Thousands of Armenians Forced Out of Azerbaijan : Soviet Union: About 10,000 are deported in 3 months. Others are tortured, deprived of food in prison, human rights delegation says.

Soviet troops have forcibly deported about 10,000 Armenian civilians in the last three months from the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenian detainees have been repeatedly tortured in Azerbaijani prisons, international human rights activists said Wednesday.

The activists, members of a delegation from a human rights group called the Sakharov Congress, said they saw evidence of widespread violations of human rights in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, a largely Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.

They reported that Armenian prisoners are beaten and deprived of food and water by Soviet and Azerbaijani troops, Azerbaijani citizens are attacked by Armenian paramilitary groups and Armenians are physically and psychologically mistreated by Azerbaijani special forces.

“If deportations continue, large-scale armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia may develop,” Lady Cox, deputy Speaker of the British House of Lords and a member of the delegation from the Sakharov Congress, told journalists. “Grave violations of human rights are still occurring.”

Villages targeted for deportation are first surrounded by Soviet Interior Ministry troops, and then Azerbaijani special forces move in to terrorize residents and force them to evacuate, Cox said.

“Azerbaijani officials, including (Azerbaijani) President Ayaz Mutalibov . . . continue to justify these deportations as voluntary departures,” Cox said. “But evidence shows that the deportations are brutally enforced. They involve the loss of life and property and physical injury.”

Hundreds of people have died over the last three years in ethnic strife between Azerbaijanis, who are Muslims, and Armenians, who are Christians. The center of the conflict has been a territorial dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to official figures, as many as 200,000 Azerbaijanis have fled their homes in Armenia and as many as 300,000 Armenians have fled their homes in Azerbaijan.

The delegation from the Sakharov Congress, a human rights organization named after the late Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, interviewed dozens of victims of abuses during two trips to Azerbaijan and Armenia, the first in late May. The group determined that Moscow’s troops heavily favor the Azerbaijani side in the conflict.

That is not surprising because, while Armenia is pushing toward independence from Moscow, oil-rich Azerbaijan remains loyal.

The group traveled to the formerly Armenian villages of Kirov and Dolanlar and confirmed that Azerbaijanis now populate them. “All of those we interviewed were refugees from Armenia,” Cox said.

The group estimated that 10,000 Armenians have been forcibly deported since late April.

When the group arrived at the airport in Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city, five Armenian passengers, three of them women, were arrested for no apparent reason. When the human rights activists tried to protest, they were threatened at gunpoint.

“The purchase of air tickets out of Stepanakert requires payment of bribes of up to 10 times the cost of the ticket,” Cox said. “Armenian passengers are systematically insulted, beaten and, in the case of young women, made to strip naked in the presence of OMON (Azerbaijani special forces) troops. Money and valuables are stolen.”

The delegation also met with 11 Armenian police officers who were recently released after 47 days in an Azerbaijani prison. They were held, a delegation member said, for possession of weapons--their service pistols.

“They suffered daily beatings,” Cox said. “They described brutal prison conditions, including the deprivation of water and the provision of excessively salty food to exacerbate thirst.”