Soviet Army Backs Azerbaijanis, Armenians Say

Armenian officials accused the Kremlin on Thursday of throwing its armed might behind their Azerbaijani foes in the worst flare-up of the ethnic enmity between the two peoples in months--attacks on two villages this week that left 36 Armenians reported dead.

“This is a new stage, the stage of war,” Seda Vermisheva, an Armenian writer and member of the Armenian Parliament, told a news conference at the Armenian mission in Moscow.

Over the past three years, she said, the Kremlin has tried to act as an impartial judge in the conflict between Azerbaijan, an oil-rich, largely Muslim republic in the Soviet Caucasus, and neighboring Armenia, which is mainly Christian. But now, Vermisheva said, “What has declared war on us is not only Azerbaijan but the whole Soviet war machine.”

Hundreds of Armenians and Azerbaijanis have been killed in the three years of sporadic fighting in and around the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave of Azerbaijan that is mainly Armenian, and in ethnic fighting elsewhere.

According to Armenian accounts of this week’s clash, Azerbaijani and Soviet troops backed by tanks and armored vehicles stormed Getashen and Martunashen, Armenian villages located in Azerbaijan near the border with Karabakh.

When the troops left Getashen, according to the Armenian mission in Moscow, they took 53 residents.

Technically, they had been arrested, but the Armenians viewed them as hostages and took 14 Soviet soldiers hostage in retaliation, according to David Vardanian, chairman of the Armenian Parliament’s Foreign Economic Commission.

The attacks on Martunashen, the smaller of the two villages, resumed Thursday, the state-run Tass news agency reported. “The village has been burnt down,” it said. “Some of the residents fled to Getashen; the fate of the others is not known. Attempts to evacuate the critically wounded from the village met with no success.”

According to Azerbaijani accounts and some Soviet media, the troops were not intent on deporting all villagers, as the Armenians claim, but on putting down Armenian militants who were using the two hamlets as bases from which they could strike at Azerbaijan.

Tass said that three mortars, 15 anti-tank mines, 84 guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, three field radios and three armored personnel carriers were seized in the joint Soviet-Azerbaijani attack on the Armenian militia.

Azerbaijani lawmaker Bekir Eyoubov asserted that his republic is merely trying “to defend itself with the help of Soviet internal security forces and local militias” from Armenian attacks.