THE REFUGEE PROBLEM

" ... Hence the theoretically overwhelming might of Azerbaijan; its large population; Turkish officers in uniform commanding troops; and Mujahideen, whom I interviewed through interpreters, being paid 500 dollars per month to come to fight for the Azeris. The infinitely smaller Karabakh population threw out that overwhelming might and drew a cordon sanitaire around its country to stop it being shelled over the border. The reason is quite simply that the Karabakh Armenians are front-line soldiers and I am afraid that the Azeris do not measure up to the same quality ... "

(Excerpt from a testimony of The Earl of Shannon at the House of Lords of the British Parliament, 17 March 1999)

The eviction of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was one of the most tragic episodes of the Balkan drama. Although the Azerbaijani military offensives of 1992 and 1993 each created a humanitarian catastrophe for Nagorno Karabakh, resulting in the depopulation of some 60% of Nagorno Karabakh's settlements and razing its capital Stepanakert to the ground by indiscriminate artillery bombardment and aerial attacks, the mass exodus of Nagorno Karabakh's population was not achieved, in stark contrast to the case of Kosovo. When the Nagorno Karabakh's defense forces liberated parts of their homeland from the Azerbaijani military, Armenians refugees from Nagorno Karabakh returned to their homes without a humanitarian intervention from abroad.

Interestingly, the nationalist crusades of Yugoslav and Azerbaijani governments against Kosovar Albanians and Karabakhi Armenians started almost simultaneously — in mid-1987, with the Azeri pogrom against the Armenian inhabitants of the town of Chardakhly in northwestern Azerbaijan and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's order to publish the notorious Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which laid down the guidelines of future troubles in the Balkans.

Throughout the Soviet years, Azerbaijani authorities assimilated hundreds of thousands of Tats, Talishes, Kurds, Lezgins, Avars, and other Muslim groups of Azerbaijan, successfully converting them into "Azerbaijanis." The Armenians in Azerbaijan, however, were Christians, and a people with ancient culture and strong identity. They were inassimilable. In order to complete the process of creation of a coherent Azerbaijani "nation," Armenians were set for eviction from the territories of their compact residence in Azerbaijani SSR.

The February 1988 constitutional appeal of Karabakhi Armenian parliament to the Soviet leadership to transfer their region under the jurisdiction of the Armenian SSR — in order to rescue Nagorno Karabakh from a looming ethnic cleansing campaign — was answered by Azerbaijan with riots and pogroms directed against the substantial ethnic Armenian population living in Azerbaijan's cities of Sumgait and Kirovabad in 1988-89, and, later, in Baku, in 1990.[1]

Despite the fact that the city of Sumgait was located hundreds of miles away from Nagorno Karabakh and was not related to it in any way, Azeri nationalists decided to teach a bloody lesson to all ethnic Armenians, wherever they resided in Azerbaijan. The message of the "lesson" was brutally simple and in line with the brinkmanship-driven logic of Azeri nationalism: any attempts of Armenians in Azerbaijan to speak for their political rights will be punished severely and immediately.

The marauding bands of Azeris, armed with makeshift weapons, ransacked Armenian homes, beating and killing the residents under the direct supervision and direction of the municipal authorities of Sumgait. It was a drawn-out, low-tech butchery, much of it perpetrated with knives and iron rods, and the killers often interrupted their work to rape and torture their victims. The legacy of the 1905 pogroms, the September 1918 slaughter of 30,000 Armenians of Baku and the March 1920 annihilation of 20,000 Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh's former capital of Shushi by Azeri and Turkish forces was revived in Azerbaijan.

The February 1988 massacre of Armenians in Sumgait was the first episode of mass ethnic violence in the Soviet history. This Azeri-perpetrated murder of hundreds of civilians — mainly women and the elderly — also resurrected the memories of the 1915 Genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, in which more than 1.5 million Armenians perished and the West Armenian heartland was erased from the face of the earth. The chauvinistic debauchery in Azerbaijan displaced over 370,000 people — approximately 80% of all Armenians residing in Soviet Azerbaijan. Thus, half-a-million-strong native communities of the historical Armenian provinces of Utik and Paitakaran, which made up part of today's Azerbaijan in the past and existed as flourishing civilizations two millennia before the first proto-Azeri infiltrators first appeared there uninvited, were uprooted and destroyed.[2]

While the Azeri response to Armenian petitions to Moscow was unexpectedly violent, neither the September 1987 Azeri pogrom in Azerbaijan's Armenian-populated town of Chardakhly nor the February 1988 massacre of Armenians in Sumgait was followed by any retaliatory acts directed against ethnic Azeris who resided in the Armenian SSR. For more than a year Armenians showed restraint, well-documented and praised by all leading Soviet human rights defenders and NGOs (e.g. Academician Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, parliamentarian Galina Starovoitova, the Memorial Group, etc.). It was not until late November 1988 when another — a much larger and state-coordinated — wave of expulsions and massacres of Armenians in the rural areas of Azerbaijan, city of Kirovabad, and Nakhichevani ASSR eventually built up a counter-reaction, resulting in the migration of Azeris from Armenia.

Only Nagorno Karabakh managed to withstand the ordeal as it resorted to self-defense measures. However, by 1994 when the Armenian-Azeri truce was signed, 3/4 of Nagorno Karabakh's territory was already in ruins. It is notable that the Azeri yearlong aerial and artillery bombardment of Nagorno Karabakh's capital Stepanakert, which turned that city of 50,000 into the piles of smoldering rubble, the shelling of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and the siege of the town of Vukovar in Croatia pursued similar goals and employed the same combat techniques.

When Karabakhi Armenian forces launched a major counter-offensive in 1992 in order to break a stranglehold that the Azerbaijani Army kept around the region between 1990 and 1992, they were not particularly motivated to persuade panicking Azeri civilians, residing in Karabakh and surrounding areas, not to leave their settlements. However, Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army's military personnel provided medical assistance and forage to Azeri civilians wherever it was possible. This in contrast to the Azerbaijani Army, which usually spearheaded all retreat operations, leaving needy Azeri civilians behind its fleeing troops.

The retreat of Azeri tribesmen from Nagorno Karabakh and adjacent regions was a sad event as was the earlier mass expulsion of Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh and other parts of Soviet Azerbaijan. However, international experts agree that while there exists well-documented evidence of the systematic deportation of Kosovo Albanians and Karabakhi Armenians, the return of Azeri colonists from Nagorno Karabakh to the plains of Central Azerbaijan was not part of any predetermined plan of the Karabakh's Armenian leadership but was the result of a spontaneous panic reaction.[3] The Karabakhi Armenians, in contrast to the Yugoslav case, had no organizational and material resources to round up and expel the population of entire regions as was done in Kosovo. In Nagorno Karabakh, the local population mobilized to repel the aggression of the overwhelming Azerbaijani Army.

Azeris — tribal newcomers from the Central Asian steppes — are naturally-born vulgar Realists, and being strategic in most aspects of life is part of their identity. The petroleum-lubricated Azerbaijani propaganda machine was quick to concoct the myth of the "expulsion" of Azeris, a hoax created to mislead international public opinion and cover up the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Azerbaijani Army and Azeri "Grey Wolves" (Bozkurt) neo-fascist paramilitaries against the Armenian population of Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh.[4] The agitators from Baku try to gloss over the fact that ethnic Azeris in the regions around Nagorno Karabakh are either nomads or recently settled former nomads, for whom seasonal migrations are tightly connected with their lifestyle, economic activities and ethnic identity. 

The fact is that in the beginning of March 1988 about 50,000 Azeris easily left Armenia in a matter of days, prematurely fearing Armenian retaliation for the Sumgait massacre of Armenians in Azerbaijan, which took place from 26-28 February 1988. Not surprising, the overwhelming majority of these ethnic Azeri migrants came back to Armenia one month later, in April, with the same ease, when it became clear that the Armenians were devoid of any vengeful moods directed against them. This demonstrates the quasi-nomadic mentality is still deeply rooted in the Azeri psyche. For instance, the traditionally high territorial mobility of Azeris, who were repeatedly encouraged by Baku authorities to move to Nagorno Karabakh in order to change its ethnic composition, was used as a tool of ethno-demographic warfare waged by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh in Soviet times.

In a similar fashion, panicking Azeris left Lachin, Kelbajar and other regions in and around Nagorno Karabakh as the first sounds of remote battles, far behind the mountains, worried them about a possible spillover of military operations to the places of their current presence. Most of them deserted their seasonal spring-summer hamlets in the mountainous pastures of western Azerbaijan, known as yailaghs, for the safer wintertime villages located in the steppes of central Azerbaijan, and known as gishlags. Yailaghs and gishlags are "double" settlements, owned by the same people in two different parts of the country. Annual migrations from yailaghs to gishlags and back constitute the essence of the pastoral sector of economy of Azerbaijan and many other regions, including Central Asia, Azeris' former homeland. When Azeris fled the mountains for the plains, propagandists from Baku — in order to create an illusion of the "balance of suffering" between Armenians and Azeris — conveniently proclaimed many gishlags of central Azerbaijan as "refugee camps."

Observers indicate that the Azerbaijani government for propaganda purposes exploits at least two refugee clusters in the central part of Azerbaijan, in Bilyasuvar and Barda. While Baku is awash with its oil bonanza, the authorities in Baku deliberately deprive Azeri refugees in those clusters of essential amenities and punish those who demonstrate a willingness to renovate their decrepit cabins or move away to the other parts of the country in search of better life.[5] These government-styled "refugee camps," where the atmosphere of grief and deprivation is carefully cultivated for display, serve as venues of propaganda tours organized for Western journalists and politicians visiting Azerbaijan. The goal of the Azeri "refugee circus" in Bilyasuvar and Barda is twofold. First, to attract more humanitarian money to be later spilled into the laps of Azeri bureaucrats. And, second, to make political capital out of refugees by the imposition of a focused emotional impression on the visiting representatives of overseas political and business communities.

Meanwhile, official Baku continues to misreport on the total number of all refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Azerbaijan, rounding off their real number of roughly 630,000 — including Meskhetian Turk refugees from Central Asia and Azeri migrants from Georgia and Iran — to a much-touted but non-existent “One Million.” In both Armenia and Azerbaijan all IDPs and refugees together comprise the same portion of the general population, more specifically — around 10% in each republic.[6]  

The above estimates exist aside from the fact that approximately 115,000 victims of the Armenian Earthquake of 1988, when 25,000 people perished and one-fifth of the Armenian population became homeless, still live without any permanent shelter, trying to survive harsh winters without heat, electricity and water in their rusty tin bungalows. The devastating Azeri-Turkish blockade of all major transportation routes to Armenia, which began in July of 1989 and continues to date, prevents any meaningful reconstruction activity in the Earthquake Zone. In order to prompt Azerbaijan to lift its blockade against Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, the US Congress had to enact article 907 as part of the Freedom Support Act. Article 907 is intended to ban US governmental aid to Azerbaijan until Baku opens all transportation routes from Azerbaijan to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh.

Another hoax created by the Azeri propagandists is that the Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army "occupies" 20% of the territory of Azerbaijan. The armed forces of Karabakhi Armenians — not the Army of the Republic of Armenia — control approximately 8-9% of the territory of the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan for defense and security purposes. The territory of Nagorno Karabakh is excluded from the calculations, because, understandably, Nagorno Karabakh cannot occupy itself. But even if Nagorno Karabakh's territory is added to these 8-9%, the total area of the controlled zone does not exceed 13-14%. At the same time, the Azerbaijani Army captured and continues to hold up to 15% of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic's own territory (whole northern Shahumian district with its Getashen enclave, and eastern parts of Mardakert and Martuni districts).[7]

Ethnic Azeris left Armenia by selling or exchanging their flats with the smaller number of incoming Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. They also received compensation from the Armenian Government for the property they had lost to the tune of 110 million dollars. Unlike this, Armenian refugees who arrived in Armenia from Azerbaijan after the Sumgait and Baku massacres and hostilities in the rural Armenian-populated districts of Azerbaijan, received no compensation from the government in Baku, in spite of the fact that they could not sell their flats and in most cases left their property behind, the total value of which is estimated at 2 billion dollars.

It is notable that immediately following the deportation of Armenians, approximately 230,000 ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and Jews of Azerbaijan also left the country for good, succumbing to the pressure of re-energized Azeri chauvinism.

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The ethnic Armenians of Azerbaijan were not the only victims of ethnic cleansing organized by the Azeri-controlled state. Most Udins and Christian Tats were evicted from their ancestral homelands as well. The major "fault" of the deported was that they belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church, as did the primary targets of ethnic cleansing — Armenians. Yet, the deportation of the Udins had another important motive too. Udins (also called Udis) are the only direct descendants of the Aluanians, an ancient yet long-extinct group of tribes that in the past thought to inhabit the northern part of the present-day Azerbaijan. Sometimes Aluanians are also called "Caucasian Albanians" (no reference to European Albanians). 

Converted to Christianity by Armenian missionaries in the 5th century, Aluania/Caucasian Albania existed as a loose state nine hundred years before the first Turkic pastoral tribes — ancestors of today's Azeris — migrated en masse to the Caucasus from the Central Asian prairies, making indigenous Christians and Zoroastrians of the Caspian flee to the mountains. When Aluania disintegrated in the aftermath of the Arab invasion of the 7th-8th centuries, the smaller Udino-Armenian Principality of Nizh (Nidj) in a circumscribed form continued its political tradition.

However, in order to enrich Azerbaijan's thin historical record and justify the over-extension of its present territory, Azeri nationalist scholars in 1970s and 1980s tried to "expropriate" and attribute the cultural legacy of the Aluanians and their Udinian descendants to Azeris, amid surprise and indignation of international academic community. Azerbaijani historians produced histories of “Azerbaijan” based not on the historical facts of a prior national state(s) but on the assumption that the genealogy of the present-day Azerbaijani Republic could be traced in terms of putative ethnic-territorial continuity. 

Similarly, the history of the early medieval Christian commonwealth of Caucasian Aluania was assimilated by Azerbaijani historians into the history of the "Azerbaijani (Azeri)  nation," despite the absence of any linguistic and cultural similarities between the Caucasian Aluanians and the contemporary Azeris. In this way, cultural practices substantiated claims to ethnic continuity based on the modern form of the territorial national state. Painful and bizarre as it is, Azeris — yesterday's little-known maraudering vagrants from the Central Asia — are trying to pose as the descendants of older cultures of Christians and Zoroastrians of Southeastern Caucasus, whose flourishing civilizations in the not-so-remote past were crippled or even totally extinguished by the attacks of their predecessors. 

Motivated by the odd logic of ethnopolitics, the deportation of the Udins from Azerbaijan in autumn of 1989 was chiefly driven by a desire to eradicate the rival claimants to the Aluanian historical heritage. The Udinian and Tatian towns in Koutkashen, Vartashen, Sheqi, Shemakha and Ismailli regions were burned, their graveyards demolished, and churches ransacked. Rescued Udins found refuge in Armenia's Lori Province.

Conceived in an unpunished act of crime against humanity, in the beginning of the 20th century, Azerbaijani mini-empire to date bears in its structure a range of institutionalized genocidal predispositions towards its neighbors. Effectively, the oil-boosted mutant of Azerbaijan paved its short road to nationhood with the corpses of indigenous Christians of the Caucasus, destroying their civilizations and expropriating their lands in the process.