Ethnic War in the Caucasus Finds New Depths of Carnage

By Francis X.Clines, New York Times, March 8 1992

As Hadjayev Hakhverdy washes the corpses of gunshot children and mutiliated adults here at the valley mosque, all the despair and defeat of Azerbaijan seems at hand in his ministrations after four years of undeclared war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“I have cleaned 200 since Feb. 26,” said the mosque worker, aghast as he wrapped for burial another decapitated male corpse fresh from the war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, which appears to be setting new standards for carnage and vendetta. “Some are so broken, but we must bury them.”

Azerbaijan appears to be losing the communal war as Nagorno-Karabakh boils over once again and the Armenian majority in the enclave continues to prevail in its campaign to wrest total self-government from Azerbaijan. Government Collapses

The Azerbaijan Government in Baku was in a state of collapse this week because of the public’s outrage over its inability to protect the scores of Azerbaijanis killed in an Armenian guerrilla attack on Khojaly, a city 10 miles southwest of here offering control of the airport for the enclave’s capital, Stepanakert.

[ Ayaz Mutalibov, President of Azerbaijan, resigned Friday under criticism of his ability to control the violence in Nagorno-Karabakh.]

Survivors who crawled through the woods to this town just outside the enclave told of tank barrages, families destroyed by point-blank gunfire, of looting, rape and hostage taking. This is a plague of terrors heard as well from assaulted Armenian villages, but lately with heightened death tolls and heavier military assaults.

“We are defeated now,” said Elshad Gulayev, an Azerbaijan nationalist guerrilla who roams the front line of Azerbaijan villages surrounding the enclave, where tank, rocket and artillery barrages have become commonplace from Armenian points a half mile across the valley.

“But the Armenians can keep Karabakh only by killing our entire nation, all of Azerbaijan,” the guerrilla continued, furious after seeing this day’s fresh graves receive some of the seven victims of overnight fighting in neighboring villages along the Nagorno-Karabakh border.

“Help us get our corpses back,” a visitor was begged by Sadikhov Mushfig, a villager in Shaly. He gestured cautiously down into a pastoral-looking valley from behind an earthen redoubt blocking the road to the west toward the Armenian villages. Corpse-taking and mutilation are a special part of the war’s bitter vendetta. Calls for Retaliation

Politicians in Baku are under great pressure from the public’s anger and calls for retaliation. They are threatening to escalate the conflict further by using the freedom delivered through the collapse of the Soviet Union to build a republic army and fight back against the Armenian strongholds of the region, which lies midway between the Black and Caspian Seas.

“The Armenians are close to their goal,” said Seyavush Velimamenov, one of the Baku Government’s chief administrators in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. “They have pushed the Azerbaijan population from Nagorno-Karabakh. The point to remember, however, is that all this fighting is taking place on Azerbaijan territory, our sacred land where we once befriended the Armenians. Let me tell you, Azerbaijan will find the force and courage to defend this land.”

Azerbaijan officials who once counted on Soviet troops to support their political control over the enclave charged that some of the soldiers became mercenaries and joined the Armenians in the Khojaly raid as the politics of the collapsed union drastically readjust.

Increasingly, the Baku Government is trying to broaden the issue and draw the Bush Administration in, after previously insisting it was a purely internal matter. Azerbaijan contends that “the Armenian lobby”
in the United States has swayed the White House and bankrolled the Armenian guerrillas in the conflict, in which an estimated 2,000 civilians have been killed on both sides in the last four years. The Bush Administration has begun to move warily into the evolving politics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. But when Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d recently made an ambitious barnstorming tour of the republics, he made a point of stressing that the White House had no intention of getting involved in any way in the Lebanon-like dilemma of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its gnarled politics.

Republic officials in Baku now concede that they are down to their last holdout city in the enclave. It is Shusha, a traditional mountain redoubt, the last of 54 communities once populated by Azerbaijanis, who have fled by the tens of thousands to sanctuary in the greater Azerbaijan republic.

Threatened Armenian villagers similarly have been put to flight in the last few years of vicious cut-and-thrust raids in which the picturesque mountains have reverberated with crossed choruses demanding revenge. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan lay claim to the autonomous region.

More than 120,000 Armenians live in the territory, which was accorded a separate status within Azerbaijan in 1923. Under the greater freedoms of the Gorbachev era, Armenians agitated for full ties with the Armenian republic, but Azerbaijan sought to stiffen its control.

New revenge raids by Azerbaijanis were already reported this week in Armenian villages as Baku officials feared the ultimate step in the territorial conflict: the attempt to create a corridor linking Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, which are only a few miles apart at the enclave’s southwest tip.

Armenia has denied any direct strategic involvement in the struggle of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, but its public and politicians are no less assertive about the region than Azerbaijan. Armenia thus far has no plans for a separate army, preferring to share the protection of formerly Soviet units inherited by the new Commonwealth of Independent States.

Last year, it was Armenia’s turn to bear the brunt of outrage. Its own village guerrillas in Nagorno-Karabakh were brutally moved out of outlying regions by Azerbaijan officials who still had the force of Soviet troops to exercise Azerbaijan’s political mandate over the enclave.

But the balance has shifted with the Soviet collapse, and a complex new world of post-Communist politics is being defined in the Caucasus.
Azerbaijan, a predominantly Islamic republic, accuses the Russian Government of turning 180 degrees and using some remaining Soviet troops to fight on the side of Armenia, which is largely Christian.

Such powerful neighbors as Turkey and Iran are closely watching the struggle over the enclave with rival sympathies. They, in turn, are being watched by Western diplomats trying to estimate the larger regional implications for the future.

Some Russian soldiers have come forward to back Azerbaijan’s claims about their units’ pro-Armenian involvement. But partisanship is denied by the Russian Government of President Boris N. Yeltsin. He has again called for mediation but, like President Bush, appears wary of being heavily drawn into the internecine conflict. Using New Freedoms

A new part of the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh is that the freedom accruing from the collapse of Soviet dictatorship is being used to deepen the conflict. No apologies are offered even for the death of children.

“They came into our house and told us to run or we’d be burned alive,”
said Akhmed Memedev, an 11-year-old refugee from the Khojaly raid who described being shot in the hand in a spray of marauders’ bullets.
“They broke everything we had and threw a grenade that wounded my big brother and my mother.”

“I saw Natavan Usubovan die with her mother from another grenade,”
said the boy, referring to a 4-year-old girl.

The boy, lying in a makeshift hospital bed in a railroad train, did not directly answer the question of whether he might some day like to join the Azerbaijan guerrillas. “If the Armenians could suffer like this, they would not have done it,” he said.

Source: The New York Times
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D9153DF93BA35750C0A9649

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