Soviets at War With Republic, Armenia Says

Armenia’s president accused the Soviet Union of beginning a war on his small mountain republic Monday with an alleged army attack on a village that he said killed dozens of people and destroyed every home.

“The Soviet Union has declared war against the republic of Armenia. The Soviet army continues its offensive on the territory of Armenia,” Levon Ter-Petrosyan declared in a statement that appeared to signal a new and alarming escalation in the bloodiest and most protracted ethnic dispute facing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

In Moscow, Gorbachev did not explicitly confirm or deny Ter-Petrosyan’s charges but acknowledged that he had decided to order Soviet authorities to take a markedly harder line to quell the rampages of nationalist vigilantes in the ethnically troubled republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Political measures cannot be implemented when there are armed bandits terrifying the people, both Azeris and Armenians,” Gorbachev told a press conference also attended by French President Francois Mitterrand, who was on a one-day visit to Moscow.

“As we are facing this situation, we deemed it necessary to enforce the presidential order to begin to disarm these illegal formations,” Gorbachev said.

Previously, as a conspicuous sign of trust in Armenia’s overtly nationalist leader, Gorbachev had allowed Ter-Petrosyan to attempt to persuade Armenian fighters to hew to his July 25, 1990, decree that ordered the disarming and dispersal of the groups.

Last week, according to Armenian authorities, at least 36 people died when Soviet troops and Azerbaijani police units swooped down on two villages that are located inside Azerbaijan but which have ethnic Armenian populations.

Defending those operations, Soviet Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo told the national legislature on Monday that his forces were targeting “illegal Armenian armed bands” that had been using Getashen and Martunashen as havens.

Although initial reports from Armenia were sketchy, Ter-Petrosyan and other Armenian sources accused the Kremlin on Monday of waging the first armed onslaughts on targets inside Armenia itself. The Soviet 4th Army, based in Azerbaijan, “flattened” Voskepar village in the northeastern district of Noyemberian near the Azerbaijani border, the Armenian leader charged.

“All buildings have been demolished, and the surrounding vineyards and forests have been razed to the ground,” Ter-Petrosyan said in an English-language statement sent to foreign news organizations in Moscow. “There have been many casualties, including dozens of dead.”

Meanwhile, villages in the Goris district of southeastern Armenia, also along the border with Azerbaijan, were under attack from Soviet helicopters, he charged.

Armenia-based correspondents of the Soviet financial magazine Business World said that, as of 5:10 p.m., they knew of 30 wounded people in Voskepar, but they mentioned no dead. They also gave indirect confirmation to the statements by Gorbachev and Pugo that the week-old operations are intended, at least in part, to break up the armed groups, whose membership totals in the thousands, that have flourished in Armenia since the violence with Azerbaijan began in 1988.

“Fifteen people who were accompanying the head of the Noyemberian police to talks with the military were disarmed and detained,” the Business World office reported.

In a dispatch faxed to Moscow, the Yerevan-based journalists reported that 400 Soviet paratroopers, as well as 17 MI-6 and 2 MI-8 helicopters, had landed at Erebuni Airport in Armenia’s capital during the afternoon.

Two companies of soldiers also took over the republic’s sole nuclear power plant.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said “extremists” from the Goris and Kafan districts have continued to use firearms, mortars, grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers and helicopters to attack villages in the Kubatly area of southwestern Azerbaijan.

Despite the discrepancies in the facts cited, central Soviet media agreed with Ter-Petrosyan and other Armenian leaders on the seriousness of the situation: Pravda, the Communist Party’s No. 1 daily, said Armenia and Azerbaijan are “one step away” from full-blown war.

“It’s a tragedy--it’s a human tragedy,” Gorbachev told the Monday night news conference. “Our attitude is that we are trying to find approaches, but it is very difficult.”

He fished a piece of paper from his pocket that he said he had prepared for his talks with Mitterrand, which dealt with French-Soviet ties and international affairs as well as the daunting difficulties now faced by the Kremlin leadership.

From March to May, Gorbachev read aloud, there were 235 shootings and attacks in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh district, the root of the three-year conflict between the neighboring republics of the southern Soviet Union.

The death toll for the past week given by Gorbachev differed from the Armenian count. He said 20 Azerbaijanis and 10 Armenians had died.

To end the bloodshed, Gorbachev said the autonomy of Nagorno-Karabakh--officially an “autonomous district”--should be “fully restored.” He said, however, that its vote to join Armenia had been unconstitutional, implying that it rightfully belongs to Azerbaijan.

Although it has a predominantly Armenian and Christian population, the hilly district, which has no common border with Armenia, has been part of mostly Muslim Azerbaijan since 1923.