Pullouts Spark Controversy in Karabakh, Moldova
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
MOSCOW, March 3 – Russian troops found themselves the target of rising ethnic violence in outlying regions of the former Soviet Union today, undermining the new Russian leadership’s attempts to secure a peaceful retreat from empire.
The withdrawal of a regiment of former Soviet troops from the embattled southern enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh was temporarily halted after the unit was attacked by Armenian militants. The Defense Ministry in Moscow said one soldier was killed in the incident, which followed a surge in fighting between Christian Armenian and Muslim Azerbaijan. The Armenians reported the loss of a helicopter carrying about 30 people.
In the western republic of Moldova, armed clashes were reported for a second say after Moldovan activists seized weapons from a former Soviet army garrison. Bands of Russian Cossacks and Russian militiamen from a breakaway region of Moldova known as the Dniester republic came to the aid of the besieged army unit, and at least two people were killed during the ensuing battles, according to Russian news agency reports.
Soviet troops stationed in the Baltic republic of Lithuania, meanwhile, began a long-heralded pullout half a century after the region was annexed by Moscow in a wartime deal with Nazi Germany. But Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis complained that the Russian government was dragging its feet on the withdrawal, which he depicted as purely symbolic.
Taken together, today’s developments were a dramatic illustration of the problems facing Russian President Boris Yeltsin as he attempts to disengage his vast nation from its centuries-long quest for military control of the Eurasian landmass. The latest attacks on predominantly Russian military units are bound to fuel the dissatisfaction of former Soviet officers already angry over the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
The rise in ethnic tensions in outlying republics also threatens the cohesion of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States. Two of its members, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are effectively at war. Moldova is wracked by civil strife between its ethnic Romanian majority and its Russian-speaking minority. The two most populous republics, Russian and Ukraine, are arguing over economic and military issues.
The sense that Russia is once again retreating from exposed positions was underlined today when it became known that Gen. Boris Gromov, the last commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, had been dispatched to Karabakh to supervise the withdrawal of the 366th Motorized Infantry Regiment. The regiment is stationed in Stepanakert, capital of the predominantly Armenian-inhabited Karabakh enclave, which is surrounded by Azerbaijani territory.
Armenian leaders have condemned the decision to withdraw the regiment, saying it could trigger an all-out attack on Karabakh by a 20,000-strong Azerbaijani army. In an apparent attempt to forestall such an operation, Armenian militiamen went on the offensive last week, attacking the Azerbaijani-populated Karabakh village of Khojaly and killing dozens, if not hundreds, of residents.
Videotape obtained by Western television networks showed more than three dozen bodies, including children, scattered on a hillside near Khojaly. Azerbaijanis say at least 1,000 people were killed, but Armenians insist that such figures are grossly exaggerated.
Armenian authorities reported tonight that an Mi-26 helicopter evacuating women and children from Stepanakert was shot down over Azerbaijani territory. Russian television said there were no survivors. The Azerbaijani news agency reported that Armenia is making 10 to 15 daily helicopter flights into Stepanakert to keep the city supplied with food and ammunition.
In Moldova, fighting continued Monday and Tuesday around the headquarters of a civilian defense regiment of the former Soviet army outside the town of Dubossary. According to the Tass-Rita news agency, Moldovan militiamen broke into the barracks Monday and seized 70 automatic rifles, about 2,000 rounds of ammunition and various hand weapons.
Tass said a bus evacuating servicemen’s families from the military base came under fire early this morning. Moldovan activists have accused the former Soviet army of siding with Russian-speaking secessionists who have declared their own “Soviet republic” on the eastern bank of the Dniester River.
Today’s initial pullout from Lithuania involved 100 members of an air defense division stationed near the capital, Vilnius, who left in a convoy of 36 mobile missile launchers. About 80,000 other former Soviet troops, including a crack paratroop division, are still stationed in the Baltic republic. Many say the will refuse to leave until their families are provided with proper accommodations in Russia, where there is a chronic housing shortage.
Former Soviet Communist legislators, meanwhile, announced that they will attempt to reconvene the full Soviet parliament in Moscow on March 17 in a calculated challenge to Yeltsin’s authority. The 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies was effectively liquidated last December following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A member of the organizing committee, former Soviet prime minister Nikolai Ryzkhov, told journalists that the ex-Soviet republics cannot survive as independent states without “a new center to balance their interests.” He depicted the 11-nation Commonwealth as “a stillborn baby” whose decisions are not binding on anyone.
Publication date 04/03/1992
Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform
