Armenians call for U.N. troops

Press, 11 September 1989, Page 11

Armenians call for U.N. troops

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Soviet Armenians have urged the United Nations to consider sending troops to strife-torn NagornoKarabakh, saying the Kremlin has failed to protect them from Azerbaijanis bent on their destruction.

A council of the Armenian majority in Na-

gorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, appealed for United Nations help saying they feared deportation and even extermination by the Azeris. “For long months now, this tiny Christian region

... has been under the harshest of blockades; regular killings and acts of violence are being perpetrated against it and

now there is talk of carrying out*a deportation of the native population,” the appeal sajd. An Armenian journalist in Yerevan said he did not know whether any reply had been received from the United Nations. The council said Moscow had failed to guarantee the region’s security in spite of the presence of more than 4000 Soviet

Interior Ministry troops and a Kremlin commission that has been running Nagorno-Karabakh since January.

A Soviet television report has spoken of serious incidents in the region around Nagorno-Kara-bakh.

It said Azerbaijani assailants had shot at and stoned buses carrying Armenians to the enclave

and that Armenians had tried to blow up bridges on the railway line to Azerbaijan. The violence started 18 months ago when the three-quarters Armenian majority in Nagorno-Kar-abakh requested union with Armenia. Since then more than 100 people have been killed in clashes in Armenia and neighbouring Azerbaijan.