A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : CHAPTER 2: THE FIGHTING : Ethnic Armies Begin to Mobilize

The initial orgy of violence in Baku quickly spread throughout both Azerbaijan and Armenia. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported new atrocities in the Azerbaijani capital--including two Armenian men being burned to death just 20 yards from a police station--and the Soviet government declared the first of many states of emergency in the region.

The declaration had little effect on rabid combatants bent on blood feud. Even as the state of emergency was being announced, agitated bands of Azerbaijani and Armenian men were breaking into police offices, military barracks and warehouses, searching for and seizing an impressive cache of weapons for their budding ethnic warfare.

Irregular militias in both Armenia and Azerbaijan were swiftly formed and equipped with some of the best weapons in the Soviet arsenal--late-model Kalashnikov assault rifles, medium and heavy machine guns, rockets, missile launchers, armored vehicles, even helicopters.

Armenia immediately deployed some of its volunteer troops to defend Armenian villages along the Azerbaijan border and in Nagorno-Karabakh, while others were being prepared for a 250-mile helicopter ride to protect Armenian civilians still in Baku. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, dispatched guerrillas to attack Armenians both in Nagorno-Karabakh and in the Khanlar and Shaumyan regions to the north of the disputed enclave.

Ill-equipped and out-manned Interior Ministry defense forces were no match for the advancing ethnic armies; indeed, the conventional Soviet forces often found themselves forced to call in large numbers of airborne troops just to fight their way out through the swarming irregulars.

Almost immediately, the Azerbaijanis moved to sever all rail lines that pass through their territory into Armenia, thereby denying Armenia 85% of its food, fuel and building supplies. Fully 224 operational trains were bottled up, and another 109 trains were unable to move for lack of locomotives. Within days, fuel shortages begin to curtail cooking, heating and public transport in Yerevan.

Ferries continued to evacuate Armenians from Baku at the rate of several thousand each day. Between occasional spasms of violence, the city appeared eerily calm, according to witnesses reached by telephone from Moscow. Outside observers were barred from the city, where it was said that 1,000 apartments had been sacked--including some belonging to Soviet Army officers--and their owners, if they were unlucky enough to be at home, were beaten or killed.

Yerevan, on the other hand, bristled with activity. The Armenian capital looked like a city at war. Streets in the center of city were blocked off to all traffic except buses and trucks moving men and supplies to what many in the city now call “the front.” Men in crisp new army fatigues keep order among the milling throngs of curious, slogan-shouting bystanders. Others, less grandly outfitted, dutifully loaded trucks or filed onto buses with their rifles and their bedrolls.

These volunteers were boys still in their teens, puffed-up college students, rough-bearded men down from the mountains and a few real soldiers who had deserted the Soviet Army to defend their homeland. Some had modern automatic weapons, others made do with scrounged hunting rifles--a few carried antique muzzle-loading muskets. Some had only their knives and their courage.

The Armenian nationalist Karabakh Committee stoked the flames of Armenian pride in a rally of 300,000 people jammed into the square in front of the opera house. Bring us clothes, people were asked; bring us food and medicine for those fighting “the Turks.” But most important of all, speaker after speaker said, bring us your guns and your sons.

Those appeals were aided greatly when, on Tuesday, Jan. 16, Yerevan started to receive the first of the wounded survivors of the pogrom in Baku. Their firsthand tales of the violence fueled the war tensions. Coincidentally or not, Armenians raided 16 more police stations, army posts and other government weapons caches that day, the Soviet Interior Ministry reported.

With industry and commerce crippled by the rail blockade, many Armenians simply stayed home and listened to the radio or watched television for news of Azerbaijan. The news was not good. As combatants from both republics poured into the contested central region of Azerbaijan, fierce fire fights involving sometimes hundreds of men broke out. Small localized fighting that had dragged on uneventfully for months were suddenly flashing into full-scale battles in which armored vehicles dodged anti-tank rockets and heavy machine guns blasted away at helicopters.

It took a good map or a great memory to keep track of the erupting battle zones: throughout Nagorno-Karabakh; along the Armenian borders with Azerbaijan and its allied autonomous region, Nakhichevan; and especially in the aggressively contested Khanlar and Shaumyan districts, where Azerbaijanis had laid siege to several Armenian villages. Strategically important hilltops and ridges were fought over for hours, in anticipation of a protracted mountain war.

Soviet authorities scrambled to head off full-scale civil war by arresting 26,000 people--fully a fifth of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh--and seizing 3,000 weapons. But the value of such actions was not immediately apparent.

Soviet troops landing in Azerbaijan found roads effectively blockaded with trucks and buses filled with civilians; when the soldiers tried to vault the roadblocks by air to avoid bloody confrontations, their helicopters came under heavy fire from stolen anti-aircraft guns. Snipers also harassed Soviet troops at regular intervals.

In one illustrative case, a squad of eight Soviet troops that had been dispatched to defend the Armenian village of Manashit were overrun with heavy casualties by Azerbaijani guerrillas. Squad leader Capt. Viktor Spiridonov later said from a Yerevan hospital that the Azerbaijanis were not the rustic “bandits” his soldiers had expected, but were a well-organized, heavily armed partisan force.

At the same time, Azerbaijani guerrillas took the fight to the front doors of both Armenians and the Soviet government. In one raid, they opened fire on Armenian villages within 20 miles of Yerevan killing six Armenian farmers. Meanwhile, Azerbaijanis laid siege to Soviet government buildings in Baku and several other cities, demonstrating against central government authority and Communist Party legitimacy.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev eventually abandoned all hope of finding a political solution to what he believed to be essentially a political problem, and he put the Soviet Army on “full war footing.” But the army’s inability to immediately halt Azerbaijani aggression led to potentially devastating political problems--Azerbaijan and Armenia both threatened to secede from the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan did so apparently with the idea that it had the military capability to repulse any Soviet attempt to keep it in the fold, while Armenia said it had no option but secession if the Soviets could not protect its people.

“If the government does not support us in our struggle--if it does not protect us from this terror and anger--then it is very possible that the movement will take power into our own hands,” warned Hambartsum Galstyan, a leader of the Karabakh Committee. “We fully accept responsibility for what we are doing, but we have no way out.”

Considering their sad fate over the centuries at the hands of Persian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, Russian and Turkish invaders, most Armenians--upon learning about the Baku atrocities and subsequent attacks--undoubtedly did believe they had no way out but to stand and fight for themselves.