A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : CHAPTER 3: THE HISTORY : An Endless Struggle for Survival

Violence and persecution are nothing new to Armenians. They have been conquered, enslaved and ostracized as a minority people by various invaders for 2,500 years. With a homeland on the frontier between Islam and Christendom, Armenians have suffered special abuse on religious grounds. As the first ethnic group to adopt Christianity as its official religion, Armenians came to be regarded--and despised--as infidels by neighboring peoples aligned with Islam.

Nothing in their earlier history prepared Armenians for the horrors of 1915. In that year, amid the unprecedented battlefield carnage of World War I, Turkey attempted to systematically exterminate Armenians for their alleged allegiance to Russia. Tens of thousands of Armenians were shot, drowned, burned and otherwise executed, while hundreds of thousands more died while on forced death marches to concentration camps in Syria. The exact death toll is unclear, but scholarly estimates range from 750,000 to 1.5 million--as many as half of all Armenians.

Armenia re-emerged, briefly, as an independent nation in the international tumult following the Russian Revolution. It remained free for two years, until 1920, when renewed threats from adjoining Muslim states persuaded Armenia to accept an invitation to join the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Even under the Soviets, however, Armenia continued to lose part of its historic area, as parts had already been grabbed by Turkey and Persia, which is now called Iran. In particular, Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh, the rugged but rich crescent of farmland between the Kura and Araks rivers.

That region, where three of every four people are Armenian, simmered in dispute for years, with occasional civil unrest contained by Soviet troops. After Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced perestroika , the restructuring of the Soviet society which discouraged police-state tactics and sought political solutions to problems, Armenia in 1988 began a political bid to annex Nagorno-Karabakh. The effort, coinciding with renewed nationalism among Azerbaijanis, sparked a violent backlash that began with sporadic guerrilla attacks on rural Armenian villages and led to bloody riots in Sumgait, the second-largest city in Azerbaijan.

The Sumgait unrest grew out of raucous protests organized by Azerbaijanis to counter Armenian demonstrations supporting the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh. The rallies were emotional but peaceful until two men were killed in a brawl. A radio broadcast pleading for calm unfortunately mentioned the names of the dead men--both were obviously Azerbaijani, presumably killed by Armenians. Retaliation began the next day: Thirty-two Armenians were killed, and 400 were injured. Fire destroyed 200 Armenian apartments, and hundreds more were looted.

Armenia’s claim on Nagorno-Karabakh reaches back to the 4th Century AD, when Armenians penetrated the rugged Karabakh Mountains from the west, said George Bournoutian, professor of Armenian history at New York University and the University of Connecticut. The Armenians used Christianity, their advanced alphabet and language to culturally dominate and later assimilate the indigenous people, known as Caucasian Albanians. Nagorno-Karabakh remained the essential, easily defensible core of Armenia, even after wave after wave of invader grabbed off the lower reaches of the kingdom for themselves, Bournoutian said.

Azerbaijanis claim the region because it was, more recently, a part of the Islamic Persian empire. Although Armenians remained Christian, Persia--now known as Iran--introduced the Shiite Islam religion to the mixed Turko-Tatar-Mongol people in the lowlands. By the late 19th Century, these people came to be known as Azerbaijani.

Nicholas I of Russia invaded the Transcaucasian region in the early 19th Century, wresting it from Persia. However, growing domestic unrest, which eventually contributed to the Bolshevik Revolution, forced the czar to turn his attention away from the region. But rather than let it drift out of his control, Nicholas intentionally sowed the seeds of ethnic strife.

Gerard Libaridian, director of the Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research in Cambridge, Mass., said the czar weakened the ability of both Armenians and Azerbaijanis to act in their own interests by intentionally drawing the boundaries of administrative districts in the region that were inconsistent with the ethnic heritage of the region. By mixing rival groups--for example, by adding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan--he made it difficult for any region to declare independence because the factions were unlikely to agree on who would be in control.

After the Sumgait violence in 1988, the central Soviet government in Moscow stepped in and administered Nagorno-Karabakh from the Kremlin as a sort of independent republic. However, bloodshed persisted in Sumgait and elsewhere. Moscow realized its efforts were ineffectual and decided last November to return full control of the region to Azerbaijan.

The prolonged Sumgait violence, which has claimed the lives of an estimated 200 Armenians, was an ominous development. In Sumgait, “Turks”--as Armenians refer to the Turkic-speaking Muslim Azerbaijanis--had once again massacred Armenians, reviving memories of Turkey’s genocide 70 years earlier. The new violence raised the very real specter of escalating revenge--by both sides. Azerbaijanis and Armenians who had lived peacefully in the other’s territories for years suddenly became convinced that they had to flee to an ethnic homeland to be safe. That feeling grew more frantic when the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan appeared to set the stage for civil war.

In the two years since the Sumgait riots, the number of Armenians in Baku fell from 220,000 to about 20,000. Meanwhile, an estimated 200,000 Azerbaijanis moved in the opposite direction, from Armenia into Azerbaijan. About 90,000 poured into Baku alone. Armenians remaining in that city were mostly middle-class merchants or professionals; recently arrived refugees were, for the most part, poor and unskilled laborers. Bitter class differences were thus layered on top of centuries of ethnic and religious conflicts.

That the conflict was brewing in Baku was particularly bad news for the Soviet Union. Baku is central to the Soviet oil industry--the primary source of foreign-exchange capital so badly needed to finance the industrial modernization at the heart of Gorbachev’s reforms. Azerbaijan itself is one of the Soviet Union’s key oil-producing areas, and its capital, Baku, makes two-thirds of the country’s oil-drilling equipment.

Despite this vital industry, however, there were not enough of the right kind of unskilled jobs to accommodate the refugees crowding into the city from Armenia. No jobs meant no housing, no future.

As weeks rolled into months and months into years, Azerbaijani refugees grew increasingly restless with the idea of living in tents in their own ethnic homeland while Armenians--the people they blamed for forcing them to come to Baku in the first place--enjoyed comfortable flats. Inspired by the nationalistic preachings of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, individual refugees began taking it upon themselves to evict Armenians from their homes and claim the dwellings for themselves.

That hate-driven campaign, mixed with the determination of often-persecuted Armenians to resist further degradation, made for an explosive situation.

As the ethnic conflict grew bloodier, the Soviets responded by disbanding all nationalist groups in the region, extending curfew hours and positioning troops along the border with Iran in an effort to close what was thought to be a major source of Azerbaijani weapons and supplies.

But Azerbaijani leaders were planning surprises of their own: a general strike, the formal declaration of secession and the expansion of their violent pogrom to include ethnic Russians and Jews.