A Report from Our Correspondents in Nagorno-Karabakh
Original Source: Izvestiia, 24 March 1988.
It so happened that a group of us journalists from the central newspapers, arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh when the main events in this small autonomous oblast and its center, Stepanakert, seemed to have passed. When we set off on this assignment we had no advance plan, no preconceived assessments or prescriptions; we had set ourselves a single task: to be objective, to avoid any one-sidedness or prejudice. Incidentally, there was one thing that we agreed on in advance: caution! For even harsh if objective assessment by an outsider can offend and set off an unpredictable reaction.
The first thing we heard from almost everyone whom we were able to talk to was complaints about the press: Why is coverage of events here so meager? Meager or one-sided.
“What is there to prevent you from speaking the truth?” people demanded of us.
In theory, nothing. The truth, to put it briefly, is that over two weeks in February big demonstrations were held here in the oblast center day and night. The main slogan was to transfer the NKAO (the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast) from the Azerbaijan SSR to the neighboring Armenian SSR. A multitude of grounds for doing so were cited: socioeconomic, ethnic, cultural and historical. …
Demonstrations like those in Karabakh but even bigger were also held in Erevan. Special committees were set up both there and here. The committee in Erevan is called “Karabakh,” and the one in Stephanakert is called “Krunk,” which means “crane”,ãa symbol of homesickness. Both there and here along with the main slogan, about the status of the NKAO, there were slogans in support of perestroika, glasnost’, democratization, and the friendship of peoples.
In fact however, both perestroika and the friendship of these two neighboring peoples, Armenians and Azerbaijanis suffered serious trials during these days.
To begin with, in Azerbaijan reaction to the very posing of the question of transferring the NKAO to its neighbors was unlike that in Armenia: what are we, not a sovereign republic? And when talking, groups of Azerbaijanis who had listened to the rumors of provocateurs moved out of Karabakh and a number of radons of Armenia, going to Azerbaijan to “seek salvation,” word of some kind of “Armenian threat” arose. Then in Sumgait events took a turn that required troops be moved in. Now order has been restored there and, as the procurator of the USSR has recently reported, the guilty are being found. These tragic events have yet to be described.
Tens of dead, many wounded and arrested, and Armenian refugees from Sumgait now, abandoning homes, school, and jobs. Add to that the general shock felt by the population of both republics, and add too that a number of enterprises are not yet able to regain a normal work rhythm. That’s what the truth is.
But for us who do the writing, the difficulty is not in telling the truth, but in that not everyone likes the truth. And that the same facts are evaluated differently in Erevan and in Baku, regarded differently in Stepanakert and in the neighboring radons of Azerbaijan.
One of our very first meetings in Stepanakert was with a large group of Party and government workers, journalists, and teachers from a pedagogical institute. What they shared with us, passionately and with conviction, about the problems that had built up in Nagorno-Karabakh could be put in a few words: “It hurt.”
On the way here, when we asked the responsible comrades in Baku at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan what they thought had brought up the question of changing the autonomous oblast’s status, they explained that the issue in principle did not exist. Or if it did exist, they said, it was created by the intrigues of subversive centers abroad that are trying to play the Armenian national card.
We are not going to argue. For some people abroad the events surrounding Karabakh are an outright gift, making easy propaganda for a while. But frankly speaking, is it someone’s intriguing that schools here in the NKAO have two Armenian language textbooks for the entire class? No, it is the result of the “farsightedness” of certain republic organs. The history of the Armenian people has been removed from the curriculum of the schools here and the question of constructing a television relay station so that Erevan programs can be received in NagornoKarabakh, already decided in principle, has been impossibly dragged out. Who thought to draw up the documents so that the deputies’ credentials and passports of local Armenians contain not a single word in Armenian? Maybe this was done in the struggle against manifestations of nationalism?
Why, we were asked later, does every visit by a touring group from Armenia, which, let us note, is just a few kilometers from here, always have to be cleared with Baku? And why is it impossible even to hire a nurse in a polyclinic here m the autonomous oblast without approval again from Baku?
The list of economic, social, and other distortions which they cited seemed endless. It must be noted that the problems mentioned are much like those of the deep provinces everywhere, and not just national provinces. On one hand, we can see here the center’s old habit of taking a free ride on the provinces, taking more from them than it provides for development; on the other hand, the rights of local, oblast organs are extremely limited. Such relations are in themselves very outdated; the local soviets have to be given more rights and more real power. On national soil, as there is in our concrete instance, proscribed rights are not merely an obstacle to development but grounds for offense. We see this as the main real aspect of the problem here.
Of course, it is a pity that the oblast and republic leaders permitted all this. What is worse, even today, they try to present matters as if the NKAO lives better than other regions in Azerbaijan and that, as they said, there is no problem here.
The processes permitted by the leadership of the republic and the oblast gradually found interpreters, and even directors outside the Party and government organs Alongside them, under their noses. Visitors from Erevan frequented Nagorno Karabakh. Letters were drafted, signatures were collected, and delegations were sent to Moscow to get support there for the idea of uniting the NKAO with Armenia. Rumors were circulated that Moscow was nearly “in favor” of it, just that the demand had to be firmer.
Then around 10 February, the process that had long been gathering strength found an outlet, on the square in front of the Party obkom. The number of people going there increased; first they came in small groups, then in entire shops, departments and classes. The speakers and slogans succeeded one another, but the main slogan was still the same: “Karabakh.”
Nevertheless, there are also questions that were not discussed there in the square. And which we understood that the people we spoke with did not much like. Such as, for instance, what would be the specific advantages if the NKAO were transferred to Armenia? Have they been calculated, and by whom? Has any account been taken of what this would mean for neighbors, for their interests, and for the country in general?
To which we heard the answer, how can this all be reduced to some kind of numbers and calculations when we are talking about something sacred!
We are aware of how easy it is to offend the people we were speaking with in this matter. Nevertheless, doesn’t the new situation in society make it possible to solve the problems of the NKAO, including that of restoring links with Armenia, without the radical demand to your neighbors, “Get out of the way!”
“We are in favor of friendship with them,” they tried to convince us.
True, there were slogans about friendship there in the square, eternal friendship at that. But one question: was there even one Azerbaijani at those demonstrations? Did any Azerbaijani speak? After all, the Azerbaijanis are still one-fourth of the population of the NKAO. They make up a similar proportion of the oblast Soviet of People’s Deputies. Or does the issue so widely aired at the rallies not concern them? Or do they not care whether they, along with their homes, land, and livestock, are transferred to the neighboring republic or left as they are?
When we asked about this, we got a strange answer:
“What’s that got to do with it?”
And anyway, why were we asking such questions? Because we had come via Baku, where of course they had time, you could tell!, to get us “on the Azerbaijani side”!
To be frank, these demands that we only listen to them, believe only them, disturbed us and jibed poorly both with their assurances of friendship with their neighbors and with our understanding of the norms of democracy and justice.
People tried to prove that it is enough merely to explain to Azerbaijanis that transfer of the NKAO to Armenia will leave them no worse. Just that. Not ask them, but explain to them. But how could the Azerbaijanis accept this explanation? Wouldn’t they have their own answers, also of substance? And what then?
Another detail was missing from the accounts by participants in February’s events, and no small one: how went the session of the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast Soviet, the people in the square had demanded. That is, they told us about the clumsy attempts from on high to block the session, and how the chairman of the oblast executive committee of the Party “lost” his seal, so the results of the vote remained “uncertified,” which certain people now take advantage of to declare the vote illegal. All that is true. But, we repeat, there is one detail missing from the accounts, that, angered by the very fact the question had been raised, the Azerbaijam deputies did not even vote.
“And so?” the people we spoke with blazed. “The majority still voted yes!”
You cannot answer all questions with arithmetic. After all there is another body the USSR Constitution says must examine the question, the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan. You cannot get around it; its prerogatives, just like those of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR and the supreme soviets of all our republics, are defined by fundamental law of the Soviet Union. Law and democracy are to be respected in its form. But in response we hear something very strange indeed from our Armenian comrades:
“Then we will hand in our Party cards!” A. Lachichan, a retired lieutenant colonel and member of “Krunk,” declared. A natural question: What will become of those who wish to keep their Party cards? But natural questions prompted an unnatural reaction.
“There will be no such people!”
So democracy means … everything is known in advance!
“Guerrilla warfare will begin!” another “Krunk” activist, G. Grigorian, senior lecturer at the Stepanakert Pedagogical Institute predicted.
Against whom?
“If there’s no Karabakh, we don’t want any perestroika,” he was echoed in Erevan by S. Khanzadian. A writer. A Hero of Labor.
Yet after all this they protest the use of the word “extremism” about them in the mass media, demand that the press be boycotted as a sign of protest, and declare TASS and the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting to be “criminal organizations,” as “Karabakh” leader I. Muradian did, when he called for new strikes. But if that isn’t extremism, what is?
There is something else that must be said. Officially the “Krunk” society has no political goals. It has announced what might be called research and educational projects, studying the history of the region, its links with Armenia, restoring ancient monuments. But in fact it leaders, operating in the name of the people, try to dictate their will to Party, government, and economic bodies in the oblast, as though the people there in the square gave them a “mandate” to do anything they wish. Some oi them get so carried away that the word “Karabakh” itself is disappearing from their speeches, replaced by demands to “demote” some leaders and promote others – their place.
There is something else that is disturbing. Demonstrating, the city did not work for two weeks. The shortfall in the work of the enterprises has caused a long chain of disruptions for partners throughout the country. What does all this have in common with perestroika and its goals? Who benefits if all the well-known and in many respects common problems of two neighboring Transcaucasian republics simultaneously seem to vanish, reduced to a single problem of territory? A disputed problem. A dead problem. Whose hands does this play into?
We have discussed only a few of the tight “knots” tangling this region.
Today they are common knowledge. And we all seem to realize that untying them requires time and common effort, patience and tolerance, wisdom and deliberation at every step, every word. People of different ages, professions, and nationalities, in Erevan, in Sumgait, and in Stepanakert talked about this with all their passions, their varying views and assessments. Today the whole country is watching here, waiting and hoping that emotions will abate and common sense will prevail, reflecting the whole experience of our multinational people. We are certain that it will.
The reader may properly ask, what specifically is proposed for solving the accumulated problems? There will be a piece about this in one of the next issues of the paper.
S. Dardykin, R. Lynev
Source: Soviet Multinational State: readings and documents, ed. Martha B. Olcott with Lubomyr Hajda and Anthony Olcott. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1990.