Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War

4. 1988–1989: An Armenian Crisis

4 1988–1989 An Armenian Crisis THE KARABAKH COMMITTEE In May 1988, hostility between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, spreading like an infection through Nagorny Karabakh, reached the village of Tug. It was a fateful moment. Tug, in the South of Karabakh, was the only village in the region with a mixed population. Both nationalities lived side by side, with only a small brook separating them; if intercommunal harmony could not be maintained there, it could not survive anywhere. Yet on 3 May, Interior Ministry units were called out to Tug to prevent fighting between hundreds of villagers. The Moscow official Grigory Kharchenko had visited the village in February 1988, and came back seven months later. He saw how enmity had taken hold in the intervening months: It was an old village. All the Armenians and Azerbaijanis had intermarried . . . . They divided everything, resolved these national issues among themselves. I remember their words when they told me, “This won’t affect us, this is a landslide from out of nowhere, which won’t make us quarrel.” Then in September I went there with a company of soldiers and billeted them in the school. By that time they had already divided the square and drawn a border. One half of the village had gone to the Armenians, the other to the Azerbaijanis. An Azerbaijani husband had even stayed in one half with three children and the Armenian wife had gone over to the other half with three children.1 The cause of unification with Armenia now had almost all the Karabakh Armenians in its grip. The only disagreement was over tactics. Communist Party officials still wanted to work with Moscow; the radicals 55 were already planning more confrontational tactics. In March 1988, the radicals formed a new grouping called Krunk, the Armenians’ word for the bird crane, a symbol of yearning for the “motherland,” Armenia.2 Robert Kocharian, the head of the Party organization in the Stepanakert Silk Factory, was put in charge of Krunk’s “Ideological Section.” Krunk was the first organization in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to use the strike as a political weapon. Armenia in 1988 was the stage for the growth of the first big mass opposition movement in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Its leaders, the eleven-man “Karabakh Committee,” had all but eclipsed the Communist Party by the end of the year. The committee—mostly composed of Yerevan intellectuals—edged aside the two original leaders, Igor Muradian and Zori Balayan, both Karabakh Armenians and Party members, in May and formed a permanent committee with no single leader. Seven of the committee members were academics, and four were to become the leaders of post-Communist Armenia.3 Although the new leaders still called themselves the Karabakh Committee, their agenda was broader than just Karabakh. They were all part of a generation whose defining moment had been the nationalist demonstrations in Yerevan in 1965–1967. As a result of those protests, an open-air memorial with a constantly burning flame was opened in the city to commemorate the 1915 Genocide, and 24 April was made Armenia ’s Genocide Day. They were pursuing the “Armenian cause,” or Hai Dat: the old goal of uniting Armenians across the world, from Beirut to Los Angeles, around common nationalist aims. Two years later the committee and its successor, the Armenian National Movement, were the first non-Communist group to come to power in a Soviet republic. To a large degree, they owed this new success to the organizing skills of its two main leaders, Vazgen Manukian and Levon Ter-Petrosian. Much later, they quarreled and violently disputed the results of the 1996 presidential elections, but in the preindependence period, they made a strong tandem. Manukian was a mathematician with an owlish look and an impulsive streak. He was also the organizer and fixer for the group, and collected the new-style Karabakh Committee in his apartment. Manukian says he deliberately picked people who were “not offended by fate,” or who, in other words, were not joining the movement merely out of a personal grudge against the authorities. He argues that the Karabakh issue was a means of waking Armenians from their Soviet-era slumber 56 1988–1989: AN ARMENIAN CRISIS and that other political goals, such as democracy, were secondary: “In Armenia the dominant issue for people was the national question. . . . The idea of democracy could not in itself create such a wave...