The Killing Zone

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Most mysterious was the appearance of orange helicopters without identification marks that suddenly materialized from the hills of the Shaumyan and Khanlar regions outside Nagorno-Karabakh and strafed Azerbaijani villages with gunfire and even rockets. The government daily Izvestia ominously reported that there was evidence of preparations to smuggle a large batch of weapons and ammunition across the border from Iran.

Through it all, Gorbachev gamely struggled to maintain an appearance of normality. Just back from his vexing three-day visit to Lithuania, where he failed to persuade nationalists to curb their secessionist demands, he aimed to project the air of a competent crisis manager. He received former Japanese Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe and met with U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who encountered protesters in Moscow holding up signs that read GORBACHEV, HISTORY WILL NOT FORGIVE YOU FOR THE BLOODSHED IN AZERBAIJAN.

At a Kremlin conference on Friday, Gorbachev described the combatants as "a handful of militants, irresponsible adventurers and shadow economy dealers" and cast the conflict partly as an effort to undermine his policies. "Perestroika is like a thorn in their flesh," he said. "They are unable to launch a frontal attack on it, so they cling to tension on an ethnic basis."

The most recent round of fighting began in February 1988, when ethnic hatreds erupted in the port town of Sumgait, north of Baku, resulting in an official death count of 32, most of them Armenians. Over the next two years, more than 220,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan. Those who remained behind in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh have lived under a virtual state of siege, relying on supplies airlifted from Armenia. Last month the Supreme Soviet voted to return administrative control over the region to the Azerbaijanis. Enraged, the Armenian parliament voted two weeks ago to include Nagorno-Karabakh in its next five-year economic plan, a move that may have prompted Azerbaijanis to seize government buildings in the Caspian Sea port of Lenkoran.

Although most of the 220,000 Armenians living in Baku fled after the 1988 pogrom in Sumgait, up to 20,000 Armenians still remained. But even as their numbers shrank, Azerbaijani refugees flooded the city. Most of them were unemployed farmers and goatherds who claimed they had been chased from Armenia. These 130,000 new Azerbaijani settlers transformed the once cosmopolitan capital into a city ringed with slums and squatter districts. Their simmering rage against the Armenians triggered the riots that led to last week's battles.

Moscow gave the impression that it had been caught unawares, but it might be more accurate to say that officials turned a blind eye. Last August, for instance, the Central Committee responded to peaceful protests in the Baltics with stern warnings. But the simultaneous railroad blockade of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis met with official silence. Armenian activists in Moscow claim that in the weeks leading up to the crisis, they bombarded Gorbachev, the KGB and the Interior Ministry with telegrams and letters warning of an imminent war.