Armenian Thrust Has Azerbaijan on Ropes : Karabakh: The nation has been humiliated by foe’s land seizure to solidify links with disputed enclave.

Police Maj. Gengiz Abbasov and his squad of exhausted militiamen slept or sat slumped over their rifles, disheveled and dejected after one of Azerbaijan’s worst setbacks at the hands of Armenian forces in five years of war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“It took us three days and nights to make it here. We have no clothes left except these. Their artillery targeting was just too good. We didn’t have a chance. This is all the fault of the Russians,” said Abbasov, coughing so deeply that he nearly fell to the ground.

Azerbaijan is staggering too, humiliated by its loss of nearly 10% of its territory in recent days to Armenian militants whose homeland has less than half of Azerbaijan’s 7-million population and a fraction of its natural resources.

Barely 10 months after it elected Abulfez Elchibey as a staunchly independent leader to take Azerbaijan permanently out of Moscow’s orbit, many Azerbaijanis, from Abbasov up to the leadership in the capital, Baku, have chosen to blame Russian military intervention for their defeat.

Russia vehemently denies involvement, however, and nobody has proven that it has given anything more than moral support to Armenia.

Diplomats say far more important reasons for the loss of the strategic Kelbadzhar region between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh were squabbling among the Azerbaijani leadership, dissonance among four military organizations and a sense of Azerbaijani nationhood so insecure that nobody can yet agree on what to call the national language.

The past 10 days of fighting in the Caucasus Mountains appear to have derailed the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process and wrecked Armenia’s promising policy of rapprochement with its main neighbor, Turkey. Armenian and Azerbaijani peace talks in Geneva, sponsored by the United States, Russia and Turkey, broke off Monday after the Armenian successes over the weekend.

“The Armenians now hold 7,500 square kilometers (roughly 2,900 square miles) of Azerbaijani territory, about 9% of our country. This is no longer a simple question of Nagorno-Karabakh. This is an invasion of a sovereign state, it is an (undeclared) war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” said Tawfiq Zulfiqar, a spokesman at the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.

Zulfiqar opened a map printed in 1992 by Armenian nationalists in Yerevan showing a greater Armenia that now has almost been achieved. Starting with the first corridor cut last May, Nagorno-Karabakh is now joined to Armenia proper by a 60-by-30-mile belt of occupied Azerbaijani territory.

Armenians have said they staged the offensive to strengthen their hold on the original corridor, which is a vital link for the passage of food and supplies between Armenia proper and the tens of thousands of Armenians who populate Nagorno-Karabakh.

The mostly Armenian-Christian inhabitants of the enclave have been fighting for self-rule from mainly Muslim Azerbaijan since 1988. More than 3,000 people have died in the five years of fighting, which has cut off most supplies to Armenia, itself landlocked. The result has been a desperate shortage of food and medicine, and a winter almost without fuel.

The misery has been aggravated by repeated sabotage of a pipeline that is Armenia’s only source of natural gas. A section of the pipeline running through neighboring Georgia was severed before dawn Tuesday, the fifth time this year that has occurred. Armenia has blamed Azerbaijani saboteurs for the four previous explosions.

The Armenian government maintains that it is not Armenia’s army doing the fighting, but Armenian irregulars of the Nagorno-Karabakh “Self-Defense Forces.”

The Azerbaijanis are unconvinced.

“What’s the difference between here and what the Serbs are doing in Bosnia? When will the world realize that what the Armenians want is a greater Armenia? We do not believe they will stop even with what they’ve got now,” said one staff officer at the Azerbaijanis’ northern headquarters near Gyandzha, 200 miles west of Baku.

Heavy shelling continued Tuesday around two Azerbaijani towns south of the disputed enclave, shaded in on the Yerevan map as “historic Armenian territory,” Azerbaijani officials said. Most of the civilian population of the towns of Fizuli and Kobatli has already fled eastward, but the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said its forces had repulsed attacks on both towns Tuesday.

To the north, more than 40,000 exhausted Azerbaijani refugees limped down the snowbound flanks of the Morov mountains with flocks of sheep, cattle and donkeys. Their accounts cast serious doubts on Armenian claims that their latest offensive is a retaliatory action by irregulars from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijani-Kurdish shepherds, village policemen and haggard militia survivors like Abbasov separately and frequently showed on maps how they had come under attack from both the enclave to the east and Armenia proper to the west.

Azerbaijan’s only real ally, Turkey, has been enraged by a sense that its efforts to help peace efforts between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been betrayed. Turkish President Turgut Ozal, reflecting a Turkish military desire to intervene in the Caucasus, warned Sunday that Turkey “should show its teeth.” It appears to be mainly U.S. pressure that is holding Turkey back.

There appeared little hope that the numbed Azerbaijani government can mount a counterattack on its own.

Ten days after the Armenians started their offensive, Azerbaijani tanks finally arrived Monday at the new front line--the ridge of the Morov mountain range.

Enthusiastic young recruits broke open ammunition boxes to load 130-millimeter shells onto their Soviet-made tanks, stripped plastic sheeting off rocket grenades and screwed fuses into the noses of the shells.

But most of the teen-age forces had just two months of training, and their 20-year-old self-propelled artillery inherited from the departing ex-Soviet forces were not in the best working order. One of the few T-72 tanks that made it up behind them ran out of petrol.

Some of the refugees collected near the front hoping to get news of relatives left behind in the Kelbadzhar region, once home to about 65,000 Azerbaijanis. Others waited lower in the valley to be assigned temporary accommodations.

With years of practice in a war that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, officials dispersed the new arrivals by bus and truck to shelter in schools, collective farms and other public buildings.

Chief district doctor Aslam Memedov said that he had registered 42 dead. About 100 people have been treated for frostbite, he said.