TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012990/01290012.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.8 KB | 236 lines

                ^¥_                                                          WORLD, Page 30

SOVIET UNION

The Killing Zone


Faced with ethnic savagery, Moscow moves to crush the militants

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by John Kohan/Moscow


    "Don't believe the reports that only 50 have died. The
number is not less than 1,000."

    "They raped 90-year-old women and flung children from
balconies."

    "This is no ethnic clash. It is genocide."

    "It shouldn't be called perestroika [restructuring]. It
should be called perestrelka [cross fire]."

    Or perhaps grazhdanskaya voina -- civil war. That certainly
was how the hostilities were seen by the 13,000 Armenians who
were forced to flee their homes in the embattled southern
republic of Azerbaijan last week, first crossing the Caspian Sea
by ferry to Turkmenistan, then flying on to Moscow or the
Armenian capital of Yerevan. Many of those who landed in Moscow
huddled around the building that houses Armenia's
representational office, transforming the quiet street into an
encampment of shock, grief and rage. As a refugee put it, "What
civilized country would allow its own people to be murdered?"

    Moscow's failure to grasp the potency of the ethnic
antagonisms in Azerbaijan became shockingly apparent as
festering tensions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis erupted
into the worst known outbreak of violence in the Soviet Union
since World War II. But what began as an ethnic blood feud
quickly turned into a popular revolt against Soviet rule.

    In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, crowds blockaded the
Communist Party headquarters and the republic's television
studio, while impassioned speakers called for the secession of
Azerbaijan and its reunification with regions of northern Iran
in a single Islamic state. Demonstrators aligned with a group
identified as the National Front Defense Committee used buses
and trucks to barricade streets and keep troops from entering
the city. Along the southern frontier with Iran, the scene of
nationalist protests earlier this month, thousands of
Azerbaijanis illegally crossed to the other side and staged
rallies calling for a joint struggle to liberate
Nagorno-Karabakh.

    After hesitating for four days, the Kremlin was finally
compelled, in the words of the official news agency TASS, "to
take the measure of last resort" and declare a state of
emergency. Early Saturday morning, Soviet troops stormed the
center of Baku in tanks and armored cars, smashing through
makeshift barricades of buses and trucks. The troops exchanged
fire with extremists, armed with submachine guns and sniper
rifles. Eyewitnesses described streets awash with "pools of
blood" and corpses strewn on the road to the highway; there were
even unconfirmed reports that Soviet tanks had opened fire on
the demonstrators.

    Popular Front activists put the minimum death toll at 120,
but during a hastily called press conference in Moscow, First
Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh claimed that 40
civilians and eight soldiers had been killed. The troops moved
quickly to secure party headquarters and the republic's
television studio, while military officials appealed over the
radio for order. The Popular Front responded by calling for
three days of mourning and a three-day strike in an effort to
mobilize the public against the state of emergency. A fragile
calm settled over the city, but neither side pretended that
peace would last for long.

    On Saturday evening a grim-faced President Mikhail
Gorbachev appeared on nationwide TV to defend the crackdown.
Noting that two years of negotiations to resolve the conflict
between the Azerbaijanis and Armenians had failed, he said
flatly, "This had to stop." Yet many Soviets wondered why
Gorbachev let the ethnic violence spin out of control last week
before sending in troops. At the same time, there was an uneasy
feeling that the country's army might find itself bogged down
in another Afghanistan, within its own borders, fighting a
people just as ferociously dedicated to defeating Moscow. Those
fears were illustrated last week when the Kremlin called up
army reservists; after a public outcry, the term of service was
shortened.

    The matchstick that ignited the powder was struck the
previous Saturday when a rally, staged in Baku by Azerbaijanis
demanding independence from the Soviet Union, gave way to
anti-Armenian rioting. Marauding bands of Azerbaijanis armed
with guns and makeshift weapons ransacked Armenian homes,
beating and sometimes killing the residents. Within days,
vigilante groups from both sides were organized and dispatched
to assist their ethnic brethren in the contested autonomous
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and along the border with Armenia.

    Initially Moscow declared a state of emergency in parts of
Azerbaijan, banning strike actions, rallies and demonstrations;
inexplicably the restrictions did not extend to Baku. Then the
Kremlin dispatched 11,000 troops from the army, the navy, the
KGB and the Interior Ministry to assist the nearly 6,000 troops
already in the region.

    Through the week, as Azerbaijanis put up ferocious
resistance, blockading roads and railways and sabotaging
waterlines, the number of troops and police cadets swelled to
29,000. At first, government forces were told to exercise
"maximum restraint." But when Azerbaijani militants turned on
the soldiers, troops were instructed to fire in self-defense and
to protect army weapons caches. Foreign Ministry spokesman
Gennadi Gerasimov said the conflict was "almost civil war."

    Some Azerbaijanis and Armenians snatched whatever they
could find to mount their attacks: pitchforks, metal bars,
hunting weapons. However, the arsenal quickly expanded to
include such armaments as surface-to-surface missiles and rocket
launchers after extremists in both republics stormed military
depots and police stations to pillage arms. Many of the
combatants are veterans of the war in Afghanistan and know how
to use sophisticated weaponry. "I fought in Afghanistan," said
an army helicopter pilot. "I know what combat experience is, and
it looks like those guys have it."

    The official press reported that in one incident alone in
Armenia's Artashat region, some 3,000 people raided police
headquarters and seized 106 automatic weapons, 30 carbines and
more than 3,200 cartridges. In the Azerbaijani city of
Kirovabad, extremists stormed the local agricultural institute,
capturing 80 automatic guns, two machine guns and 27 rifles with
bayonets.

    Most mysterious was the appearance of orange helicopters
without identification marks that suddenly materialized from the
hills of the Shaumyan and Khanlar regions outside
Nagorno-Karabakh and strafed Azerbaijani villages with gunfire
and even rockets. The government daily Izvestia ominously
reported that there was evidence of preparations to smuggle a
large batch of weapons and ammunition across the border from
Iran.

    Through it all, Gorbachev gamely struggled to maintain an
appearance of normality. Just back from his vexing three-day
visit to Lithuania, where he failed to persuade nationalists to
curb their secessionist demands, he aimed to project the air of
a competent crisis manager. He received former Japanese Foreign
Minister Shintaro Abe and met with U.N. Secretary-General Javier
Perez de Cuellar, who encountered protesters in Moscow holding
up signs that read GORBACHEV, HISTORY WILL NOT FORGIVE YOU FOR
THE BLOODSHED IN AZERBAIJAN.

    At a Kremlin conference on Friday, Gorbachev described the
combatants as "a handful of militants, irresponsible adventurers
and shadow economy dealers" and cast the conflict partly as an
effort to undermine his policies. "Perestroika is like a thorn
in their flesh," he said. "They are unable to launch a frontal
attack on it, so they cling to tension on an ethnic basis."

    The most recent round of fighting began in February 1988,
when ethnic hatreds erupted in the port town of Sumgait, north
of Baku, resulting in an official death count of 32, most of
them Armenians. Over the next two years, more than 220,000
Armenians fled Azerbaijan. Those who remained behind in the
disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh have lived under a virtual
state of siege, relying on supplies airlifted from Armenia. Last
month the Supreme Soviet voted to return administrative control
over the region to the Azerbaijanis. Enraged, the Armenian
parliament voted two weeks ago to include Nagorno-Karabakh in
its next five-year economic plan, a move that may have prompted
Azerbaijanis to seize government buildings in the Caspian Sea
port of Lenkoran.

    Although most of the 220,000 Armenians living in Baku fled
after the 1988 pogrom in Sumgait, up to 20,000 Armenians still
remained. But even as their numbers shrank, Azerbaijani refugees
flooded the city. Most of them were unemployed farmers and
goatherds who claimed they had been chased from Armenia. These
130,000 new Azerbaijani settlers transformed the once
cosmopolitan capital into a city ringed with slums and squatter
districts. Their simmering rage against the Armenians triggered
the riots that led to last week's battles.

    Moscow gave the impression that it had been caught
unawares, but it might be more accurate to say that officials
turned a blind eye. Last August, for instance, the Central
Committee responded to peaceful protests in the Baltics with
stern warnings. But the simultaneous railroad blockade of
Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis met with official
silence. Armenian activists in Moscow claim that in the weeks
leading up to the crisis, they bombarded Gorbachev, the KGB and
the Interior Ministry with telegrams and letters warning of an
imminent war.

    That hesitation was in part due to Moscow's fear of
repeating last April's crackdown in the republic of Georgia,
which resulted in 20 deaths. It also stemmed from the absence of
any clear signal from the Azerbaijani government that it wanted
assistance. Local authorities have been paralyzed in recent
months by strikes, blockades and rallies, all but ceding power
to the Azerbaijani Popular Front. This movement, founded by
intellectuals calling for greater autonomy, soon attracted the
loyalty of the seething Azerbaijani refugees. Now the
intellectuals have been eclipsed by the militants, who find the
answer to their ancient enmities in violence.

    As yet, Gorbachev's determination to finally act has met
with no resistance outside the contested republics. His
proclaimed state of emergency received a sympathetic endorsement
from Washington and was warmly applauded in Moscow. But even if
Russians, and Soviets elsewhere, accept Gorbachev's crackdown
in the Caucasus, they are not likely to forget their own
demands, whether they concern self- determination or soap on the
shelves.