Azerbaijanis Try to Salvage Their Image

Black flags of mourning flutter outside the Azerbaijani mission here, and weary, unshaven officials huddle over their telephones around the clock inside, caught up in what they describe as a virtual war to save the image of the Azerbaijani people.

They cannot do much, they say, about their dead countrymen being buried miles to the south in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital--people killed when Soviet troops shot their way into the city early last Saturday.

But on the telephones, they are organizing money and medical supplies to send to people living under the Kremlin’s state of emergency.

Even more important, they say, they are trying to tell the world the Azerbaijani point of view, which they feel has been lost amid the reports of violence against Armenians earlier in the month.

Since the latest round of anti-Armenian violence erupted Jan. 13 in Baku and Soviet troops swept into the city a week later, foreign journalists have been barred from entering Azerbaijan. They have had to rely on word of mouth, including wild rumors.

According to official figures, more than 170 Armenians and Azerbaijanis were killed.

The people at the Azerbaijani mission in Moscow said they think the picture has been painted with strokes too broad, coloring all Azerbaijanis--predominantly Shiite Muslims--as bloodthirsty criminals and showing their nationalism as ethnic bias rather than pride.

“What happened to the Armenians in Baku is horrible,” Zaur P. Rustam-Zade, the deputy head of mission, told a reporter, “and those responsible should be found and punished. Many Azerbaijanis helped their Armenian neighbors, and the whole nation should not be damned.”

Zakhrab Shamkhalov, chief of the Moscow branch of the nationalist Azerbaijani Popular Front, noted: “We’ve called for organizing a commission to investigate and find out who is responsible. But nothing justifies the violence the Soviet army carried out against Baku and its innocent citizens.”

So far, 139 Azerbaijanis have been arrested and charged with attacking Armenians, hurling some from balconies and burning others alive. More than 13,000 Armenians were evacuated from Baku in mid-January, according to official figures.

It is the Azerbaijani refugees who left Armenia in February, 1988, after the first wave of violence over the Azerbaijani-controlled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, who are thought to bear the primary blame for this month’s outbreak of violence against Armenians.

After 32 Armenians were killed in 1988 in a clash over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, about 150,000 Azerbaijanis living in Armenia, fearful of retribution, moved to Azerbaijan.

Armenia and Azerbaijan both stake a historical claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous region within Azerbaijan. And the territorial dispute combined with religious differences--Armenians are mostly Christian--has led to the bloodiest of the many ethnic conflicts among the more than 100 nationalities of the Soviet Union.

“The republic’s government never did enough for those Azerbaijani refugees,” Rustam-Zade said. “About 90,000 of them live in Baku in terrible conditions, many in huts and without good jobs. They are bitter and, without doubt, some are so angry they are ready to commit crimes.”

Rustam-Zade, whose mother and brother live in Baku, said some stories told by fleeing Armenians have made it appear that the 1.8 million people living in Baku are all animals.

“That’s causing trouble for everyone,” he said. “The latest rumor, spread by the Soviet military commander of Baku, is that Russian people are not safe there. So we are getting dozens of telephone calls from Moscow and Leningrad, with Russians threatening the safety of Azerbaijanis in those cities.”

About 45,000 Azerbaijanis live in Leningrad and about 40,000 in Moscow. Rustam-Zade said his people have been told that “if anything happens to a single Russian in Azerbaijan,” Azerbaijanis living in Moscow and Leningrad will be punished.

The fear among Russians in Baku for their personal safety has given rise to fresh panic among that city’s Azerbaijanis, who are already emotionally exhausted by events of the last two weeks, Rustam-Zade said.

“They think if the Russians are afraid to stay, maybe it is because the troops are going to launch another bloody attack,” he said.

Nationalism, long a factor in Azerbaijan, has burst into the open only in the last couple of years, accompanied by a resurgence of religious passion.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Azerbaijan was an independent republic until 1920, when Baku, riven by political dissension, fell without a shot to Soviet troops.

The Soviet Union’s first step was to try to discourage or repress outright the practice of Islam, and it had some success.

As the overt practice of Islam withered away in the 1930s, nationalist problems declined as well. But there is evidence that many people, including young people, have continued to quietly practice Islam.

All this created a situation that remained quietly unstable for years, coming to the fore only with Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rise to power in Moscow. Gorbachev, in calling for greater tolerance, inadvertently helped bring on the growth of Islamic power in Azerbaijan--and the growth of nationalism.

Also during this time, Islamic fundamentalism was receiving a boost under the leadership of radical Shiite Muslim leaders in Iran.

Azerbaijani leaders here say it is too late to try to crush the nationalism, that it would only backfire.

“The Soviet army made a mistake,” Shamkhalov said. “The Azerbaijani people will no longer be forced into submission.”