Armenians Dodge Azeri Lies, Bullets : Nagorno-Karabakh: Azerbaijan’s colonial rule has no place in the post-Soviet era.

Last weekend, Armenian militiamen captured Shusha. That ancient fort, high in the hills, has become the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the four-year conflict between Azerbaijan and its ethnic Armenian population in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The seizure of Shusha will utterly change the course of armed combat in the Caucasus. On Tuesday, the Security Council voted to send a fact-finding mission into the Caucasus and to work within the framework of the peace initiative by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. But no one should be so naive as to believe that the latest Armenian advance, the U.N. action or the cease-fire brokered by Iran guarantees peace in the region.

Shusha has symbolic as well as strategic significance for both sides. Azerbaijanis claim the old fortress town as a center of intellectual life. More important, the bastion also stood as the last Azeri stronghold within the predominantly Armenian enclave, used to launch aerial missile attacks on Armenian civilian sites. For their part, Armenians remember Shusha as their centuries-old capital city and the cultural seat of Karabakh before Soviet rule. Yet during the last two months, Shusha has become an armed Azeri military encampment, with all civilians evacuated.

This is not the first time blood has flowed in Shusha. Violence visited the town in 1920, when Armenians, then half the inhabitants, looked to free themselves from Azerbaijani attack. Azeri Turks responded by burning down the old Armenian quarter, beheading the local bishop and butchering much of the resident Armenian population. In 1988, after the grisly anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azeri port town of Sumgait, the 5,000 ethnic Armenians remaining in Shusha were run out of town.

The bad times promise to get worse, even though Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan have all ostensibly embraced the principle of arbitration. After Armenian militias claimed control of the main airstrip at Khojaly in February, Azerbaijanis reversed the advance by bombing the runway, which is now inoperable. Karabakh remains isolated geographically, cut off from food, electricity, running water and medical supplies. Stepanakert, the capital of the enclave, has been leveled by incessant Azeri air raids. Azerbaijan has accepted international assistance, but kept humanitarian aid from reaching from the enclave. Famine threatens. As the temperature goes up, so does the danger of disease.

It is difficult to find any common ground for discussion. Azerbaijan has fudged the facts and, in an ironic inversion of history, cries genocide. The Armenians, Azerbaijan still insists, slaughtered 1,000 innocent civilians during the battle for Khojaly; eyewitness accounts from the foreign press have verified about 100 dead. The Azerbaijani mission at the United Nations claims that about 200,000 Azeris ran for their lives from Karabakh. But the last Soviet census, taken before the 1988 troubles, put the Azeri population in the enclave at 30,000. The majority of casualties from the four-year struggle lie on the Armenian side.

Azerbaijan seems set on reclaiming the lost colony of Karabakh but it faces the permanent intransigence of the resident population. The government of the neighboring Armenian republic has now become directly involved. Last week Azerbaijan shelled the entire length of its border with Armenia, and the city of Goris, in the southern corner of the Armenian mainland, fell under heavy artillery attack.

Turkey, which has also appealed to the United Nations for help in the matter, has been in a bellicose mood since the autumn. Turkish television has broadcast false reports of fighting between Armenians and Azeris in Nakhichevan, the autonomous region controlled by Azerbaijan but bordering Armenia, Turkey and Iran. Last week Bulent Ecevit, the former prime minister, called for Turkish military intervention in Nakhichevan; that day President Turgut Ozal held up U.S. humanitarian aid en route to Yerevan through Turkey, taunting “Let’s scare Armenia.” Turkey’s inability to come to terms with its own minorities precludes its honorable participation in the peace process.

Iran has so far stayed on the sidelines, preferring to play the mediatory rather than the military card.

Any peace negotiations must take as their starting point recognition of the freely elected government of Karabakh. Azerbaijan must understand that its colonial rule over the Armenian enclave has come to an end. It is time for Azerbaijan to shed the Soviet legacy of corruption and repression in favor of modern, democratic institutions.