Azerbaijan Refugees Raise Fists at Government : Ethnic war: Passions run high over defeat by Armenia in battle for Nagorno-Karabakh.

An angry crowd of war refugees hammered on the barred wooden doors of the presidential palace here, hurling abuse about Azerbaijan’s crushing defeat by Armenia in the fight for Nagorno-Karabakh.

“There is nobody helping us in Baku. We need houses. Why have you abandoned us?” shouted 34-year-old Rafile Aslanova, a woman who fled on foot last month from Shusha, the last Azerbaijani town to fall to the advancing Armenian forces.

Passions run high among those who have lost their homes; they care little who is really to blame for the defeat in the remote mountain enclave where 150,000 Armenians used to live side by side with 30,000 Azerbaijanis.

While the Armenians are victorious for now, both sides are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in the long conflict over the enclave, which belonged to Armenia until 1923, when Kremlin leaders gave it to Azerbaijan.

The fighting started in February, 1988, after Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and in the Armenian capital of Yerevan began holding mass demonstrations to demand that the territory be returned to Armenia.

Later that month, Azerbaijani youths went on a rampage in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait, and 32 Armenians were killed. After that, frequent bloody clashes eventually escalated to all-out warfare. During the conflict, at least 1,500 people died as a result of the violence in Nagorno-Karabakh, in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and in other places in the two former Soviet republics.

Most of the 500,000 Armenians who used to live in Azerbaijan and the 200,000 Azerbaijanis who once lived in Armenia have fled their homes to escape the bloodshed.

Here in the Azerbaijani capital, diplomats, officials and soldiers say that years of shortsighted and corrupt leadership are to blame for the final collapse of the Azerbaijani forces. And the former Communist regime of this Caucasus republic has already paid the price.

The nationalist opposition, the Popular Front, ousted President Ayaz Mutalibov in March and easily reversed his attempted return to power in a 24-hour coup in mid-May. Popular Front leader Abulfez Elchibey is expected to seal the front’s victory by winning presidential elections today.

“We never had enough guns or ammunition,” said a woman sergeant who was one of the last Azerbaijani troops out of Shusha. “Our battalion received orders to withdraw two hours before the last Armenian attack. We were sold out, betrayed.”

Fighting has now subsided to local shootouts, and Armenia’s takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh could become a long-running international conundrum like that which followed Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus.

But the Azerbaijani defeat has changed the image of Armenia as a Christian David battling a Muslim Goliath. Azerbaijan’s population of 7 million may be twice as big, but in terms of military capacity, Azerbaijani officials and foreign diplomats say the four-year conflict had increasingly become no contest.

“(Azerbaijan) never created a regular army. They set up armed gangs and didn’t even want the gang leaders to know each other,” said the new Azerbaijani foreign minister, Tofig Gassimov, a theoretical physicist speaking in the elegant 19th-Century Baku townhouse that now serves as the Foreign Ministry.

Diplomats said Azerbaijan’s former Communist rulers were slow to respond to Armenia’s initial moves to take over Nagorno-Karabakh, waiting for a solution as usual from Moscow. By the time they realized that Russia was not going to act, they had lost military initiative and public confidence.

Mutalibov vowed to set up commando units and an independent Azerbaijani army. In reality, his main efforts seemed to have been to frustrate, divide and even disarm the growing power of military units loyal to the Popular Front.

Since November, Azerbaijani forces have been in constant retreat, culminating in the loss of not only all of Nagorno-Karabakh, but also of the Azerbaijani town of Lachin, which gives Armenia a corridor to the disputed territory.

“I have been trying to find good points about the Azerbaijani army. But until now, I couldn’t find any,” said one Moscow-based Western specialist who said not even Azerbaijani leaders knew how many fighters they really had.

Some of the 100- to 500-member battalions, he said, were only 10% armed. Troops are badly trained. There was virtually no communication between units and little communication with the high command. There was never full mobilization, and would-be volunteers were frustrated by Baku bureaucrats.

“The Armenians had not only the benefit of guerrillas trained in Lebanon, but also the fact that being Christian, their officers rose much higher in the old Soviet army. The Soviets never trusted the Azerbaijanis, who spent most of their military years in construction battalions,” the Moscow-based specialist said.

Now that the Popular Front is in power and the distribution of the old Soviet weaponry should soon begin, the Front apparently will try to forge a national army out of troops loyal to rival commanders.

Foreign Minister Gassimov said that Azerbaijan would never be prepared to let Nagorno-Karabakh go, even if this meant a long diplomatic struggle, a defense alliance and an army training agreement with Turkey, and even war.