Azerbaijani Vote Likely to Ratify Ouster : Caucasus: The ballot asks, ‘Do you trust President Abulfez Elchibey?’ He was deposed in rebellion. His supporters are boycotting the election.

Called to the polls by an old-time Communist boss now back in the saddle, Azerbaijanis voted massively Sunday in a referendum expected to legitimize the ouster of their first democratically elected president.

There was a single question on the ballot: “Do you trust President Abulfez Elchibey?”

The bearded Elchibey was deposed during an armed rebellion in the troubled Transcaucasian country last June, after Azerbaijan had suffered a string of humiliating defeats in its war with Armenians for Nagorno-Karabakh. He fled Baku, the capital, and is now holed up in his native mountain village.

Geidar Aliyev, former Communist Party first secretary of the onetime Soviet republic, was made acting president. Sunday’s vote should pave the way for new presidential elections, in which the 70-year-old ex-KGB general and former Soviet Politburo member is considered the top candidate.

“I have run the country as acting president for more than two months,” Aliyev said over the weekend. “We can do this on a temporary basis, but we can’t go on living like this.”

Elchibey and his Popular Front called for a boycott of the referendum, charging that Aliyev wants to re-establish a dictatorship in the oil-rich country of 7 million. They said the only way authorities could win was to falsify the results and asserted that reports were arriving in Baku about election “violations and rigging.”

The anti-Aliyev opposition also objected that its representatives had not been allowed to act as poll watchers.

By 8 p.m., the Central Electoral Commission said more than 90% of the electorate had cast ballots, a figure Elchibey supporters said was so ridiculously high that it proved Aliyev loyalists were faking the returns. Preliminary results are expected today, but Elchibey’s chances were considered next to nil by most observers.

“I voted against him. Elchibey bears the guilt for everything that has gone wrong. It’s he who has let the war drag on for so long and the bloodshed of Azeris continue,” a middle-aged homemaker told a Western journalist after casting her ballot in Baku. “I tell you, 99.9% of the people want him to go.”

In the village of Keleki, part of the Nakhichevan enclave along the Iranian and Turkish borders, Elchibey did not vote, his press secretary, Arif Aliyev, said. Elchibey still holds himself to be Azerbaijan’s rightful leader.

Elchibey, a historian, former dissident and ardent advocate of close ties with neighboring Turkey, won 59% of the vote in June, 1992, presidential elections. But his popularity evaporated as a result of Azerbaijan’s military setbacks and worsening economic hardships.

Meanwhile, fighting continued between Azerbaijani and Armenian units in some parts of the republic. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry and military sources in Baku said Armenian units backed by armor were continuing to fight their way to the Iranian border and were staging a three-pronged attack on Azerbaijani positions in the Kubatli district.

One Armenian assault, the Azerbaijanis said, was beaten back only five miles from the Iranian frontier.

There was no independent confirmation, but aid agencies told journalists in Baku that as many as 200,000 refugees may be on the run from the Armenian advance.

Armenian sources countered that Azerbaijani units based in Kubatli had launched futile attacks to try to reach the corridor that Armenia uses to supply Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian enclave.