The late 80s of the twentieth century brought to the international surface the conflict that was hidden for long in the secret files of the USSR, opposing Armenians and Azerbaijanis on the mountainous agricultural strategic region of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known by Artsakh. An old thorny dispute that goes back, in the modern era, to the year 1923, date in which the martyred Armenia of the Ottoman epoch adhered to the Soviet Union to become one of its republics, thinking that the country can escape, in this way, to the Turkish danger that was threatening it.
The memory of the terrible massacres of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, perpetrated by the Turks and their allies, was, at the time, still fresh in the minds of the Armenian people who were seeking refuge from the sanguinary colonizing ardours of its Turkish neighbour and its regional and international partners. Thus, Armenia thought finding its safety in being part of the body of the ethnic and industrial giant, born in 1917, during the Bolshevik revolution, under the name of the Soviet Union.
However, the new emerging communist superpower, which priority was to secure its borders with its neighbors, gave, without having the right, certain Armenian territories, the most important among them is Artsakh, to the Muslim Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan country and, in the same time, one of the main allies of Turkey in the region. By acting so, the Soviet Union was aiming to appeal to the newly comer to the power after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the legendary Turkish Leader, Kemal Atatürk.
Armenians, mostly farmers, living in this fertile region of Caucasia that extends over an area of approximately 4400 km2, which name in Armenian, Karabakh, means “the black garden” as a reference to the color of its dark fertile lands, suffered from their new status imposed to them by the Soviet Union for strategic purposes. Therefore, they multiplied, for nearly a quarter of a century, the complaints to Moscow demanding their incorporation into their homeland, Armenia.
The Armenians of Karabakh invoked, among the arguments of their complaints, the cultural discrimination and the economic abandonment in which Azerbaijan was leaving this strategic region rich in natural resources and formerly only populated by Armenians. Though, with its new status, as an autonomous region within the Republic of Azerbaijan, Karabakh received the migration of a growing population of Azerbaijanis who settled on its territory to reach, at the end of the 80s of the last century, the number 40,000 Azeris against 145,000 Armenians. These dramatic demographic changes in the region made the Armenians believe in an Azerbaijani ploy to legitimize the annexation of Karabakh to the Republic of Azerbaijan.
On its part, Moscow used to ignore, for decades, the Armenian complaints that accumulated. And under the enormous pressures of the various Soviet regimes that succeeded in power for about 60 years, the Armenians opted for the silence while waiting for a favorable opportunity to plead their cause and recover their rights.
The coming of Gorbachev to power, by the end of the 80s of the last century, and his adoption of reform policies seemed a propitious moment for the Armenians to claim their long time violated rights. The Armenian population of Karabakh, then, presented a petition to Moscow demanding the reconsideration of the Armenian borders of 1923. The refusal of the request came, however, from the administration of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Gorbachev was against any change of borders to avoid aggravating the problems that were threatening, from all parts, the Soviet Union at that fateful crossroads of its history.
Since then, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh persists, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of each of its republics. The problem continues to be an important and living witness on the catastrophic consequences of the tyrannical and repressive regimes that the harmful echoes of their policies strongly resound for decades and even centuries to come.
Amal M. Ragheb
(Carmen Aprahamyan)
International Journalist and Writer
amragheb2@gmail.com
