FULLERTON : Doctor Can Testify to Hatred in Baku

When retired Fullerton pathologist Thomas Jones visited Baku in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan last summer, he saw firsthand the ethnic tension and violence that has led to the deaths of about 150 Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Jones, 72, and his wife, Elizabeth, had just left their hotel on Lenin Square when they met two university students on the sidewalk. The students were friendly and struck up a conversation in English.

But the tone changed when one of them looked at the T-shirt Jones was wearing, which showed a map of California and its large cities.

“He looked at Los Angeles, took his finger and pushed it into the area (of Los Angeles) and he said, ‘Armenians! Kill!”’ said Jones, who was visiting the Soviet Union for the first time on a tour conducted by a Cal State Fullerton history professor.

The students knew Los Angeles was home to thousands of Armenians, he said. One of them pulled a vine from a nearby plant, formed it into a circle apparently to represent the neighboring republic of Armenia, and stomped up and down on it.

“They were very vehement when they said ‘kill, kill, kill,’ ” Jones said. “I never felt such an impact of passion and emotion, and I began to see the depth of feelings,” he said. “And now that I’m back, I realize how deadly serious they were.”

The depth of hatred between Armenians and Azerbaijanis will make that area of the Soviet Union the toughest for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to solve, said Robert S. Feldman, director of the Russian and East European Area Studies program at Cal State Fullerton.

Feldman led the summer tour taken by Jones through the southern Soviet republics and returned in December from visits to Moscow and Leningrad.

“It’s almost an insoluble problem,” said Feldman, a Placentia resident who has traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and speaks fluent Russian. On his visit last summer to the southern republics, he said, he could see “the hatred lying just below the surface.”

Ethnic violence has a long history between the Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Feldman said. Armenians he talked with in Baku still bring up the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Turks, he said. “People there are unwilling to forget,” he said.

After Russian soldiers shot at and killed Azerbaijanis in Baku, the Azerbaijani ethnic hatred also turned into anti-Soviet hatred, Feldman said.

Groups of Azerbaijanis are now calling for their republic to leave the Soviet Union.

Glasnost brought the ethnic tensions to the surface, Feldman said, warning that “now it’s an avalanche.”