A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : CHAPTER 7: THE FUTURE : Little Hope Seen For a Lasting Peace

The guns have fallen silent now. Delegates from the Armenian All-National Movement and the Azerbaijani Popular Front reached a tentative accord on a cease-fire and the return of hostages held by each. However, that accord broke down the next day. The future remains uncertain.

As the fighting has died down, the debate has heated up again. But historians and political scientists in this country are skeptical that the cease-fire will lead to lasting peace, even if the central Soviet government is eventually invited to join the process.

“Enmity which is ages old doesn’t just go away,” said Jeremy Azrael, a Soviet affairs specialist at the RAND Corp., the Santa Monica-based think tank. “And presumably, it’s been reinforced by recent events.”

If the Kremlin really wants to keep peace in the region, he said, “it’s going to have to do it by keeping a very large number of troops there for a very long time.”

The human tragedy throughout the area is compounded in Armenia by the human tragedy caused by the earthquake of late 1988--lingering hunger and persistent homelessness made worse by the intentional disruption of supply lines by Azerbaijani militants.

“There’s the potential for a sizable human tragedy quite apart from violence,” he said.

Nikola B. Schahgaldian, another Soviet analyst at RAND who is himself an Armenian, said that, because the Soviets have reached the bottom of their popularity in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, “a vacuum of power” has developed.

“The whole thing is how to fill it,” he said. “The presence of the Soviet Army may be looked at as a step to fill that, but it cannot do that job” over the long term.

That very issue is not far from the thoughts of many Armenians.

“Now the army is here, and I think for some time it will be quiet,” said Sergei Barserian, 29, a factory worker in Ararat, near Armenia’s border with Nakhichevan. “But the army can’t stay all the time. And then we will wait for (Azerbaijanis) to come again. Until the end of our lives, we wait. Only through our dead bodies can they enter our territory.”

Ronald G. Suny, a professor of modern Armenian history at the University of Michigan, said a low-level Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict could continue indefinitely, turning the region into “Northern Ireland, Lebanon or Palestine.”

“Gorbachev must restore political authority in the country with a renewed Communist Party, possibly a coalition with the Azerbaijani Popular Front,” he said.

Suny said the Soviet president also must take the initiative in resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. He said the most practical option seems to be partitioning the contested region, with the larger part going to Armenia and the smaller part to Azerbaijan. He conceded that Soviet troops would be required to enforce the partition, at least “for the time being.”

Gerard Libaridian of the Zoryan Institute disagreed, at least with the suggestion that Gorbachev take a leading role in negotiating an end to the crisis.

“There must be an outside third party, which at this point cannot be Gorbachev,” he said, adding that Gorbachev could arrange for Latvia to continue to act in such a role, or even “a Western European government or individual that has moral legitimacy.”

If the effort succeeds, Libaridian said, Gorbachev could take the credit; if it fails, he could distance himself.

Libaridian said the discussion first should be narrowed from the broad Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict to the question of self-determination for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. He said any resolution must accommodate the legitimate concerns of Azerbaijanis about human, religious and cultural rights.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan must be allowed to embrace democracy, he added.

“Everyone has a stake in this,” Libaridian says. “What is happening . . . has import for perestroika . If Gorbachev falls, we all have a very serious problem.”

Bournoutian, the professor of Armenian history at New York University, said he and many of his colleagues think that Gorbachev bungled the situation by not sending in troops after the Sumgait riots in 1988. The tensions that lingered and then exploded last month into violence in Baku hurt the chances for finding a long-term settlement.

“He should have acted much more severely, but he didn’t want to open a Pandora’s Box of nationalist fervor elsewhere,” Bournoutian said. “He was also afraid of a Muslim backlash and hoped that it (the problem) would go away. But . . . these things don’t go away.”

Bournoutian believes the Soviet leaders are more concerned with placating their population of about 60 million Muslims than the 4.5 million Armenians.

But another scholar said the time taken to control the violence over Nagorno-Karabakh may actually have worsened the problem.

Tadeusz Swietochowski of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Advanced Soviet Studies said the Armenian interest in Nagorno-Karabakh served as a “political awakening” of nationalistic instincts among Azerbaijanis. He said pogroms against Armenians were largely carried out by Azerbaijani refugees who had left Nagorno-Karabakh in desperation.

“These pogroms that took place were caused by these uprooted people,” not a cross-section of the population, he said.

For most Azerbaijanis, the battle with Armenia is secondary, Swietochowski said. “The most important issue is the emancipation from Russian rule and possible unification with . . . Iranian Azerbaijan.”

Indeed, anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiments run deep now in Azerbaijan, and grow deeper every time that women in black mourning dresses and mullahs in white gowns gather at the grave of another person killed during the army takeover of Baku.

“After this, who would want to stay in the Soviet Union?” a woman screamed as she thrust her arm toward several freshly dug graves.