to defend Armenians from ethnic attacks by Azerbaijanis, their rivals in the dispute over the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

As many as 40,000 irregulars are now reported to be under arms in Armenia, and Gorbachev said Interior Ministry troops and Soviet army units could be set against those who do not turn in their weapons. Ter-Petrosyan said the Armenians can put their own house in order.

“We are capable in a short period of time and with our own means,” he said, “of solving the complex problems relating to the republic’s domestic life . . . provided external interference is excluded.”

In the same message, Ter-Petrosyan ordered the police to “secure lawfulness” on Armenian territory, where attacks on soldiers and police posts have become commonplace. In the latest such incident, according to the official news agency Tass, a man shot and killed a military cadet while trying to seize a submachine gun.

Armenia’s Parliament has rejected Gorbachev’s decree as interference in the internal affairs of the Transcaucasus land, and Ter-Petrosyan set off for Moscow late Tuesday to explain this view. The independent news agency Interfax said Ter-Petrosyan will be received by Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and the top Soviet official for police affairs, Interior Minister Vadim V. Bakatin.

The Interfax report indicated that Moscow authorities are ready to listen. It said Ter-Petrosyan told Parliament that he had received a telephone call from Gorbachev congratulating him on his election and vowing his willingness to work together.

“Naturally, from our side, the readiness for joint action and mutual understanding was also expressed,” Ter-Petrosyan told the Armenian Parliament.

Also Tuesday, lawmakers in two other Soviet republics seeking independence, Lithuania and Estonia, worked out negotiating positions for talks with Moscow, with the Estonians saying they will refuse to help put together a new “union treaty,” Gorbachev’s last-ditch effort to keep his increasingly divided country together.

Lithuania, so far the only Soviet republic to declare independence outright, could open formal negotiations on secession as early as next month, President Vytautas Landsbergis said while on a visit to Switzerland.