Lebanon in the Soviet Caucasus?

A Red Army general bluntly describes the ethnic conflict now raging in Azerbaijan as civil war. The Soviet press, which not long ago avoided reporting news even of common crimes or aircraft accidents, relates in gory detail the random murders, arson and mutilations carried out by Azerbaijanis and Armenians and pronounces events to be “out of control.” The government has responded by declaring a state of emergency in parts of Azerbaijan and sending in thousands of troops, though with what effect is still to be seen. Muslim Azerbaijani and Christian Armenian gangs appear to be remarkably, if mysteriously, well-armed. Their conflict, moreover, is fed by passions that even the threat of superior firepower is unlikely to restrain.

Many nightmares haunt the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. Among the worst of these, in an empire peopled by more than 100 disparate and often discordant ethnic groups, is the ever-present danger of communal strife and nationalistic self-assertion. The confrontation between Azerbaijanis and Armenians reflects animosities that are ancient and seemingly uncompromisable, and it is as pointless to search for immediate causes for the newest outbreak of violence between them as it is to look for immediate solutions. For most of its history the Soviet state was able to suppress intercommunal tensions by the use or threat of brute force or mass deportations. A more civilized regime now shuns these methods, even as it searches desperately for effective alternative means of control.

The long history of the Caucasus is spattered by repeated episodes of turbulence and bloodshed. The great concern now is that the region could be approaching a process of Lebanonization, of bloody intercommunal warfare where each side will fight with a blind fanaticism because each feels that its very survival may be at stake. It is a frightening possibility. It is also, all too clearly, a wholly realistic one.