Azerbaijan a Land of Skulls, Plots, Rumors

A visitor does not have to spend much time here in the capital of Azerbaijan to understand why President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said last week that no other problem in the last two years has commanded as much Kremlin attention as the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

Baku, now in the fourth week of a state of emergency imposed after a bloody anti-Armenian uprising by Azerbaijanis, gives new meaning to the word intractable. It is a city where hyperbole and conspiracy theories have become the rule rather than the exception.

Highly educated and seemingly rational Azerbaijanis suddenly predict in all seriousness that Moscow will not bother sending in troops the next time there is trouble: It will simply bomb the place.

Or they will solemnly repeat rumors about thousands of Azerbaijani bodies having been secretly dumped in the sea, some of them mutilated, and then in the next breath concede that at worst the death toll is probably not more than twice the officially acknowledged 143.

They extol the ethnic planks in their political platforms, then launch into a pseudo-scientific lecture on Armenian skulls and teeth, which prove, they say, that Armenians are late-comers to the region and should be expelled from territory under Azerbaijani administration.

Perhaps it is not as powerful or as politically sophisticated as similar movements in the Soviet Union’s Baltic republics, but there is a groundswell of sentiment, here and in neighboring Armenia as well, for greater political autonomy from Moscow, even full independence.

Yet for all the clamor to move forward, the Azerbaijani and Armenian movements are preoccupied with the past, mired in a conflict the roots of which reach deep into the history of the Transcaucasus region.

The conflict centers on Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian region within Azerbaijan that is officially semi-autonomous but is administered from Baku. Problems with the economic and cultural development of Nagorno-Karabakh brought demands for its secession from Azerbaijan and annexation by neighboring Armenia. The problems were compounded by longstanding cultural friction between the Christian Armenians and the mostly Shiite Muslim Azerbaijanis.

Two years ago, the dispute flared into armed conflict with an attack on Armenians by Azerbaijani refugees in city of Sumgait, and it spread quickly to other mixed-population areas of both republics. There has since been a chain reaction of expulsions and pogroms, leaving hundreds dead and about 500,000 refugees.

Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia are a key element in this latest round of fighting. About 70 Armenians were killed in anti-Armenian riots in Baku in mid-January, and this was followed by the intervention of Soviet army and Interior Ministry troops, leading to at least 140 more fatalities and about 500 injuries, this time among Azerbaijanis.

Forced from their homes in Armenia by the conflict, compensated only partially if at all for their losses and often living in abysmal conditions in squalid camps, many of these refugees are primed to lash back at their enemies, real or imagined.

Of the 87 Azerbaijanis killed by army gunfire in the last three weeks and buried in a martyrs’ graveyard in Baku’s Kirov Park, 32 were refugees, according to journalist Arif Yunisov. He said 28 additional refugee victims are buried elsewhere.

In addition to refugees, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has created thousands of new supporters for the fledgling Azerbaijani Popular Front, a movement patterned after similar movements advocating independence in the Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

But some in the front say that this growth is a mixed blessing, diverting a movement ostensibly dedicated to economic and political autonomy into ethnic warfare, and reportedly causing deep organizational divisions in the process.

Maj. Gen. Anatoly I. Kirilyuk, deputy military commander in Baku under martial law, was asked about the front in an interview and replied: “If we take up its program, I’m ready to sign it myself. It’s a good program. But the fact that all sorts of (extremist) groups have formed out of it--that’s another question.”

Many Azerbaijanis are convinced that the introduction of federal troops had little to do with protecting Armenians in Baku, most of whom had either fled or had been evacuated by the time the state of emergency was declared on Jan. 20. Rather, they say, it was meant to halt their struggle for independence.

So, anger at the Kremlin, which sent in the army, is so mixed with anti-Armenian hostility that the two are often hard to separate.

The same could be said of Moscow’s attitude towards the Azerbaijani Popular Front, elements of which were on the streets days before the troops arrived, demanding the replacement of the local authorities. The front then actively led attempts to block the troops.

“After the punitive operation by Moscow, we can hardly hope to find common language with the Armenians, because the Armenians were the cause of what happened,” Rauf A. Guseinov, a historian, told a reporter. “Moscow supports the Armenians.”

Armenians, of course, point their fingers at the Azerbaijanis; some of them also reject the idea that protecting their community was Moscow’s true motive. They claim, as proof of their suspicions, that violence against them continues.

Indeed, some Azerbaijanis openly advocate the expulsion of all Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and other areas of Azerbaijan as the only realistic solution.

“Events in the last two years have resulted in a situation where the two peoples really need to be isolated from each other,” journalist Yunisov said. “No matter whose troops you station in Nagorno-Karabakh, you will not be able to prevent the two peoples from periodically renewing the conflict.”

The Azerbaijanis demand that the Kremlin remove its troops but often acknowledge in the same breath that with the army gone, ethnic violence is bound to erupt again.

“As soon as the army leaves, the Armenians will find their situation totally untenable,” historian Guseinov said. “There are enough arms on both sides. And we are twice as numerous. . . . I don’t want to say we’re acting on the Biblical principle of an eye for an eye, but it may turn out that way.”

Some people in the Azerbaijani Popular Front are trying, along with people in Armenia, to untie the Gordian knot of their feud. Delegations from the two sides met with Baltic mediators two weeks ago in Latvia to try to begin a dialogue.

The talks reportedly ended on a sour note when Azerbaijani Popular Front activists demanded the deportation of Armenians in two villages of Azerbaijan’s Khandar region. Front officials here described the report as false and a provocation, but a spokesman for the Armenian All-National Movement said a commission sent from Yerevan to investigate had confirmed the report.

“It is impossible under these conditions that the negotiations continue,” Armenian spokesman Martin Martirosian said. “We would like to see the Azerbaijani party’s explanation about the situation, and we want to know what measures they will undertake to guarantee the security of the Armenian population of these villages.”

Martirosian and activists here in Baku agree that there is still hope that further negotiations are possible.

“It’s a very complicated problem, a big one,” Yussif Samadoglu, a prominent local writer and member of the 14-man governing council of the Azerbaijani National Front, told an interviewer, “but we still hope common sense will triumph.”

Samadoglu acknowledged that the ethnic conflict is jeopardizing the front’s political program. Of the 15 Soviet republics, only in these two have dates still to be set for local and republic elections. And in Azerbaijan, really free elections are impossible while the state of emergency is in effect.

“I’m very afraid that in connection with all these events, Moscow and our (Azerbaijani) leadership might stage a provocation to extend the legitimacy of (Azerbaijan’s) parliament for another year in order to buy more time and work further to strangle the democratic movement,” Samadoglu said.

If martial law is lifted, the front stands to make a strong showing in local and republic elections against the traditional Communist Party leadership of Azerbaijan.

Well over 200 Azerbaijanis are still under arrest following the state of emergency decree, many of them local Popular Front activists. Samadoglu said that one of his fellow council members is among the arrested, and the rest are in hiding.

The front has promised the authorities that if the troops leave, “we will guarantee complete public order here and we shall deny the opportunity to act on our territory to any extremist grouping,” Samadoglu said. The leadership’s latest move was to “temporarily suspend” the principle of grass-roots autonomy on which the movement is founded, imposing rule from the top.

“Today it is vital for us to have a strong central organ controlling the entire situation in the Popular Front, knowing full well that all kinds of demonstrations and so on can result in another bloodbath,” Samadoglu said.

He said the front’s “ultimate goal is the creation on Azerbaijani territory of a sovereign, parliamentary state . . . a multi-party state.”

Azerbaijan, a major producer of oil, cotton and other raw materials, needs economic autonomy, he said, in order to solve food shortages that are so persistent that meat, butter, sugar and other items have been rationed for years.

“We are waltzing around all sorts of problems,” he said. “The Soviet Union is the world’s last empire, and it is disintegrating. Our goal, and that of all the popular movements, is to ensure that this disintegration involves the least possible amount of blood.”

It is possible that Azerbaijan’s grievances can be resolved without Azerbaijan leaving the Soviet Union, he said, and added: “I think that if all this talk we hear about preparation of a new union treaty will result in a qualitatively new law, granting not illusory but genuine independence to the republics, then of course in this new form the federation can preserve itself.

“But that’s if common sense prevails. Unfortunately, the entire 70 years of Soviet power shows that common sense almost never triumphed.”