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The National Reawakening of Azerbaijan
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20127 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
2,641 Words |
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David Nissman
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Had the Armenian-Azeri ethnic conflict not dominated other events over the last four years, a two-week long mass meeting in Baku in November and December of 1988 would have clearly marked the beginning of the end of Soviet rule in Azerbaijan. Originally conceived as a demonstration to protest Armenia's expulsion of Azeri Turks and the Armenian claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, the range of topics broached by one impassioned orator after another expanded to include violations of Azerbaijan's sovereignty, the state-sponsored neglect of the Azerbaijani language, the crimes of Stalin, the incompetence of the Communist Party apparatus, the suppression of Islam, and the exploitation of Azerbaijan's natural resources.
Half a million people took part in the meeting and remained in Baku's Lenin Square for two weeks. In the first week of the demonstration the government imposed a "special situation," giving the MVD the authority to make arrests with out warrants and hold detainees for 30 days without bringing charges. By the end of November, the government conceded that these measures were ineffective. It also became known that as of December 1, 55,000 Azeri refugees had been expelled from their traditional homelands in Armenia, losing their lands, their livelihoods, and their homes. As the mass meeting began to wind down, there were those in the crowd who unfurled the banner of Islam, raised posters featuring the Ayatollah Khomeini, and flew the flag of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which had been founded in Azerbaijan in 1918, and ceased to exist in April 1920 with the arrival of Soviet power in Baku. Two weeks after the demonstrations began; the remnants of state authority were able to clear Lenin Square "for sanitary reasons."
Not even the most prescient of press commentators realized that this event marked the end of Moscow's domination of the region. It also marked the beginning of national reawakening in Azerbaijan and the restoration of political pluralism and democratic traditions, which had been lost in 1920. Of more immediate effect, it was a phase in an intensifying territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which has resulted (at the end of 1991) in the expulsion of a quarter of a million Azeris from Armenia, and of about the same number of Armenians form Azerbaijan. Moscow's inability, or unwillingness, to help resolve the claims and counterclaims that characterize this long-lived dispute between two neighboring peoples only served to strengthen the growing nationalist forces in the southern Caucasus.
The Azerbaijan Popular
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