A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : CHAPTER 5: THE TALKS : A Rumor of Peace Ends in Bloodshed

With tensions, arsenals and armies escalating rapidly and possibly out of control, regional Armenian and Azerbaijani party and government leaders agreed to meet under Soviet supervision to negotiate a way to limit, if not eliminate, the increasing threat of civil war.

At one point, nine days after the initial bloodshed in Baku, the official leaders did agree to remove armed groups from their borders, restore damaged communication lines and resume rail traffic. Almost immediately, however, there were serious doubts that the discredited Communist Party apparatchiks who had struck the deal could enforce it with the highly nationalistic and decidedly anti-government movements behind the militias.

As feared, the settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan collapsed two days later, when the official governments failed to win the cooperation of the nationalist Azerbaijan Popular Front and Armenian All-National Movement.

One possible reason for the collapse was the remarkably ill-timed decision by Soviet military authorities to raid not only the offices of the Azerbaijan Popular Front, but the homes of all its leaders. During the raids, 43 leading Azerbaijani nationalists were arrested, and another 110 were seized and detained later in the day.

On the same day, the increasingly shaky Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party--the center of official power in the strife-torn republic--was scrambling to elect new leaders to replace those who had fled to Moscow in fear of their lives. The committee met well after curfew to avoid provoking a demonstration outside their party headquarters.

But the search went on for a negotiated settlement with the surprisingly popular nationalist groups because both Gorbachev in Moscow and Soviet army leaders in Azerbaijan realized that a military solution was impractical and existing civilian authority lacked credibility on its own.

Indeed, observers on both sides of the struggle in Baku concurred that the Soviet army and the Azerbaijan Communist Party controlled little more than the few key government buildings where they made their offices and parked their tanks.

Most of the city belonged to the Azerbaijani Popular Front. Ironically, when the front was founded in the fall of 1988, it was seen as little more than an eager but feckless imitation of the nationalist democracy movements flowering in the Baltics. But the intellectuals behind the front knew that power came with the support of the uneducated masses, and the easiest way to reach them was with an emotional issue like Armenia’s designs on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Empowered by that issue, the Azerbaijani nationalists expanded their goals to include local control of the region’s considerable oil resources and its cotton and fruit growers. They also desired a free press and free elections with which they could turn out Communist Party leaders who ruled Azerbaijan as a fiefdom.

Such goals harked back to the best of Azerbaijan’s cosmopolitan cultural and intellectual history. Enriched by offshore oil rigs, the capital city Baku was big and sophisticated. Among its residents it boasted a diverse mix of Armenians, Russians and Jews. Centuries-old ethnic and religious rivalries among these groups were never entirely forgotten, but even those swept up in the pogroms recall a time when the city’s upper and middle classes enjoyed a civilized, peaceful coexistence.

But affluent Azerbaijanis are a minority even in their own country. Azerbaijan is primarily an agrarian republic, with a large ill-educated, ill-housed underclass. These are the people who responded to the tenets of militant nationalism: undermining the government that let them live in squalor and confiscating the wealth of “foreigners”--even the foreigners who had managed to be born in Baku. These are the people who enforced the general strike.

Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Nechayev, a ranking officer in the internal security force, observed that the general strike that had paralyzed Baku and undermined local Communist authorities also had given workers long hours to attend political meetings being organized at the idled factories. The most popular topics at the meetings hardly came as a surprise: more political autonomy for Azerbaijan and the disbandment of the Communist Party apparatus.

The newly boisterous Azerbaijani Parliament stepped up the political pressure by warning that, unless Soviet troops withdrew from Baku in two days, it would begin the constitutional process of seceding from the Soviet Union. At the same time, Armenians again threatened to secede unless the Soviet central government could control the crisis and protect victims of persecution.

“My opinion is that we have to launch a dialogue with these groups,” Nechayev was quoted as saying by the official Soviet news agency Tass. “We have to find compromises. We have to pursue our common aims.”

By the end of the second week of fighting, the need for some negotiated settlement had become apparent to all but the most militant of the nationalist leaders. At that time, 10 days after the Baku barbarisms, dead and wounded guerrillas were beginning to return home, bringing with them the grim realities of war.

In Yerevan, for example, the inspiring nationalist anthems that had filled the air and the ears of departing Armenian fighters a week earlier had been replaced by the sadder traditional mourning music as the casualties of the ethnic warfare began to come home. People who had rousingly dispatched their fathers, sons and friends to battle scant days earlier now watched somberly, in person or on television, as trucks inched through city streets carrying plain wooden coffins accompanied by smartly uniformed soldiers carrying photos of the dead.

“Up to this point, it was like it was a play,” said Araik Papian, 35, as one procession crept past his home. “We did not understand that we are in a real world. Now we do.”

Vera Mouradian, 50, could barely bring herself to speak while she walked respectfully a few paces behind the coffin of Yervand Sahoumian, a 32-year-old man whose televised funeral march became symbolic of the grief all Armenians felt.

“There is a sad feeling for everyone,” Mouradian said as the procession wound its way through the colorful old city’s maze of handsome, brightly colored stone buildings. “It makes no difference whether he is our son or not. He is the child of everybody.”

For others, he is the symbol of the renewed sense of persecution that many Armenians around the world say they have started to feel.

“I was standing in the street the other day, looking at a puddle,” said a pensive Yerevan State University student named Artavazd Khatchikyan. “And I was thinking that all my life I have heard about the horrible massacres of 1915. I always said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ but it was so distant. Now, I feel the horror. I stand on a street and look at that puddle and feel I am going to be pushed right in.”