NATION-STATE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING

"If there is a single Armenian left in Karabakh this October, Azeris will hang him in Baku's Central Square ..."

(Excerpt from a public address of Abulfaz Elchibey, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, June 1992)

" ... Armenians feared that in Karabakh, Armenians would one day be a minority as they were in Nakhichevan, another lost part of historic Armenia ... yet now part of Azerbaijan ..."

(Robert D. Kaplan. Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus)

The ethnic conflict between the Azerbaijani Republic and the Armenian region of Nagorno Karabakh — formerly part of Soviet Azerbaijan — resulted from the awakening of Azeri nationalism during the last years of the USSR.

For a relatively young and sufficiently ambiguous ethno-political entity, such as Azerbaijan, activating this conflict contained an important functional feature. It became a vehicle of self-definition and consolidation for Azeris, achieved through the nationalist juxtaposition of Azerbaijan's Muslim majority to the country's indigenous Christian groups — Armenians, Udins and Christian Tats.[1] This practice of ethno-political identity-actualization through the victimization of minorities eventually turned into “ethnic cleansing,” a practice and concept that was later used to describe not only the horrors of the Azeri-inflamed ethnic wars in the Caucasus but also nationalist turmoil in the Balkans.

Another source of Azerbaijan's ethnic cleansing campaign — against Armenians — like the Nazi Holocaust and also like the Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, was the desire to create an ethnically homogenous nation-state of one race, one tribe, one mindset, one "volk." Inevitably, this process turns members of other ethnic groups into political enemies who have either to be driven over the borders or exterminated.

Programs of ethnic purification on the territories of the USSR’s successor states and in Yugoslavia did not emerge immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In the Soviet Union, these programs developed gradually as malignant side-effects of the earlier policy of ethno-cultural homogenization (or "nativization") of the republics of the Union. This semi-official policy was intended to promote the political, cultural and even demographic domination of the preponderant nationalities in the republics, often at the expense of the republic's ethnic minority groups.[2] However, “nativization” was constrained and regulated by the USSR's ethno-federal institutions and the Communist Party, and was rarely accompanied by violence.

The great irony of the Soviet nationality policy was that a program that intended to eradicate nationalism, eventually melt all the ethnicities into a single "Soviet people," and reduce the political salience of nationality as such, in fact, embedded ethnicity into politics, granting advantages to some and disabilities to others. The durable legacy of the Soviet experience for those emerging from the grip of Soviet power was that it became almost impossible to imagine politics that was not infected by ethnicity.[3] 

Ethnic cleansing is not a novelty for Azerbaijan and the Caucasus region as a whole. The Turkic invasion of Asia Minor and the Caucasus in the Middle Ages was accompanied by systematic massacres and the expulsion of Christian natives from their lands. Later, each phase of the development of Azeri national self-awareness, which started fermenting in the beginning of the 20th century and continues crystallizing to date, was similarly marked by pogroms directed against the indigenous Christian population of the Caspian. In 1918-1920, the leadership of the independent yet short-lived Azerbaijani Republic, with the help of expeditionary Turkish troops, attempted to annihilate the entire Armenian population of the Baku and Elizavetpol provinces of the former Russian Empire, including Nagorno Karabakh. In an attempt to execute their share of a pan-Turkist plan to craft an ethnically homogenous all-Turkic geopolitical belt that would stretch all the way from the Balkans to China, Azeris massacred an estimated 85,000 Armenian civilians.[4]

It was expected that after the nationalist experiments of 1918-1920 Azerbaijan became one of those Soviet republics that has been most aggressively implementing the policy of ethnic homogenization. This process aimed at achieving the cultural, demographic and territorial-administrative "azerbaijanization" of those regions of the republic, e.g. Nagorno Karabakh, which survived earlier massacres and were forcibly separated from Armenia and attached to Azerbaijan by the revolutionary whims of the early Bolshevik regime in Russia, in 1920-1923.

An incomplete list of articles of this program, mainly directed against Armenians, included: the official prohibition of teaching Armenian history and literature in Nagorno Karabakh's schools; a ban on practicing the Christian religion in the region; a suspension of cultural contacts between Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh by the Azerbaijani KGB; a gradual removal of ethnic Armenians from the leading administrative positions and their substitution by ethnic Azeris; and the systematic destruction of Armenian architectural monuments in Nagorno Karabakh and the neighboring areas of Azerbaijan.

Before 1930, Nagorno Karabakh had a land connection with Soviet Armenia, but the border was later changed under pressure from Baku, leaving Nagorno Karabakh entirely surrounded by Azerbaijani territory. Twelve Armenian villages located in Lachin, a region of Azerbaijan that came to separate Armenia from Nagorno Karabakh by an artificially created 2.2 mile-long strip of land, were destroyed and their population violently deported first in 1919 and then in 1923. In 1928, the territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region was further trimmed, as its northern Shahumian district — historical Golestan — was cut off from the region to form a separate administrative unit inside Azerbaijan. 

Not surprisingly, Nagorno Karabakh resented Azeri rule since the first days of the region's arbitrary incorporation into Azerbaijani SSR. With the most salient manifestations in 1923, 1938, 1947, 1966-67, 1977, and, finally, in 1988, acts of mass protest against Azerbaijani despotism were held in Nagorno Karabakh periodically. A kidnapped and abused prisoner of Azerbaijan, the Armenian region of Nagorno Karabakh has long been struggling for its very existence.

The economic discrimination that turned Nagorno Karabakh into a virtual Azeri colony, backward and exploited as a source of raw materials, was coupled with Baku’s policy of ethno-demographic aggression.

Consequently, the region’s population shrank from 149,000 in 1923 to 123,000 in 1979, while the population of Azerbaijan’s Azeri-inhabited districts adjacent to Nagorno Karabakh expanded five-fold in the same timeframe. From 1926 to 1976 Azerbaijan's authorities created 17 new Azeri villages in Nagorno Karabakh, liquidating 85 Armenian settlements in the process.

On 23 February 2001, Azerbaijan's President Heydar Aliyev, in his address to the Parliament (Malli Maclis) of Azerbaijan, publicly acknowledged that this policy was devised and directed by him personally  >>. Writing in May 1999 in Azerbaijan's government newspaper "Bakinskiy Rabochiy," Interior Minister Ramil Usubov praised Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev for his administration's earlier efforts aimed at ousting ethnic Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh, thus forcibly altering the ethnic composition of the autonomous region in favor of Azeris. In his article "Nagorno Karabakh: Mission of Salvation Began in the 1970s," published in May 1999, Usubov testifies:[5]

"Heydar Aliyev, who became the 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan on 12 July 1969, along with economic, scientific, and cultural work, took a demonstratively principled approached toward Nagorno Karabakh, an approach based on national norms and style. [...] This created conditions for an inflow of the Azeri population from neighboring regions, like Lachin, Agdam, Jebrail, Fizuli, Agjabedi and others. Azeris, who resettled into Nagorno Karabakh, were registered there, without the usual hindrances. ... All these measures in economic, educational, personnel, and other policies ... helped in the strengthening of ties between the autonomy and regions of Azerbaijan, and increased the inflow of Azeris. Thus, if in 1970 Azeris made up 18% of Nagorno Karabakh's population, in 1979 they already made 23%, and after 1989 — 30%. ... The region was [subsequently-aut.] cleansed of Dashnak ["Armenian nationalist"-aut.] elements."[6].

Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization policy, known as perestroika, marked the peak of ethnic homogenization projects across the USSR. As perestroika provided the Union republics with more autonomy to deal with internal matters, the demographic and cultural "azerbaijanization" (i.e. “de-armenianization”) of Nagorno Karabakh skyrocketed. By March 1987, this policy took explicitly offensive forms, disquieting the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, alarmed by the rise of Turkic militancy in Agdam, Kirovabad, Lachin and a number of other neighboring regions in Azerbaijan.

Gorbachev's policy of liberalization effectively coincided with a new phase of post-industrial mutation of the young and unstructured national identity of Azeris, and — as happened periodically, under similar circumstances in the past — was to include another cycle of ethnic purges in Azerbaijan.

Sociologically speaking, Azerbaijan's ethnic war against their Armenian neighbors was a necessity. It brought ethnic Azeris together through their violent confrontation with another group, and, by this, reinforced their otherwise weak sense of ethnic community. Azerbaijan's popular exterminatory racism was resurrected from dust to serve as medium of that consolidation, helping to pit ethnic Azeris against Azerbaijan's scapegoated Christian groups.

In the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the constraining institutional framework of the two states became weaker and the subsequent vacuum, uncertainty and mistrust among ethnic groups created the situation that came to resemble the security dilemma.[7] This helped to resurrect the programs of territorial revisionism and ethno-demographic purification that were nurtured for decades by previously sidelined chauvinist elements in both Azerbaijan and Yugoslavia. In both countries local Communists-turned-nationalists conveniently borrowed and exploited those programs in order to avoid being wiped out from the political scene by the anticipated tide of liberal reforms.

The proliferation of bogus historical narratives where neighbors were pictured as foes or people who deserve little respect was another dimension of the pre-conflict reality of Azerbaijan and the FRY. Yo'av Karny, an Israeli journalist and Caucasus expert, demonstrated in his "Highlanders" how Azerbaijani nationalist attempts to fabricate history formed a prelude to the Karabakh conflict.

In Azerbaijan, ethnic cleansing was preceded by "cultural cleansing." Karny points to the role of Dr. Ziya M. Buniyatov, Vice-President of Azerbaijani Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose controversial state-supported project to invent Azerbaijan's past and "un-invent" that of Azerbaijan's neighbors soon spilled over the academic field and helped to bring about a major regional trouble.

In the 1980s, Azerbaijani scholars, through a series of "discoveries," built up a body of highly controversial literature that denied thousands of ancient Armenian churches and monasteries in Nagorno Karabakh any association with Armenian culture and history. The eastern part of the Republic of Armenia was blatantly declared by Buniyatov and his disciples as a "historical Azerbaijani land." Further, in a subsequently developed conspiracy theory, Buniyatov contended that Armenians and other native groups, which populated the territory of the present-day Azerbaijani Republic prior to the migration of proto-Azeri Turkic nomads from the Central Asia to the Western Caspian, are not native at all. Therefore, he claimed, these groups deserved less political rights and should have ultimately been driven over the frontiers of the Azeri-controlled state. Dr. Buniyatov's denial half a million Armenians in Azerbaijan their identity — "cultural cleansing" — formed an ideological pretext to the late ethnic cleansing campaign in Azerbaijan.

Similarly, Serbian and Croatian historians, shortly before the eruption of the Bosnian war, made extraordinary efforts to publish revisionist historical narratives in their respective sub-republics. In these accounts, Serbs were portrayed as victims of a Croatian-Slovene conspiracy, Croats were hostages to Serbian "hegemonic ambitions," while Albanians and Muslim Bosnyaks featured as Turkish proxies aimed at inviting the Turks back to reconquer the Balkans. Such ideas contextually provided the reasons of why the vengeful counter-victimization of ethnic minorities throughout the former Yugoslavia could be regarded as righteous causes to pursue.

By 1987, Azerbaijani violence-on-paper has translated into a sustainable policy on-the-ground. The efforts to bring to Nagorno Karabakh and adjacent areas new echelons of Azeri colonists gradually turned into an anti-Armenian ethnic cleansing campaign, which officially began in Azerbaijan in September 1987 in the town of Chardakhly, the largest Armenian settlement in Azerbaijan outside the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region.[8] Chardakhly once was part of the historical province of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh.

The acts of coordinated hooliganism against the Armenians of Azerbaijan were coupled by the calls of Azeri intelligentsia in Baku to disband the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region and redraw the map of the Transcaucasus in order to annex Armenia's southern province of Zangezur (Siunik) to the Azerbaijani SSR. In the past, Zangezur served as a locale of Azeri summer pastures and, perhaps more importantly, was the much-rumored true birthplace of Azerbaijan’s strongman Heydar Aliyev. 

In Chardakhly, when the local population replied negatively to an ultimatum to vacate the town and provide their houses for the newly arrived Azeri resettlers, the Communist authorities of the Shamkhor district of Azerbaijan, supervised by Shamkhor's Communist Party boss A. Asadov and backed by regional police and KGB agents, organized a pogrom whereupon mass beatings and the destruction of property of Armenians took place. Apparently, the aim of the Chardakhly pogrom was to evict Armenians first from the territories adjacent to Nagorno Karabakh, where they constituted a demographic minority, and then to spread this policy to Nagorno Karabakh proper, where any plans to deport the Armenians were more likely to face organized resistance.

The events in Chardakhly exploded half a year before the first demonstrations had been held in Nagorno Karabakh's capital of Stepanakert. Chiefly out of fear of repressions by Moscow, these acts of mass protest were peaceful and mild. They started petitioning USSR’s central authorities in Moscow to remove the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region from the direct subordination of Azerbaijani SSR, until, as demonstrators argued, it was too late to rescue the Armenians there from the seemingly inevitable fate of being harassed out of their homeland, as nearly had happened in Chardakhly.

The protesters used exclusively constitutional mechanisms for the expression of their will, employing the residual mechanisms of democracy that were still formally present in the Soviet political system and which Gorbachev-supported reformers in Moscow proposed to activate. Initially launched in Stepanakert, the protest movement against Azerbaijan's unfolding ethnic cleansing project spread to Armenia by late February 1988.

After the events in Chardakhly, the Armenian residents of Nagorno Karabakh feared, and for a good reason, that the destiny of their homeland would soon be that of the Nakhichevan enclave of Azerbaijan.

St. Christophor church in Agulis (1671-1675) Desecrated in 1928 - Nakhichevan - (www.armgate.com) Click on picture to enlarge	St. Trinity church in Agulis (12th century) Destroyed  in 1965 - Nakhichevan - (www.armgate.com) Click on picture to enlarge	St. Karapet Monastery in Abrakunis (8th century) Abandoned in 1934 - Nakhichevan - (www.armgate.com) Click on picture to enlarge

Under pressure from the sympathetic-to-Azerbaijan Kemalist Turkey, Nakhichevan too had been cut off from the Republic of Armenia and given to the Azerbaijan by Russian Bolsheviks in 1921, while not even having a common border with the rest of Azerbaijani Republic. Downsized to a tiny and forgotten minority, Nakhichevan's Armenians were subjected to a policy of "white genocide" during 70 years of Azeri misrule. While constituting nearly one half of Nakhichevan’s population in the 1940s, native Armenians were prompted to leave the region and comprised by 1988 meager 2.4%. The bitter nickname for Nakhichevan, “Land of Mute Bell-Towers,” refers to the desecration of more than 200 of Nakhichevan's Armenian churches — masterpieces of early medieval architecture — that followed the expulsion of Nakhichevan’s native Armenians. Since 1950s, Armenian architectural monuments of Nakhichevan have been standing amid empty Armenian villages, while having been gradually demolished and used by local Azeri peasants as a source of cheap building material.[9]

The rise of Azeri chauvinism in 1987, besides analogies with Nakhichevan’s “white genocide,” resonated with the memories of 1905 anti-Armenian riots in Baku and the legacy of the 1918-1920 slaughter of Armenian civilians in Nagorno Karabakh by Azeri armed gangs and Ottoman Turkey's expeditionary forces — especially the 23 March 1920 destruction of the Nagorno Karabakh's regional capital of Shushi (Shousha), where up to 20,000 Armenian civilians were indiscriminately killed. It is notable that due to these large-scale atrocities the international community in 1919 rejected Azerbaijani Republic's application for membership in the League of Nations.[10]

In similar fashion, the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 became a catalyst that awakened previously latent tensions among the ethnic groups within Yugoslavia. The ascent to power in Belgrade of pro-Communist nationalists, headed by Slobodan Milosevic, resulted in the orchestrated harassment of Albanian residents in Kosovo. This included the attempts to oust ethnic Albanians from important posts in regional administration and industry as well as to suppress Albanian intelligentsia in Pristina.

Violence occurred when the institutional barriers of the USSR and the FRY, which had served as security guarantees for the ethnic minorities, vanished, and when the prevalent nationalities acquired unlimited opportunity to victimize the minority groups. This became the worst nightmare for the native Christians of Azerbaijan (Armenians, Christian Tats and Udins) and the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.[11] Both Azerbaijan and Yugoslavia dismantled previously existing autonomies on their territories — the Autonomous Region of Kosovo (in 1989) and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region (in 1991), respectively. Within the context of the policy of ethnic homogenization, these acts were violent breakthroughs in the marginalization of minorities in the successor states.

When the minority nationalities of the autonomous regions (i.e. in Nagorno Karabakh and Kosovo) protested against the tightening of screws by the Yugoslav- and Azeri-controlled states, systematic campaigns of intimidation and outright pogroms were launched against them. And while both conflicts unfolded, the central governments in Baku and Belgrade stubbornly refused to negotiate with the leaders of Nagorno Karabakh and Kosovo. The goals of both nationalist regimes, in Azerbaijan and in Yugoslavia, were also identical, aimed to ultimately make Armenians and Albanians leave the territories of their traditional settlements. Both Azerbaijani and Yugoslav governments, respectively, designed to destroy Karabakhi Armenians and Kosovar Albanians as national, ethnic, racial and religious groups.

Here, however, one should very clearly distinguish between Slobodan Milosevic and his government, on one hand, and the people of Serbia and Montenegro, on the other, whose cultural heritage as well as heroism and self-sacrifice both in the Medieval period and, more recently, during WWII, are yet to be fully appreciated by the nations of Europe.

The Kosovar Albanians and Karabakhi Armenians were in varying degrees successful in deterring threats to their identities and status, employing political and at times military resources. The disintegration processes of the USSR and FRY provided both regional autonomies with different opportunities for lawful presentations of their efforts to deter the perceived danger of genocide. And both the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh and the Albanians of Kosovo, after persistent yet unsuccessful attempts to attract the attention of their own federal governments, foreign states and international organizations to their causes, finally resorted to means aimed at the creation of — and, in Nagorno Karabakh’s case, revival — their own rudimental nation-states.

The Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh withstood the brutal onslaught from Baku by reestablishing — through its parliament and a region-wide referendum — an independent state with its own political and military structure. The Albanians in Kosovo, who, in contrast, failed to follow these procedures, were consequently subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing — forcible deportations and murder — by the president Milosevic's police and paramilitary units. When peace finally returned to Kosovo, it was not because of the balance of forces between the region’s army and that of the central government, as happened between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh, but as the consequence of the 78-day long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

In the beginning of both conflicts, Nagorno Karabakh's and Kosovo's armed resistance to the forces of their central governments was asymmetrical, due to the numerically superior and better equipped Azerbaijani and Yugoslav military. In the initial stage of the conflict poorly equipped Armenian self-defense units proved no match for the Azeri OPON (Special Operations Police) regiments, which had been armed by the Soviet military, trained by Moscow's KGB Spetznaz and backed politically by the Azeri government in Baku. Azerbaijan excessively used Afghan, Russian, Ukrainian, and Chechen mercenaries, who usually spearheaded infantry attacks, drove most tanks and operated Azerbaijan's airforce.

But in the case of Nagorno Karabakh, the quantitative superiority of Azerbaijan's armed forces was later counter-balanced by the higher motivation of Nagorno Karabakh's Armenian troops, which also included volunteers of Karabakhi origin from other areas. These former residents of Nagorno Karabakh, whose number is close to half a million, are scattered across Armenia, the Northern Caucasus, the Ukraine, and the Central Asia. They left Nagorno Karabakh decades before the conflict, primarily because of the cultural discrimination against the Armenians in Azerbaijan and the lack of economic opportunities at home, but came back to defend their homeland — Nagorno Karabakh — in the time of trouble.

Active hostilities in Nagorno Karabakh ended with the Russian-brokered cease-fire in May 1994. At that time, Nagorno Karabakh’s Armenian forces liberated most of their region from the invading Azerbaijani Army, with the exception of eastern swathes of Martuni and Mardakert districts, and the entire Shahumian district in the north, which still remain under Azerbaijani occupation. In addition, Nagorno Karabakhi forces fully controlled a number of strategic territories on the borders of Nagorno Karabakh, known as "Nagorno Karabakh's Golan Heights," creating a demilitarized Security Zone around the region for better defense. This reduced the front-line threefold, recreated a land bridge between Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh and enabled Karabakhi Armenians to defend their homeland in depth against a possible future aggression of the outnumbering and better equipped Azerbaijani Army.

For what had happened to the demilitarized lands of the former Azerbaijani SSR, Azeri politicians should blame nobody but themselves. The Azeri blockade of Nagorno Karabakh in 1989-1992, reinforced by indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardments that claimed hundreds of civilian lives, was aimed at starving the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh into surrender and exile.

Had not official Baku ordered to cut Nagorno Karabakh off the outside world by all-around siege, which by late January 1992 caused hunger and outbreak of epidemics in the region, the Karabakhi Armenian forces would have hardly resorted to a bold yet highly risky operation of demilitarizing the territories of the former Azerbaijani SSR which artificially separated their homeland from friendly Armenia. Thus, Azeris choked on their own vulgar Realist and double-sided vision of history as foodchain, a bizarre ideological cliché that was flamboyantly propagated by the Popular Front of Azerbaijan Party (PFAP) in the beginning of the Karabakh conflict, which Azeri nationalists used to sarcastically juxtapose to the Karabakhi appeals for conflict resolution.

The creation of a regular army — an institution that became instrumental in deterring the danger of the looming genocide — was one of the biggest achievements of the Nagorno Karabakhi incipient nation-state. In fact, the Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army (NKDA) performed the same task that NATO did to help out Kosovar Albanians.