Dozens Reported Killed in Fighting Over Karabakh

Dozens of people were killed in heavy shelling over the weekend in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, according to press reports Sunday from the former Soviet Union’s most battle-torn region.

The fiercest action occurred around Askeran, a strategically important Armenian city under siege for three days by Azerbaijani forces. Nine tanks led the attack on Askeran, but Armenian fighters seemed to have successfully repelled the Azerbaijani attempt to take the city.

Armenian officials reiterated a claim that troops from the former Soviet army aided the Azerbaijani side during the Askeran assault, and according to one press dispatch, Azerbaijan made a similar charge, saying former Soviet fighters were helping the Armenians.

“There is enough evidence to prove that soldiers from the Commonwealth of Independent States were involved,” Varudjan Sarkisyan, duty officer at the Armenian Parliament said. “Armenian self-defense forces managed to intercept radio messages between (the nine) tank crews that showed that those were tanks of the 23rd Division (of the former Soviet army).”

The Azerbaijani side denied it was receiving support from the forces of the Commonwealth army, and the army’s headquarters in Moscow has repeatedly denied that its troops are helping either of the combatants.

Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan populated primarily by Armenians, has raged for four years and grown as intractable as the fighting that used to take place among competing militias in Lebanon. As many as 2,000 deaths have been reported in the violence between Armenians, who are Christian, and Azerbaijanis, who are Muslim.

The intensity of the fighting, however, has increased greatly since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The last of the Commonwealth forces, which had served to stabilize the situation to some degree, were pulled out of the region last week, although a few paratroopers remained behind to destroy abandoned military equipment, Russian Television reported.

Political upheaval in Azerbaijan appeared likely to aggravate the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in coming weeks.

Last week, the Azerbaijani opposition forced President Ayaz Mutalibov to resign, and according to Russian Television, the new leadership is likely to take a more offensive stance in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The power in the republic is now in the hands of those who consider it necessary to step up active military operations (in Nagorno-Karabakh) and to form a national army as soon as possible,” Russian Television commented.

An Azerbaijani official quoted by Russian television indicated that the new leadership is not likely to let Russia mediate in the conflict.

“Mutalibov acted wrongly when he sought the assistance of Russia,” said Tofig Gasyamov, whom Russian Television called a representative of Azerbaijan’s new government. “Russia is interested in pitting the two peoples against each other to preserve its influence.”

Azerbaijan has declared that it intends to form its own army so it can firmly establish its rule over Nagorno-Karabakh, claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In an interview on another television program called Itogi, however, the head of an Azerbaijani think tank said the new government would not support heightened violence.

“The opposition was first, even at the beginning of the conflict, to call for a peaceful settlement,” said Eldar Namazov, director of the Independent Center of Strategic and International Research in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital.

Askeran was not the only part of the mountainous enclave that witnessed bloodshed Sunday. The Russian news agency reported that Azerbaijanis attacked two other villages with Armenian populations.

Armenian forces also fired on several Azerbaijani villages, according to Oktai Kasumov, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Popular Front. One woman was killed in the town of Agdam, he said, and several people were injured.