Armenia Seeks Wheat From Old Foe Turkey

Running critically short of bread and strangled by an economic blockade, Armenia has turned to Turkey, its hereditary enemy, with an urgent request for 100,000 tons of wheat, Armenian officials said Saturday.

The former Soviet republic wants to borrow the grain--representing about 10% of its annual consumption--and repay Turkey in kind later, officials said.

“The republic needs any kind of food at all, as we are in an economic blockade,” Armen Arutyunyan, an administrative aide in Armenia’s government, said. “But the need for bread is the most pressing.”

“Armenia used to receive 36 trains of food and merchandise, or about 400 rail cars, every day,” Arutyunyan said by telephone from Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. “For the past 20 days, we’ve gotten nothing.”

Rail service from the neighboring Transcaucasian land of Georgia has been broken by violent unrest in the Abkhazian district there. Transport links with neighboring Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic, were suspended long ago as the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh escalated into warfare.

That leaves Turkey as the only neighbor with rail links to which landlocked Armenia can turn. However, the request poses a knotty political and diplomatic problem for the Turks.

Armenians accuse the Turks of carrying out the intentional mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman sultans during World War I. The Turkish government insists this number is an exaggeration and denies there was a state-sponsored plan to exterminate the Armenian people.

Historic grievances are not the only problem between the overwhelmingly Christian Armenians and their mostly Muslim neighbors. Turkey now sees itself as a major foreign player, perhaps the major one, in former Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. And one of them, Azerbaijan, is locked in an undeclared war with Armenia.

By agreeing to help Armenia, which it publicly denounced last May for “aggression and expansionism” in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey could lose much goodwill in Azerbaijan.

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Moreover, large quantities of food and ammunition are regularly shipped from Armenia to fighters in mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh by truck and helicopter airlift. The Turks may object that the same thing could happen to any grain they sent.

On Saturday, Armenian forces reportedly launched a major counterattack in the disputed enclave that the Azerbaijanis said succeeded in overrunning several villages in the Khojaly district and near the Azerbaijani stronghold of Agdam.

“There are dead and wounded. Violent fighting is continuing,” Radio Russia quoted the Information Center of the Azerbaijani Popular Front as saying. That outbreak of fighting threw into doubt the latest in a series of cease-fires between Armenia and Azerbaijan--a truce supposed to go into effect Sept. 15.

Armenian officials said their urgent request for wheat was sent in a letter from Prime Minister Khosrov Arutyunyan to Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel last Wednesday.

“We haven’t gotten any answer yet,” Vladimir Manoyan, head of the Armenian prime minister’s press service, said.

The Armenians say they will consider Turkey’s reaction a test of whether that NATO-member country really wants to be neutral in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, as it has said it does.

The Itar-Tass news agency said that wheat purchased with $51.6 million in foreign credits offered to Armenia is sitting in the Black Sea ports of Russia and Ukraine and has not yet been unloaded.

Those stocks could be used to pay back the Turks. As for home-grown grain, Armenia’s current grain reserves can supply only about a quarter of the demand in the country of 3.3 million people, officials say.