COLUMN ONE : David and Goliath in Caucasus : Feisty Karabakh Armenians are defying the odds in a battle to liberate their tiny enclave from Azerbaijan. The key to their success? ‘This is a war for our existence,’ one veteran says.

They found the photo in one of the Azerbaijani tanks they had captured and took it as a war trophy.

It had been a good day’s battle. Azerbaijani forces had attacked at dawn. The Armenians, pretending to retreat in disarray, had led them into a booby-trapped village, then savaged them with artillery.

The picture, inscribed “To my brother, Elman,” was on the body of an Azerbaijani tank crewman. It was dated just two days earlier and showed a group of dark-eyed teen-agers in uniform, some smiling with a hint of youthful cockiness. Most were probably gone now, blown away in the firefight.

Sitting around a headquarters picnic table in post-battle glow, the more seasoned, bristle-bearded Armenian fighters of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army were struck anew by the contrast between themselves--mostly men in their 30s--and their enemies.

“They’re all so young,” headquarters commander Grigory Gasparyan mused. “They just get sent into the meat grinder. . . . This is the third time we’ve seen them fire on their own soldiers to keep them from retreating.”

No one needs to fire on the Karabakh Armenians to keep them from retreating. Unlike the young soldiers they face--who are handicapped by shaky training and low morale, they have a sense of purpose.

This is their corner of the Caucasus Mountains, populated mainly by Armenians for centuries. They see themselves as a national liberation army destined to free Karabakh from the Azerbaijani rule imposed by the Kremlin in the 1920s.

“This is a war for our existence,” Gasparyan said. “The difference is in what you do and what you do it for. You know a few miles back is your family, children, women and old people, and therefore you’re duty-bound to fight to the death so that those behind you will live.”

That would seem to be the key to one of the greatest success stories by a military underdog since 1948, when tiny Israel held off the might of a dozen Arab nations surrounding it; a tough people, faced with what they see as the threat of extinction, get tougher.

The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh now number about 120,000--fewer than the population of Pasadena--and their mountainous enclave within Azerbaijan is about the size of Ventura County. They export mainly wine. They get some backing from their 3 1/2 million ethnic brethren in Armenia proper, but the real fight to control Nagorno-Karabakh, which began when they tried to secede from Azerbaijan in 1988, is theirs.

The Azerbaijanis, whom they have battled for six years in the former Soviet Union’s longest war, number 7 million and are blessed with oil fields so rich that world petroleum powers are hovering in their capital, Baku, in hopes of winning a stake.

But for at least the last two years, the Karabakh Armenians have been winning--and then some.

In 1992, the Karabakh Armenian army, which is believed to have 10,000 to 20,000 men, cut a corridor through the slice of Azerbaijani territory that separates their enclave from Armenia. Then, last year, it managed to capture about 10% of Azerbaijani territory. Casualty counts routinely put Azerbaijani losses at five to 10 times greater than the Armenians’, with combined deaths estimated at well over 15,000, including civilians.

Stepanakert, the Karabakh capital, runs under a wartime regime, but it runs. Every man age 18 to 45 is in the army. All power is centralized in the State Defense Committee. Food supplies allow each resident 15 pounds of flour per month. Thanks to the capture of a power plant, there is electricity most of the time--far more than can be said for Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

In Yerevan, “they talk a lot and do little,” Gasparyan said. “Here, it’s the other way around.”

In explaining their military success, Karabakh Armenians start by citing a special character, what one official called a “mulish stubbornness,” that developed over years of repelling Iranian, Turkish and other would-be occupiers.

The enclave’s symbol is a craggy old man and woman, facing front like a Karabakh version of Grant Wood’s classic painting, “American Gothic.” These characters once embodied the region’s fame for longevity but now seem to speak more to the Armenians’ rock-like determination. The symbol, displayed in sculpture and woven into carpets, is taken to mean “We are our mountains.”

The Karabakh Armenians are also traditional warriors, having contributed far more than their share of marshals and heroes to the Soviet Union and even the old czarist-era army.

But to last out a war that could drag on for decades, they have had to readjust their national mentality, said Jirair Pogosian, the Karabakh deputy prime minister in charge of the economy. They had to get rid of what he called “the Armenian complex,” the belief that Armenians, who suffered through massacres by the Turks in 1915 and an earthquake that killed 25,000 in 1988, must always be victims.

“That lament that we’re always getting beaten up had to be broken off,” Pogosian said. “We had to believe we could fight and feed ourselves. All through the centuries we cried and put up monuments to victims of the genocide. But the main principle should be: I stand up for myself. I depend on my own strength and brains.”

Their brains combine well with what they learned in the Soviet army, in which Armenians tended to be officers in combat and technical arms, far outnumbering Azerbaijanis in those positions.

A Western military expert who has extensively observed the fighting in Karabakh said that because of their Soviet experience, Armenians “are very good at maneuvering--they tend to outmaneuver the Azerbaijanis and encircle them.”

He is also deeply impressed by their cohesion. “From the political leaders to the soldiers, they believe in their cause,” he said. “That’s not the case with the Azerbaijanis,” many of whom come from distant towns and see no reason why Azerbaijan needs Karabakh so badly that they should risk their lives for it.

Their tactical and maneuvering skills, combined with what is usually a superior knowledge of the terrain, allow the Karabakh Armenians not only to win battles but to capture plenty of Azerbaijani equipment for battles to come.

“We’re very grateful to (Azerbaijani leader) Geidar Aliyev because he’s funding two armies at once,” Gasparyan said, repeating what has become a stock witticism in Karabakh.

If the recent battle near Agdam, about 25 miles northeast of Stepanakert, is any indication, the harvest is usually good. Of the 13 tanks and armored personnel carriers used in the Azerbaijani attack, the Armenians said they knocked out 10, several of which could be repaired.

As evening fell over the unharvested cotton field where part of the battle had raged, Azerbaijani guns were occasionally erupting--not so much to kill anyone, Armenian soldiers said, but to try to destroy disabled tanks before the Armenians could get them.

The attack failed even though it was backed by helicopters and planes. The Karabakh Armenians have no air power.

“They have new equipment, but it seems they have bad commanders and organizers,” said Artur Arutunyan, commander of one of the Armenian battalions. That is why Azerbaijan has hired Turks and Afghans to try to bring the army skill and discipline, he said.

The Azerbaijanis have admitted to organizational problems but have sworn to correct them and conquer Karabakh nonetheless.

The Karabakh Armenians get more than just tanks and armored personnel carriers from Azerbaijan. When they conquered swaths of Azerbaijani territory outside Karabakh last year, they asserted that they had to take out the positions from which shells rained down on Armenian towns.

But then they kept going, capturing land down to the Iranian border and along Karabakh’s eastern edge. By the time they stopped, Azerbaijan no longer surrounded Karabakh, and the front that the Armenians had to defend had shrunk from about 80 miles to 20.

The Armenians not only shortened their defense lines, a dire necessity for such a small army; they also captured the wherewithal to keep their war effort running for months, stripping Azerbaijani towns of everything useful.

Economy chief Pogosian acknowledged that “the military effort that would normally cost millions and millions of dollars to run we get at the expense of (those whose) territory we take--shells, tanks, they’re all trophies.”

Civilian life too benefits from the talan, or booty.

“We took grain and gas--otherwise it was impossible to survive,” said Maxim Hovannisian, the Karabakh government press chief.

One Yerevan official said he had visited a Stepanakert counterpart in a virtually empty office; when he returned a day or two later, the office was furnished--” Talan, “ the Stepanakert official explained.

Booty in the form of building materials has also gone to repair most of the Stepanakert buildings ravaged by Azerbaijani shelling.

“In Stepanakert, unlike in Yerevan, construction is under way,” Karabakh Foreign Ministry functionary Yuri Zakharyan said.

The Armenian successes have helped bring down two Azerbaijani leaders and made the current one, Aliyev, determined to gain a military victory. Since December, Azerbaijan has repeatedly attacked Karabakh on several fronts at once, throwing young conscripts at the Armenian forces in assaults that have reportedly cost 10,000 Azerbaijani lives.

Armenian losses are in the hundreds--painful blows for their small fighting force.

Since December, the war appears to have evolved into a stalemate, the Western military expert said. In recent days, Azerbaijani planes have repeatedly bombed Stepanakert. The Armenians, no longer blocked by winter snow, have advanced farther into Azerbaijani territory in the north. There is no impending hiatus in the fighting.

“Azerbaijan has had two or three big defeats,” said Murad Petrossian, the top political officer of the Karabakh army. “But it will take two or three more such defeats until they are really convinced that Karabakh is too tough a nut for them to crack. For now, they can’t believe it; it’s like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.”

For the Karabakh Armenians, the prospect of defeat, no matter how logical it may seem given their inferior size, is not even imaginable--at least, not aloud.

In Stepanakert’s military hospital, 17-year-old Vagram Beglarian said he is just waiting patiently until his two leg wounds heal so he can return to the front. He has served only as a volunteer so far--he will not get his real draft training until he is 18.

“My spirit is raised by a desire for revenge,” he said, his big dark eyes contrasting with his nest of white sheets. “Of course, victory is on our side. But when it will be, God knows.”

No one thinks it will be soon, it seems. Stepanakert may have always been a sleepy town, a regional center of about 50,000, but now it is a tired town as well--tired of air raids and rations, but seeing no alternative.

Outside Beglarian’s hospital window, five nurse-trainees taking a break in the sunlit courtyard said they have gotten used to the wounds they treat, used to the sirens, used to the scarcity of boys their age.

No matter how difficult wartime life gets, however, Karabakh Armenians know they cannot allow themselves the luxury of collapse, Pogosian said.

“He who gets tired will lose,” he said. “Even if we feel fatigue, by God, we don’t have a right to be tired or even show this fatigue.”

Petrossian of the army’s political department said he is working on adapting the thoughts of Karekin Nezhde, an Armenian hero who battled the Bolsheviks, as the basis for a new ideology for Karabakh fighters and perhaps the populace at large. Petrossian particularly likes ideas culled from the philosophy of ancient Sparta.

“You have to keep your belt tightened and forget all about human happiness for now,” he said.

Petrossian takes this disciplined approach very seriously. When a Yerevan-based photographer complained recently that Petrossian had reneged on a promise to take him to the front from Stepanakert, Petrossian shouted over the phone that if he didn’t stop complaining he would be thrown into the slammer for 15 days.

No one doubted that Petrossian could do it if he chose. Life in Stepanakert is strangely simple: The army has all the real power, and everything is subordinated to it, from the sewing factories that turn out camouflage uniforms to the border police who require special permission to let draft-age men--and nearly everybody else--leave Karabakh.

Karabakh’s leader, Robert Kocharian, a 39-year-old former Communist official, keeps an extremely low profile, but he appears to be the mastermind behind the enclave’s wartime order.

About two years ago, after a set of military defeats, he came up with the current scheme of things--the economy and the military functioning as one mechanism--and this is how it seems it will stay.

The war will continue, said one Karabakh Armenian after another, until Azerbaijan accepts that force is not the way to solve the Karabakh problem.

The Armenians say they will settle for nothing less than independence. They may someday agree to be linked with Yerevan, they say, but the central issue now is freedom from Azerbaijani rule.

“The Karabakh population won’t end up under Azerbaijani control--no one will agree to it,” said Leonard Petrossian, head of the committee that oversees aid from Armenia proper to Karabakh.

Azerbaijan continues to see Karabakh as its own province. Russia and the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe have begun to pool their efforts aimed at negotiating a settlement, but there appears to be no breakthrough on the horizon.

The Karabakh Armenians say they want a cease-fire and some kind of international military personnel to form a buffer zone between their troops and the Azerbaijanis. So far, the two sides have not even been able to form a truce that could hold. More than half a dozen have failed.

“We’re ready to stop the war now,” said Arutunyan, the Armenian battalion commander. “But if it goes on for decades, well, we’ll just have to order some more kids from our wives.”

BACKGROUND

Nagorno-Karabakh is a breakaway region of 1,694 square miles in southwestern Azerbaijan, populated mainly by Armenians. The area was the home of leading Armenian feudal families and historically a haven for the Armenian people during onslaughts by the Turkish and Persian empires. In the early 19th Century, the region became part of the Russian Empire. Through its history, Nagorno-Karabakh’s attempts to join Armenia have failed. In 1921, the Communists attached Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan; in 1923, it was declared an autonomous region within Azerbaijan. Hostilities broke out in early 1988 after a regional governing council requested the territory’s unification with Armenia.