Armenia

By PAUL HOFHEINZ YEREVAN

Almost every day for five weeks, a group of Armenians had huddled in the winter chill in front of Moscow's six-story Supreme Court building, slapping their arms against the sides of their brown fur coats to keep warm. Their breath burst forth in clouds of pale steam as they talked quietly to one another, discussing the fate of those on trial.

Inside, in a crowded courtroom, three young Azerbaijani defendants sat motionless as they listened to witnesses describe a violent clash between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azerbaijanis that left 32 dead and 400 wounded in the Azerbaijani port city of Sumgait last February. Struggling to hold back tears, an aging Armenian woman described how she had watched an Azerbaijani mob burn a man to death in his automobile. A Russian doctor described the head < wounds he had found on the corpse of a man beaten to death with lead pipes.

Last week the ordeal came to an end as a three-member panel of justices sentenced Akhmet Akhmetov, 24, to death for his part in what has been described as the worst ethnic clash in Soviet history. Akhmetov, the oldest of the three men on trial, was charged with "organizing and participating in pogroms, murder and arson." The cases of his co-defendants were sent back for further investigation. "I suppose I'm pleased," said an Armenian who had come to the courtroom every day since the proceedings began on Oct. 18. "But we really wanted to get at his leaders. He didn't act alone, after all."

Some 1,200 miles to the southeast, in the Armenian Republic, the upheaval set in motion by the Sumgait riots was still under way, though in muffled fashion. Since February, Armenians have been in near open revolt over Moscow's refusal to transfer to Armenian control the mountain enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh (pop. about 160,000), where an Armenian majority has lived under Azerbaijani rule for nearly 70 years. Demonstrations first erupted when news began trickling back into Yerevan, the Armenian capital, that Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh were being beaten, raped and killed by Azerbaijanis, people who are ethnically related to Turks.

Since then the Armenian Republic has been paralyzed three times by widespread work stoppages protesting the Kremlin's refusal to countenance a border change despite the violence committed against Armenians next door. Twice the Soviet government has had to dispatch troops to Yerevan to quell disturbances. Last July a boy was killed by a plastic bullet and 36 people were wounded during a confrontation with soldiers at Yerevan's Zvartnots Airport.

Despite the crackdown, thousands of Armenians still gather nearly every Friday in Theater Square, a small plaza tucked behind Yerevan's neoclassical opera house. Around 7 p.m., old women, their heads wrapped in shawls, begin to perch on the steps leading to the theater. Bands of youths, sometimes unruly, wave the orange-red-and-blue Armenian flag, which last flew over the region when it was a free republic in 1920. Later, at about 7:30, a lone bugler approaches a microphone and plays a melancholy tune. When the last note dies, the crowd breaks into a chant: "Artsakh! Artsakh!" -- the historic Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh.

Trapped between the leadership in Moscow and a broad-based popular movement at home, the Armenian Communist Party has tried to equivocate. In June its newly elected first secretary, Soren Arutyunyan, along with the Armenian Supreme Soviet, defied Moscow's wishes by petitioning the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. to reopen the Nagorno-Karabakh question. (The enclave was assigned to Azerbaijan by Joseph Stalin in 1923.) But Arutyunyan also declared that the Yerevan demonstrators were "not supported by the broad masses." In reply, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev chided an Armenian delegation that had come to the Kremlin to plead the cause. Gorbachev described Armenian demonstrators as "opponents of perestroika" who "wanted to poison the people's consciousness with nationalist intoxication."

In Yerevan the movement to join Armenia has spawned its own leaders. Foremost among them is the shadowy Karabakh Committee, which loosely coordinates the Theater Square demonstrations. The committee, officially disbanded in March, still has eleven active members, who meet regularly despite the threat of prison sentences should the government decide to act. "We lead totally open lives," says Levon Ter-Petrossian, 43, a linguist and committee member. "If they arrested us, they'd have an insurrection on their hands." The Karabakh movement has recently begun to wage a fresh campaign for pleading its case in Moscow. In October nationalist leader Khachik Stamboltsyan abandoned a 21-day-old hunger strike to exploit Gorbachev's democratization campaign and run for the regional parliament against the republic's sitting minister of the interior. He polled nearly three times as many votes as his opponents, but was disqualified on a technicality.

After that happened, such a roar went up at the weekly demonstrations in Theater Square that authorities were forced to restage the election. This time Stamboltsyan won with an astonishing 98% of the votes. This week he is scheduled to take his seat as the first acknowledged radical in the Armenian supreme soviet.

Unlike some citizens in the Baltic republics, Armenians do not seriously contemplate secession from the Soviet Union. "Look at us, surrounded by Turkey and Iran," says an Armenian party official. "Secession would be the stupidest thing we could do. We'd be swallowed up immediately." His comments are backed by history: for several centuries, Armenians and Turks fought for control of the Lesser Caucasus mountain range, which borders Asia Minor. During that struggle, Armenians often turned to their Russian neighbors for + help. In the 19th century, Russians and Armenians built a string of fortress cities along what is now the Soviet-Turkish border.

But, above all, Armenians remember the massacre that began in 1915 in which more than 1 million Armenians died at the hands of Turkish mobs. A small memorial commemorating the event is located in a corner of Theater Square. One photograph taped to the wall depicts three Turkish army officers posing with a pile of severed Armenian heads, stacked up like bowling balls.

For all their long-standing ties with Moscow, the Armenians have a detailed list of complaints against the Soviet state. Aside from the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, a special sore point has been bureaucratic insensitivity to the environment, as in the Baltic states. Ever since the Soviet Union under Stalin began to industrialize in the 1920s, Moscow has built the republic into a leading chemical-production center. One result is chronic air pollution. "The air is so bad, you can no longer see Mount Ararat," complains a Yerevan resident, referring to the snow-peaked 16,945-ft. mountain some 30 miles away across the Turkish border.

Next month the movement to return Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenian control will attempt to broaden its character by transforming itself into a Baltic-style Armenian All-National Movement. Like similar organizations in Estonia and Lithuania, the group will officially be committed to supporting perestroika, though its agenda may not be identical to Moscow's. So far, the group's organizers have not announced a specific program, but they are expected to press for issues such as more Armenian-language instruction in schools, greater economic independence for the region, and the right to establish embassies in other Soviet republics with cities that have sizable Armenian populations.

As Armenian organizations gain sophistication, popular resentment is growing at Moscow's apparent disdain for nationalist grievances. While accounts of Stalin's crimes have been splashed across the pages of leading Soviet newspapers, the Armenian crisis has virtually been ignored. Pravda has given only vague accounts of the Yerevan demonstrations; when articles have appeared, correspondents have condemned the protests as the work of "corrupt elements" and "extremists." Says Ter-Petrossian: "What we are doing is what Gorbachev says he wants: people participating in government decisions." Adds another Armenian who regularly attends the Theater Square meetings: "He should be proud of us. We've shown that there's still blood in our veins." At the moment, no one is certain whether more of that blood will spill on the streets of Yerevan.