Armenian protests reach new peak AFTER a long silence, Pravda finally referred in its June 10 issue to a three-week long general strike in Stepanakert and other centers in Nagorno-Karabakh. The article was introduced in a peculiar way: "Lately, we have been getting significantly more letters asking us to report what is happening today in Nagorno-Karabakh. Readers are asking whether the situation there is becoming normalized." GERRY FOLEY
USSR to grant the demand for the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. At the same time, he appealed to the crowd to give Moscow 100 days more to study the problem.
The decision to go ahead with the general strike before the deadline set on May 30 was made, Muradian told Agence FrancePresse, after a report that the CPSU secretariat had again rejected the Armenian demands at its June 9 meeting. The session, as it happened, was chaired by Ligachev.
Although the strike was supposed to be for three days, it was called off after one day when the authorities in Armenia indicated that they would support the demands of the protesters. It should be noted that there is a clear pattern both in the Armenian republic and in Nagorno-Karabakh of the authorities yielding to the pressure of the masses and trying to catch up with them. Specifically, the protests have result- them. Specifically, the protests have resulted in the removal of the party secretaries in both jurisdictions who were considered unresponsive to national demands, and their replacement by officials who have sought to demonstrate a more sympathetic attitude.
Local bureaucracy under mass pressure
The Armenian ex-secretary, Karen Dimirchian, is regarded as a burcaucratic conservative, and there have even been claims that he supported the Armenian protests as a way of defending his own corner. However, he was removed from his post on May 21 by the central authorities without a murmur of opposition from the movement for the return of Nagorno-Karabakh, or from anyone else in the Armenian republic.
The first official body to support the demand for return, the regional Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh, did so after a mass movement had developed and under powerful pressure from it. The claim that somehow some faction of the Armenian bureaucracy may be using the protests has come, for example, from state capitalist dogmatists, for whom the active or passive identification of any element in the bureaucracy with them is fundamentally suspicious. For them, the bureaucracy is separated from the masses by an unbridgeable class gulf.
Of course, sections of a local bureaucracy may support national demands in order to increase their own autonomy and because such demands do not immediately pose the question of reorganizing society, but the dynamic of a mass movement under a bureaucratic dictatorship is something else again.
Moreover, there have been clear signs of the movement radicalizing. In the rise of the new wave of protests, the moderate Armenian representative Sil'va Kapoutik-
3 1. See /V 143, June 13, 1988. June 27, 1988 • #144 International Viewpoint
O NLY after three weeks of an unprecedented mass mobilization did the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union consider that it was necessary to report what was happening, supposedly to answer queries from readers.
By its own account, the situation was dramatic: "Today, in Stepanakert [the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh] and the local centers of Martuni, Mardakerte, Askerane, most of the industrial plants, as well as public transport, are at a standstill. Virtually all public eating places and supermarkets are closed. The sale of produce is severely limited. Economic ties with Baku have been broken. The strike — such a unusual and expected word for us! — is in its third week."
A strike of this sort is something that has not been seen in the Soviet Union since the establishment of the Stalinist regime, although the same could be said of event after event in the latest struggle of the Armenian people for the reintegration of Nagorno-Karabakh into the Armenian republic.
But the article went on to describe something that was evidently even more disturbing for the bureaucratic rulers: "Every morning tens of thousands of people move through the downtown streets of the city [Stepanakert] with slogans and banners; rallies take place. There is one idea — "Hold fast until the end. When night comes, in the streets and the alleys lights flicker in specially constructed guard huts. These are the so-called Self-Defence Posts. Small groups keep watch until the morning, in the belief that they are defending security and peace for their families."
Popular self-defence forces, whatever their origin, are a challenge to the power of the state, and the rulers of a bureaucratic dictatorship cannot but be ultra-sensitive to this.
Pravda blamed the new flare-up of the conflict on Armenians, who supposedly attacked Azerbaidzhani residents. This version of the unfolding of the events contradicts what appeared in the international press, apparently based at least partly on dissident sources in the Soviet Union.! The latter indicated that the conflict began to heat up again around the trial of the Azerbaidzhanis charged with participating in an anti-Armenian pogrom in Sumgait, and that the Azerbaidzhani authorities supported the Baku demonstrations, which they could not have done without the approval of at least powerful allies in the central Communist Party apparatus.
Specifically, the strike in Nagorno-Karabakh was touched off by a statement made by Yegor Ligachev, the leading bureaucratic conservative, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Azerbaidzhani Communist Party. Pravda did not mention the the question of Ligachev's remarks, not even as a rumor needing refutation, although it did mention that the strike began immediately after the Azerbaidzhani plenum.
An entire nation goes on strike
Two days after the Pravda article appeared, something even more "unusual and unexpected" in the Soviet Union came on the scene, a general strike of an entire nationality, called at a rally of hundreds of thousands of people. Pravda has not yet either reported it or commented on it, although in the runup to the special CP conference starting on June 27 it has been full of general declarations of the importance of "democracy" and "openness."
Igor Muradian, leading representative of the Karabakh committees, which have been formally banned by the Soviet authorities, raised the threat of a general strike before a rally of hundreds of thousands of people in Yerevan on May 30 if the Soviet authorities continued to refuse
USSR yan made statements expressing bitter disillusionment with the Soviet authorities, whom she compared to the czar to whom the conservative leaders of the Bloody Sunday protest of 1905 appealed in vain. Like the czar, she said, the Soviet authorities had "fired" on their loyal Armenian petitioners. ("Fired on" was obviously poetic licence, as yet at least.)
Reports in the international press have indicated that there was a notable absence of pictures of Gorbachev in the new wave of protests, as contrasted with the February and March rallies. In its June 10 article, Pravda pointed out that appeals for moderation from Kapoutikyan had been ignored by the Armenian protesters. At the same time, it avowed a more fundamental problem:
"Party bodies are not in control"
"The party bodies in the region are not in control of the situation. The appeal of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaidzhan for normalizing the situation addressed to the workplaces has received no response. Also unheeded was a similar appeal by the well-known Armenian writer Sil'va Kapoutikyan in the pages of the region's paper."
In this wave of protests, according to all accounts, the Armenian demonstrators have made clear their rejection of the half measures proposed by Moscow, that is educational and cultural reforms that would not challenge the political and economic jurisdiction of the Azerbaidzhani SSR over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Supreme Soviet of the Armenian republic voted on June 16, following the recommendation of the new Armenian secretary, Suren Aroutiounian, to appeal to the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaidzhan to cede Nagorno-Karabakh. That procedure is required by the Soviet constitution, which stipulates that the borders of the republics can only be altered with their consent. The request was rejected by the Azerbaidzhani Supreme Soviet a few days later by unanimous vote. In fact, some of the Armenian protesters demonstrated against appealing to the Azerbaidzhanis and therefore, presumably, in favor of putting pressure directly on Moscow.
In fact, the way forward for the Armenian movement is now far from clear. The demand that Moscow assert the right to draw the borders of the republics is not consistent with the principle of national self-determination and can only further aggravate and poison national questions in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Armenia in particular is likely to be the loser in such a game.
Azerbaidzhan has a larger population and greater economic importance for the Soviet rulers, who are also interested in 4 ho Azerbainshani arurkey. our aranced. good relations with Turkey. Furthermore, International Viewpoint #144 • June 27, 1988 of the peoples of Islamic culture in the Soviet Union, who are mainly Turkic also. An affront to Azerbaidzhani feelings could fan resentments among a very large and dynamic population that is already worrying the Soviet rulers.
In the first phase of the struggle, at least some of the leaders of the Armenian protests seemed to be determined to avoid a conflict with the Azerbaidzhanis as such, and accused forces in central government bodies of trying to provoke communal clashes.3
On the other hand, the text of petition signed by 75,000 people and addressed to Gorbachev (which was a focus of the first protests leading up to the mass mobilizations in February) was politically contradictory, basing the claims of the Armenian nation both on its alliance with the Russia of the czars and on Lenin's national policy:
"Armenia's geographical position made it for centuries an extremely important strategic center for Russia. For centuries Armenia shed its blood, in particular in the Russo-Turkish wars. It progressively lost the space necessary for its national existence... In creating the Soviet state, VI Lenin took into account the political situation in which Armenians found themselves. He Con tung to per t demanded that the Russian government resort to all means possible to put pressure on Turkey to get it to resolve the Armenian question. He demanded that western Armenia be attached to Russian Armenia and that Armenia be given access to the sea."
Further on, the petition said "The agents of pan-Turkism declare quite openly: •What the empress Catherine took from us without a shot, the Communists have returned with more territories in addition'." 4
More at stake than the territory itself
Such references to the historic alliance of the Armenians with the Great Russian state are hardly the sort of thing to appeal to the Azerbaidzhanis and other peoples of Islamic culture, who have suffered national oppression at the hands of Great Russians both under the czars and under the Great Russian nationalist regime of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Caught as the Armenians are between Turkish chauvinism and the Great Russian bureaucracy, there seem to be insurmountable barriers to achieving the national destiny to which they aspire unless they can link themselves to a broader movement for a just settlement of the national question in the Soviet Union. That cannot be done by trying to appeal to historic links with Russia or even by tactical alliances with a wing of the bureaucracy (say, with Gorbachev against Ligachev).
For the Armenians clearly much more is at stake in the fight for Nagorno-Karabakh than that territory itself. It is only the clearest and most easily remediable case of a territory of which they have been deprived. What evidently dominates the national consciousness of Armenians is the genocide and the destruction of historic Armenia. When Armenians were first allowed to commemorate the genocide again at the end of the Khrushchev era in 1965, the slogan they raised was "Our lands!"
A nation that can never achieve national objectives
In an interview published in the Armenian Spectator Boston, Sergei Mikoyan, a Soviet Armenian personality, said in answer to a question about Nakhitchevan (another territory claimed by the Armenian protesters but now a Turkified part of Azerbaidzhan), "If we compare it with the Armenian lands that today belong to Turkey, it has to be understood that even if very few Armenians live on our territories, we think and continue to think that these lands are Armenian, in spite of the ethnic changes, particularly when these changes have been achieved by actions that we will never forgive and never forget."
In the same interview it was stressed that Soviet Armenia is too small and poor to accommodate a growing population or build a full national life. In fact, the Armenians have the peculiar problem of being a nation that alone could never, in any conceivable circumstances, achieve its real national objectives. To move forward requires an exceptional political vision.
Bureaucratic degeneration has created manifold obstacles that go beyond Russian chauvinism itself. Not a voice has been raised in Azerbaidzhan, apparently, to express a proletarian internationalist standpoint. That is a notable difference from the revolutionary period when Azeri communists recognized the national claims of the Armenian people, including their right to Karabakh.
On the other hand, the relaxation of bureaucratic repression required by the perestroika policy has allowed the question of a democratic settlement of the national question to be raised again in the Soviet Union. The Armenian events are only the most advanced form of this. (In fact, the Armenians may have been allowed more tolerance because Moscow is well aware of the the tight corner in which they find themselves as a nation.)
It remains to be seen whether the Armenian movement will advance beyond its present political limitations. But it has already demonstrated the importance of a principled program on the national question for the anti-bureaucratic movement in the Soviet Union and given an unprecedented example of the power of a mass movement. * 2. Ibid. 3. See /V 138, April 4, 1988. 4. Le Dossier Karabakh, Sevig Press, Paris, p.63.