Old Struggle Flares Anew in Bitter Karabakh Battle : Caucasus: For besieged Armenians, wresting the disputed region from Azerbaijan is a historic cause.

Clad in dark green parkas and nervously fingering the gold crosses around their necks, the 40 Armenians flew into the battle zone aboard an aging helicopter that used to belong to the Soviet state airline.

One passenger was a skinny, soft-spoken medical student in a Boy Scout uniform who firmly gripped an automatic rifle. Another, a father of three young children, was an accordion teacher from Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, whose wife was deathly afraid he might be killed.

They crouched or sat on the metal-floored belly of the MI-8 amid crates of grenades and 5.45-millimeter bullets, cradling their Kalashnikov assault rifles and mostly keeping to themselves. As the copter made its way among the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, they craned their necks for a glimpse of their destination.

“They are massacring our people down there, driving them and burning them out of their homes,” the accordionist, David Avetisyan, who was wrapped in a shaggy sheepskin, shouted over the din of the rotors as he scanned the landscape through the chopper’s plastic portholes.

“If history shows us just one thing,” said the 36-year-old Avetisyan, “it’s this: The Armenian nation must resist.”

Nagorno-Karabakh--the name means “Black Garden in the Mountains”--is a loamy slice of grain- and grape-growing upland in the southeastern Caucasus. Smaller than Delaware, its craggy peaks and dun-hued plains have been fated by history and geography to become a collision point for two nations and cultures.

Four years ago this month, encouraged by the heady talk of new freedoms emanating from Moscow, it was the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region that cut the first, fateful breach in the Soviet political monolith.

Legislators in this territory, three-quarters of whose 180,000 residents are ethnic Armenians, asked that their land be wrenched from the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan and reunited with Armenia itself.

It was sudden proof that the heralded “friendship of the peoples” was largely a sham, and it was also an act fraught with great danger for the multinational Soviet state, since it alerted the more than 100 other ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union that their demands, too, could now be voiced.

Although he could not have known what lay ahead, then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev recognized the explosive immediacy of the Karabakh problem. “If we don’t find the key to a solution,” Gorbachev warned in mid-1988, “it will have far-reaching consequences for all perestroika. “

Gorbachev’s Kremlin tried imposing its direct rule on Karabakh, repressing the pro-reunification movement and forcibly depopulating Armenian villages (“Operation Ring”) in collusion with the Azerbaijanis, but Moscow officials never found the key to Karabakh and to halting its people’s stubborn quest for self-determination.

Two winters ago, after brutal massacres of Armenians by mobs in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, full-blown warfare, complete with artillery and machine-gun barrages and the use of armor and helicopters, erupted here between Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

An ambitious attempt by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to broker an end to the hostilities, made in a northern Caucasus spa town last September, was a failure. Russia tried again last week and got the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan to issue an unexpected joint call for an immediate cease-fire. But hostilities continued to escalate.

The commander of strategic forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Air Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, said the crisis had become so white-hot that Commonwealth leaders should consider stationing a joint peacekeeping detachment in Karabakh to prevent a widening of the war.

“For politicians, Karabakh was a lesson; for soldiers, a second Afghanistan,” the Moscow-based military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda said last week as it marked the fourth anniversary of the deployment of Soviet troops here.

Twenty-seven servicemen from the Soviet Interior Ministry died in the conflict--a sacrifice that the newspaper made clear had been in vain.

“It is time to call a spade a spade,” the soldiers’ commander, Yuri Shatalin, told Krasnaya Zvezda. The struggle in Nagorno-Karabakh, he said, “is a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

In the besieged village of Kichan and elsewhere, the ethnic dispute that has been the Soviet Union’s most protracted and bloodiest, with more than 1,000 lives lost, is more violent and hateful than ever as it enters its fifth year. It is a nasty scenario for what could happen in the post-Soviet Caucasus as a whole. In this mountainous area, home to what were the most ancient peoples of the whole nation, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ossetians and Chechens have already taken up arms to battle for their cause.

As in Yugoslavia, the warfare between ancient enemies in Karabakh--the predominantly Christian Armenians and the mostly Muslim Azerbaijanis--has been especially ferocious. “They want to put the last Armenian into a museum, and for us to disappear,” said Arut Arapetyan. The family of the 30-year-old construction worker originally lived in the Mush area of what had historically been western Armenia but fled at the beginning of the century when the Azerbaijanis’ ethnic brethren, the Turks, exterminated an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

“In Karabakh,” Arapetyan declared, “it’s the same war.” Other Armenians in the enclave agreed, to the point of simply calling Azerbaijanis “the Turks.”

The volunteers from Yerevan touched down after an hourlong flight on a stubbly wheat field and clambered aboard a truck for the mountainside settlement of Kichan. As streams of red tracer bullets from Azerbaijani machine guns buzzed through the night sky, the brigade bolted through ankle-deep snow to the village of 40 homes, now mostly abandoned.

Kichan, under siege for weeks, commands the main north-south road in Karabakh, and the Armenians say it would be a disaster if they lost the town. At any given time, about 50 Armenians, crouching in trenches slick with cocoa-brown mud, must hold off a much larger Azerbaijani detachment, perhaps 500 fighters or more.

“Comparing us is like comparing an elephant to a fly,” said one defender, Pavel Tadevosian, 32.

Two women, both said to be crack shots, have come from other parts of Karabakh to help defend Kichan. Petite, dark-haired Vartui Gevorkyan, 27, who worked in a condenser manufacturing plant in Stepanakert, the Karabakh capital, said she was only doing her part to “defend the fatherland.”

“They, the Azerbaijanis, want to clear the whole Armenian population out of here and won’t stop until they do,” Gevorkyan said.

Karabakh was attached to Azerbaijan, over protests from Armenia and the local population, in 1921, when Josef Stalin was responsible for Soviet ethnic affairs. To throttle the drive for self-determination--a referendum on independence was passed by 99% of those casting ballots last December--the Azerbaijanis have blockaded road and rail entrances to the enclave, and disconnected telephone service and electricity.

In the main, Karabakh is now cut off from the outside world and has become perhaps the most isolated place in Europe.

Huddled in dark basements, trying to keep warm in winter overcoats, the people of Stepanakert are riding out an artillery blitz of rockets and 100-millimeter shells. There is a new horror--the Azerbaijanis have begun blasting the city of 70,000 with a Grad battery, which fires more than 40 missiles at a time and can reduce a city block to powdered concrete. On a single day this month, 180 projectiles struck the city, killing more than 20 people by Armenian count.

The Armenians are also attacking, blasting Shusha and other Azerbaijani settlements with gunfire and encircling them to choke off their food and energy supplies. In the pastoral land they lovingly call “Little Switzerland,” Armenians admit to looting Azerbaijani villages of everything from bleating goats to designer sunglasses and pulp novels.

Thanks to Armenian guns, said Armen Seiranyan, a construction engineer-turned-fighter in Karabakh’s Self-Defense Forces, the Azerbaijani city of Shusha, about seven miles from Stepanakert, “is now more battered than Stepanakert.”

A fragile stalemate seems to prevail, but is sustained on the Armenian side only by the lifeline over the hump of the Caucasus. Every day, weather and gunfire permitting, the orange and blue MI-8s that until recently were the property of the Armenian branch of Aeroflot, the old Soviet airline, chug over the mountains from Armenia to carry in sacks of flour, drums of gasoline, pharmaceuticals and the tools for battle.

Aid from Armenia, plus Karabakh’s rough terrain, which neutralizes the Azerbaijani edge in armored personnel carriers and tanks, have until now evened the odds of Karabakh’s Armenians taking on the 7-million-strong population of Azerbaijan.

So has the Azerbaijanis’ inability, so far, to master much of the equipment they appropriated or seized from departing Soviet forces. Another factor, according to the Armenians, is what they scornfully call the Azerbaijanis’ lack of stomach for battle.

Caught up in the war, much of Karabakh, including Kichan, has become a dead zone. Each day, the Armenians say, the Azerbaijanis blast this strategically located village with as many as 20,000 bullets and artillery shells. Provisions, including loaves of crusty, flat Armenian bread, must be brought in by a World War II-vintage armored car.

The sheep have run away. The stone-walled church has been turned into a supply dump; its floor has disappeared under a mound of barley. An antitank rifle of the kind Red Army soldiers once used to shoot the treads off Nazi Panzers is pointed out a small aperture, ready to fire.

Light comes from candles or from smelly diesel fuel burned in lanterns meant for kerosene, and heat in the makeshift Kichan barracks is generated by a wood stove. In one recent firefight, four defenders on a scouting mission were shot to death by Azerbaijanis. Because of the chronic lack of gasoline, the wounded cannot always be evacuated to Stepanakert.

Using World War II-era crank-powered field telephones and portable radios, a fragile communications network linking Armenian villages has been cobbled together. One settlement, Kazanchi, is surrounded by 16 hostile villages and can now be reached only at night by a circuitous 10-mile hike through wooded mountains. It is similarly dangerous for Azerbaijanis to resupply their settlements.

There are multiple signs, though, that the balance in Karabakh is shifting. In the past three months, leaders of the fledgling republic say, fighting has entered a new, more intense phase, as the Soviet Union tottered and collapsed and Moscow’s troops, for the most part, pulled out of Azerbaijan.

Now arrayed against them, Armenians estimate, are 10,000 to 15,000 fighters from the fledgling National Army of Azerbaijan, the Interior Ministry and Azerbaijani Popular Front. Azerbaijan’s President Ayaz Mutalibov says Azerbaijan must now strike at Karabakh with a single “fist.”

“Whatever Azerbaijan does, we will fight, since this is our home,” seemed to be the attitude of Armenian fighters at Kichan, Stepanakert, Malybeili and elsewhere. But as he spooned down a bowl of rice soup, Valery Sayan, 45, a baker-turned-rifleman at Kichan, wondered aloud, as did other Karabakh residents encountered by a Western correspondent this month, why members of the Armenian diaspora, including the huge Armenian-American community of Los Angeles, were not being more generous. “The millionaires had better send us something, or we’ll starve to death,” Sayan said.

During a visit this month to Baku, Secretary of State James A. Baker III called on Azerbaijan to observe human rights. But Sayan shrugged indifferently. “We’re beyond the point where words can help,” he said. “If Baker wants to help, let him send 10 tanks.”

Some foreign aid is trickling in, but it’s impossible to tell whether it is intended for Karabakh or was lifted from general aid sent to Armenia and the former Soviet Union, or from emergency relief for victims of Armenia’s 1988 earthquake.

Airlifted medical supplies include packages bearing the starry blue flag of the European Economic Community and the emblem of the French-based humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.

One former Soviet army regiment, the 366th, is still stationed in Stepanakert, and Armenians worry that it is getting ready to hand its weaponry, including modern T-72 tanks and heavy artillery, to the Azerbaijanis and then depart. Who gets the regimental arsenal could decide, finally, the Karabakh conflict.

Stepanakert residents by the scores are consequently maintaining a vigil outside the base, ready to block its three entrances with dump trucks and tractor-trailers if the soldiers attempt to break out with their equipment.

Some Armenians liken their stand in Karabakh to the resistance of Constantinople to the Turks, and call for assistance from the West or the “Christian world.” Others ask why, in the supposedly better world brought about by the collapse of communism, people are still fighting and dying in the land once likened to a garden in the mountains.

“Is anybody in the world thinking about Nagorno-Karabakh?” a wizened 78-year-old woman asked as she huddled with hundreds of other people in a Stepanakert basement bomb shelter. “Can people be murdered without anyone caring?”

An Island of Armenians

BASIC FACTS: Mountainous autonomous region of 1,694 square miles inside Azerbaijan in the southeastern Caucasus. Name derived from three languages: nagorno, Russian for mountainous; kara, Turkish for black; and bakh, Persian for garden. Capital: Stepanakert, population 70,000.

POPULATION: About 180,000 people, 80% of them Armenian Christians speaking a dialect of Armenian. Other 20% are primarily Shiite Muslim, Turkic-speaking Azerbaijanis.

HISTORY: Area was home of leading Armenian feudal families. In late Middle Ages, it retained sovereignty while Armenia was divided between Turkish and Persian empires. In early 19th Century, it was conquered by czarist armies; in 1813 it became first Armenian-speaking region officially recognized as part of Russian Empire. It was separated administratively from other parts of present-day Armenia. After Russian Revolution, Ottoman Turkish army moved in. Independent republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were created during strife in the Caucasus. Nagorno-Karabakh found no support in its desire to be attached to Armenia; Azerbaijan, backed by its ethnic allies, the Ottoman Turks, claimed and occupied the region. In 1923, Nagorno-Karabakh was declared an autonomous region within Azerbaijan. Hostilities broke out in early 1988 after regional governing council requested the territory’sunification with Armenia.

Credit: Compiled by Times staff writer John Thor-Dahlburg and Cindy Scharf, a researcher at the Times’ Moscow Bureau.