Soviets Open Fire to Break Blockade of Baku’s Port

MOSCOW —  Soviet troops, afraid that Azerbaijani militants would soon begin attacking Russian families in Baku, used artillery, tank and naval gunfire Wednesday evening to break a blockade of Baku’s port so that ships carrying refugees, many of them Russians, can leave.

A number of ships used by Azerbaijani militants to blockade the port for the past three days were sunk, according to reports from Baku, while others were observed on fire in Baku Bay. Some of the sunken vessels were believed to be oil tankers whose crews had declared their solidarity with the Azerbaijani nationalists.

The troops opened fire, according to a Soviet television correspondent reporting from Baku, after members of the Azerbaijani militia launched an attack on the port’s main terminal, where thousands of Armenian and Russian families had gathered to await evacuation across the Caspian Sea.

Rumors had swept Baku for two days that Azerbaijani militants would begin attacking Russians in the city Wednesday if the troops were not withdrawn, and wives and children of army officers already had been wounded or killed in previous fighting.

“The firing went on for 40 minutes, and at the end the ships had either been sunk or pulled out to sea,” Yusif Samed-Ogly, an Azerbaijani writer and a member of the nationalist Azerbaijan Popular Front, told Reuters news agency by telephone from Baku.

“Before the attack, the merchant ships were issuing long whistles every hour; now there is silence from there,” Samed-Ogly added. “It was real combat.”

The official news agency Tass in a late report said simply, “The blockade of Baku Bay has been lifted.”

In the city, troops early Wednesday raided the offices and homes of leaders of the Azerbaijan Popular Front and its National Defense Council, detaining 43 of their members under the state of emergency and seizing the groups’ files and equipment. The council was outlawed under the emergency regulations Wednesday. Another 110 people were reported detained later in the day.

But Basur Aleskerov, a member of the movement’s leadership council, declared that it would fight on. “The Popular Front continues to act and to lead the people,” he said by telephone from Baku.

A general strike called by the front remained in effect for the third day. No factories or offices are working, and most of the oil industry there has shut down despite an order by the military commander to return to work. Only a few shops selling food and daily necessities are open.

The Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party went into session late Wednesday, well after curfew to avoid demonstrations outside party headquarters, to review the situation in the republic and to elect a new leadership to replace the officials who fled to Moscow last weekend after losing control of the situation there.

Action Uncertain

However, what concrete action the party can now take to re-establish its own political legitimacy in the eyes of the people and then to restore order was quite uncertain, because power in Baku now rests with those who command the guns.

Scores of small party meetings have been held in Baku in recent days, according to Soviet journalists in the city, and there have been mass resignations at most. About a third of Azerbaijan’s 380,000 party members are believed to have quit in the past 10 days.

What began earlier this month as a wave of anti-Armenian violence--a pogrom, as Soviet officials have described it--and then threatened to turn into a conflict among rival militias is now the very sort of anti-Soviet insurrection that Moscow feared.

Azerbaijani militants, stepping up their resistance to the Soviet army’s occupation of Baku, intensified their attacks on troops patrolling the streets, borrowing the techniques used by urban guerrillas in Northern Ireland, Latin America, South Africa and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Luring armored vehicles onto side streets, according to the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia, the militants then ambushed them with Molotov cocktails. Using motorcycles, others struck at soldiers on foot patrol in hit-and-run attacks.

Skirmishes continued around a military barracks in the city where about 400 well-armed and -supplied soldiers and military cadets, most of them Azerbaijanis, have refused to surrender to the Soviet troops.

With the clashes in the port, the fighting was the heaviest since the Soviet army entered Baku last weekend to restore order after a week of anti-Armenian violence turned into a virtual seizure of power by militant nationalists.

The violence spread to the neighboring Soviet republic of Georgia, where the last railway line into Armenia was cut by Azerbaijanis in the Marneuli district. A train from the Russian city of Rostov headed for Yerevan, the Armenian capital, was derailed, according to Tass, and several passengers were injured.

Meanwhile, negotiations broke down between the Azerbaijan Popular Front and the Armenian All-National Movement on terms for a disengagement of their militia forces along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and around the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The military and political developments, taken together, left little hope for an easy or early restoration of order in the two southern Soviet republics.

The official death toll is now 99 since the army moved into Baku, in addition to the 72 people killed there in the week of anti-Armenian violence.

But officials of the Popular Front, quoting information they say they obtained from the republic’s health officials and the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence organization, assert that between 300 and 460 people have been killed there this week.

Rumors that thousands of Azerbaijanis have been killed by the army have swept Baku and helped galvanize the population there in the nationalist cause. More rumors that the army has hidden those bodies in its barracks, in government offices or aboard ships in the harbor have added to the tension.

This was one of the justifications for the blockade of the harbor--Azerbaijanis wanted to inspect outbound ships to make certain they were not carrying away the “martyrs” of the clashes with the army.

“We will burn together with the fleet if our conditions are not accepted,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda had quoted one of the captains as saying.

‘Horrible Rumor’

On Wednesday, Izvestia described Baku as “shaking with the horrible rumor that the city’s remaining Russian residents will have to answer” for the military intervention there and that Azerbaijanis who do not support the Popular Front will also be attacked.

Azerbaijani militants have begun to attack the apartments of Russians, the trade union newspaper Trud reported, and Azerbaijani shops are refusing to sell bread to Russians. Baku, the Soviet Union’s fourth-largest city, has about 100,000 Russians in its population of 1.8 million.

After the initial attacks on military housing and the deaths of two army wives, more than 16,000 military dependents have been evacuated from Baku, and Tass reported that more are being taken out by air and sea.

At rallies in two other Azerbaijani cities, Gyandzha and Geokchai, speakers called for the deportation of the Armenians remaining in their districts and for the lifting of the curfew and the departure of Soviet troops there, according to Tass.

In Armenia, nationalist militias continued to raid police and military arsenals, stealing weapons. On Wednesday they stole two cannons and two anti-aircraft guns along with other weapons from the military museum in Yerevan.

Soviet authorities did manage, however, to re-establish control along the entire length of the Soviet-Iranian border in Azerbaijan, according to Tass. Large numbers of people had been moving back and forth between Azerbaijan and Iran, and Moscow was suspicious that not all were Soviet citizens and that many have been found to be bringing in weapons.