Lithuanians Reach Truce With Troops

After the blitz attacks by the Soviet army that caused great carnage and shocked the world, the Lithuanian government reached an agreement with military commanders late Sunday to avert more bloodshed, and the thousands of Lithuanian nationalists forming a human wall to protect their Parliament began to disperse.

In a truce that might prove only temporary, the military promised not to attack the Parliament overnight, to keep their tanks and armored cars off the capital’s streets and not to enforce the military curfew imposed earlier in the day.

The government of President Vytautas Landsbergis, in return, called upon an estimated 8,000 Lithuanians gathered at the Parliament to return home.

“The Sunday of the victims is ending,” Landsbergis told the crowd outside the Parliament building. “You have defended us, and we all defended our right to independence.

“That right was strengthened in world consciousness more than it ever has over the past 50 years. We became free. We rid ourselves of fear. This is victory, the sparks of which we will take home and kindle in our children.”

After overnight clashes that left 13 people dead and 163 wounded, both sides appeared to want to back away from another confrontation, but the agreement took nearly six hours to work out under mediation by the presidents of Armenia and Byelorussia who arrived Sunday on a “mission of goodwill.”

Although many Lithuanians doubted that the Soviet military could be trusted to keep its word, most left the large plaza in front of the Parliament building and the other facilities that they had been guarding, day and night, to prevent their seizure by the Red Army. About 2,000 stayed to remain overnight.

“I think it was the correct decision because there was an ultimatum from the military, and that meant there was a real danger of more victims,” Kazimiera Prunskiene, the republic’s former prime minister, said in an interview.

Other Lithuanian leaders expressed the hope that the agreement, however limited and tentative, was the first step toward an easing of the immediate crisis here.

The delegation from the Council of the Federation, the country’s highest policy-making body, that arrived Sunday from Moscow will continue its meetings today with members of the Landsbergis government, its rivals and the Soviet military. A top-level military mission is expected today as well.

Boris Pugo, the Soviet interior minister, said on national television that the deaths had been “unfortunate” but that the Lithuanian leadership was to blame for mobilizing the people to resist Soviet authority. Efforts were being made to reduce tensions here, he said, and to “control the situation.”

“If there are no attempts to aggravate it very seriously again, I think it would be possible to achieve a normalization or at least a softening of the present situation,” Pugo said.

But the truce was clearly fragile. One of the four Lithuanian officials who took part in the talks, Alexandras Abisala, the speaker of the Supreme Council, the republic’s Parliament, said that the military officer, who identified himself only as Col. Belousov, had stressed he was not authorized to speak for the entire Soviet military, only for the Vilnius Garrison, in agreeing to the army stand-down.

That left open the possibility that another military unit--the Soviet army has an estimated 92,000 troops in Lithuania--might attack the other facilities that the central government began seizing last week in a crackdown on the republic, which is seeking to secede from the Soviet Union.

The agreement was announced to Parliament less than an hour before the start of the 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew that the military imposed on Vilnius and Kaunas, the republic’s second-largest city, under a state of emergency established Sunday morning.

The military has also restricted entry and exit from Vilnius to prevent Sajudis, the Lithuanian nationalist movement, from bringing more of its supporters from other parts of the republic to defend the Parliament building and other facilities in the capital.

The Committee for National Salvation, which claimed to have assumed power with the seizure of the broadcasting center, meanwhile declared that it was illegal now to film or use sound amplifying devices, tape recorders or copying machines. It said political demonstrations were also banned.

Although the army declared that it had acted at the committee’s request in seizing the broadcast center and other buildings, what authority it had was unclear. A press conference it scheduled for Sunday morning was canceled, and the identities of most of its officials remained a secret.

After the nighttime seizure of Vilnius’ television tower and broadcast center by paratroopers, the government feared that the next target would be Parliament, and thousands of its supporters gathered around it and the adjacent republican library, determined to defend the symbol of the rebirth of Lithuania as an independent nation.

With another bloody confrontation imminent, however, negotiations began to work out a truce with the help of Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Byelorussian President Nikolai Dementi and Boris Oleinik, deputy chairman of the Soviet Parliament’s Council of Nationalities, who had been sent by the Federation Council to assess the situation here.

They had already met for 2 1/2 hours with Landsbergis, viewed films of the Vilnius violence taken by Lithuanian Television and visited the facilities seized by the army. They also met with the opposition Communist Party, the Committee for National Salvation and local military commanders.

When Landsbergis finally spoke, it was 9:20 p.m., and tension was rising in expectation of another nighttime assault by the paratroopers.

Deputies discussed the crisis with gas masks on their desks. Men armed with rifles and pistols guarded entrances to the Supreme Council chamber. Chairs were piled high against the windows of the modern glass and concrete building.

Outside, a crowd that ranged in age from students to pensioners stood fast through the day despite freezing temperatures and listened to telegrams of support from across the Soviet Union and around the world.

“We have come to defend our Parliament that we chose freely and that is ours,” Linas Pankevicius, 33, a worker from rural Lithuania, said, rubbing the stubble on his chin after more than a day on the square. “We are helping it at this difficult time because without it we have nothing.”

Across the Neringa River, a bell tolled slowly in a Catholic Church, mourning those killed earlier in the day. And dozens of ambulances waited by the riverside in case of a further army attack, this time on the Parliament.

Landsbergis, speaking to the Supreme Council, compared the situation in the republic to that in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Soviet army ousted the reformist leadership of Alexander Dubcek.

But he said the mission from the Federation Council “gives grounds for hope that further bloodshed can be avoided.”

Pugo, speaking on the national television news program “Vremya,” asserted that the paratroopers’ assault on the television center had been carried out at the request of the National Salvation Committee, which had objected to “anti-Soviet” broadcasts, and that the soldiers opened fire after the Lithuanians guarding the center had shot at them.

The official Soviet news agency Tass, quoting an unidentified spokesman for the front, said it had appealed to Soviet Interior Ministry troops and the army to take over the center because “the Lithuanian Parliament has lost control of the situation in the republic.”

“The constitution of the Soviet Union and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic will be gradually reinstated,” Tass quoted the spokesman as saying.