Case Study in Ethnic Strife: Without Rules or Pity

David Rieff

From Foreign Affairs, March/ April 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 4,520 words total.

Summary:  Like Bosnia, Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority enclave deep in Azerbaijan, has seen civil war, ethnic cleansing, and a million people made refugees. Living without a peace agreement, this statelet no one recognizes is mired in communal grievances and nationalism, as is the entire region. One almost longs for a return of the Soviet Union and its rhetoric of friendship between peoples. Karabakhis are discovering that nationalism cannot power an economy and that ethnic identity is a poor foundation for a state.

David Rieff, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West.

The austere beauty of the mountains surrounding Stepanakert does little to relieve the morose atmosphere. Long a provincial town with an ethnic Armenian majority deep in western Azerbaijan, Stepanakert now styles itself the capital of the independent Armenian Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. But not even Armenia, which urged Nagorno-Karabakh's secession and supported it in the subsequent war with Azerbaijan, recognizes the enclave as a state. After almost seven years of violence and another two under a shaky cease-fire, the enclave's economy is deteriorating and the population is declining. This has done little to mitigate the sense of ethnic grievance and nationalism that prevails in the mountain fastness of High Karabakh.

Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians had agitated for autonomy for decades before declaring independence in July 1988 as the Kremlin's hold over the Soviet Union slipped. (The 1989 Soviet census in the enclave showed a population about three-quarters Armenian and one-quarter Azeri.) That February, some 30 ethnic Armenians had been killed in a pogrom in Sumgait, and more would die later that year in Baku, the capital, and other towns in Azerbaijan outside Nagorno-Karabakh; the government of Azerbaijan probably encouraged the massacres, and certainly did little to prevent them. When the enclave seceded, Baku sent police commandos to suppress the Armenian militants. By 1991 Nagorno-Karabakh was at war. Three years later, Karabakhi fighters, supported by Armenian regular troops and Russian advisers, had routed Azerbaijani forces far superior in number. Not only had the Karabakhis gained control of the enclave's 1,700 square miles, but they had seized territory beyond its borders amounting to approximately ten percent of the rest of Azerbaijan.

Some 25,000 people died in the fighting, according to Human Rights WatchffiHelsinki, and indiscriminate shelling of civilians, hostage-taking, and torture of prisoners were reported on both sides. A December 1994 cease-fire has brought no peace agreement. The initial massacres led about 400,000 ethnic Armenians to flee Azerbaijan proper. The war also uprooted some 700,000 ethnic Azeris, Kurds, and others from Armenia, captured areas of Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh; all 40,000 Azeris in the enclave, a quarter of the population, fled or were expelled. Those refugees have since been living in camps in Azerbaijan.

Even though 20,000 Karabakhi Armenians are under arms, there is little trace of fighting today in Stepanakert. Its apartment blocks and low houses are dusty and rundown and water and electricity are scarce, but such is the case in many other remote, impoverished corners of the former Soviet Union, including most of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The fa ades bearing shrapnel marks and the occasional building gutted by rocket fire look as if they were damaged long ago. Neighboring Susa, overwhelmingly Azeri before the war, is now a ghost town, the Armenian church steeple rising over the ruined mosque. But in the nearby capital, as throughout Nagorno-Karabakh, the overall impression is of dilapidation, not war.

ENEMIES EVERYWHERE

Rebuilding and refurbishing is going on in the would-be capital of Stepanakert, at least among the grim official buildings around the ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,520 words total.