Pogroms in Azerbaijan and Armenia of 1988-89 As Historical Echo of the 1915 Armenian Genocide (Погромы в Азербайджане и Армении 1988-89 как историческое эхо 1915 Армянского Геноцида)

The intended question to be posed in this essay relates to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and its evident connection to the massacres of Armenian minority in Azerbaijan in 1988-89. The path I have chosen to answer this question leads throughout the history of Genocide in 1915. Hence, the tragedy at the outset of the twentieth century provoked the slaughter of the same prosecuted ethnical minority by the same perpetrating ethnic majority only seventy years later.

According to the theory introduced by sociologist Alfred Schults, any event by its own nature has no meaning. His view is that a meaning is something ascribed to events or objects and is based on two concepts functioning evenly: the sediment of past experience and another one projected in future. These two factors establish what he calls the system of relevances that enables to interpret a current even out of dual perspective based on past and future.¹ By all means this theory is applicable to massacre of 1915 and the pogroms in 1988. The outlined parallels between the two series of events denote a much more disastrous circumstance under which all the Armenian population in Azerbaijan was jeopardized by “the Turks.” In this case the Schutz’s theory indicates that the significance of past events (the various massacres and genocide) became evident in interpretation of the pogroms that occurred in 1988-90.²

No crime carries as much destruction and cruelty as genocide. It aims at loss of ethnic identity of a victimized party. Genocide intends not just to kill, maim, or violate people; the ultimate purpose is to deprive the victim of its future as a strong national entity. Any massive crime has impact on contemporary and/or possible prospective relations of the victim and the perpetrator on global political arena. One well-documented massive crime against humanity is the Armenian Genocide of 1915 when number of casualties was estimated from 600 000 to 2 000000 people. The bloody event in history of Armenia caused not only human loses, but deprived Armenia partially of ancestral territory.

On the 9th of December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, compiling the following definition in Article II:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following facts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The definition of genocide accepted by United Nations has caused a great deal of controversy, for it excluded social and political groups. Thereafter, in the 1980’s Helen Fein developed a broader and more profound definition of genocide, from which she excluded killing as a mandatory attribute of warfare, and on the opposite, included groups being persecuted based on their social and political belonging:

Genocide is a sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.³

In the case of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 the governmental atrocity against its own people wasn’t specified anywhere in the scrolls of International Law. It contained certain regulations on account of a civilian, noncombatant population during wartime, but this incident became first of its kind for which international law had no stipulation. When the legislative definition of genocide was accepted by the United Nations in 1948, it turned out to be that Armenian genocide fell under each of the five categories of it.⁴ Although the pogroms in Sumgait and Baku of 1988-90 resemble more the pogroms in Ottoman Empire in 1890’s rather than actual genocide which occurred in 1915 and culminated in 1921 in the fight and expulsion of survivors who returned to Celicia, the analogy between 1915 and 1988-90 is apparent.

Armenians were a minority population in both Azerbaijan and Turkey, thus clearly identifiable for persecution. Armenians were more upwardly mobile than the majority population, hence creating the possibility of potential social conflict. The overarching political conditions were unstable in both the Soviet Union and the Ottoman Empire – revolutionary change often being a prerequisite of genocide. Armenians were scapegoated for political events outside the borders of the country in which they were residing.⁵

Armenian genocide is one of the first genocide of the twentieth century. It became a model for the “political” type of genocide. The majority of the current genocides followed this pattern.

In order to examine to what degree the Genocide of 1915 is related to the pogroms in Azerbaijan in 1988-90 some history of Armenians is to be examined.

Armenians have populated the highland region between the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean seas for centuries long. This area presented a crossroad between East and West. As a result of the geographic location Armenia wasn’t govern by its own dynasties constantly. The state has experienced direct foreign rule as well as paying fees to the surrounding states. Besides the geography, Armenia had another disadvantage. It was the only Christian state surrounded by Muslim entities, this aspect kept Armenia apart from others. Such distinct difference referred Armenians as second-class citizens after the Ottoman Empire annexed the territory that had molded ancient and medieval Armenian kingdoms, in the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire established on its territory confessional-based Muslim, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian millets. Through these establishments the Ottoman administrative system legalized the social inequality within a structure of the society. The millet system enabled Armenians to preserve their cultural-religious identity, but kept them politically and militarily inefficacious. Armenians didn’t pose any threat onto the multinational, unequal society and retained in accord to certain degree with the dominant Muslim millet as long as they paid the tributes to the government and remained politically inactive.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a wind of changes came across the Ottoman Empire and caused external challenges and internal instability. Incapable of competing with the West economically and military, the ruling authority lost a number of provinces and ended up in debt. Such immediate breakdown of law and consequent venality fractured the foundations of Ottoman multinational society. Due the increasing threats to continued existence of the Ottoman Empire, the sultans, under the pressure of Great Britain, launched a program of remodeling that broke away from the traditional sociopolitical theocracy.

The tanzimat period, stretching from 1839 to 1876, was designed to commence theoretical equality of all Ottoman subjects. However, while the decree went into power, the system of millets maintained, and the equality within it correspondingly. During the political internal and external torments Armenians endeavored to uphold and to follow the reforms in order to secure life and property. They had no intentions to develop a task of separation or acquiring independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Then followed the Russian-Turkish War, in which Turkey lost severely. The military and diplomatic failure of the sultan Abdul-Hamid II attributed to the break away of the most of Balkan provinces. Thus, the attention of the European community was drawn to the “Armenian Question.” However, the fact of European protectorate, explicitly expressed verbally in regard to the domestic policy of the crumbling Ottoman Empire only aggravated the condition of Armenians in Turkey. Armenians’ quest for security and equality resulted in brutal pogroms ordered by Abdul-Hamid, which were carried out by armed Kurdish brigands in almost every province inhabited by Armenians. The ultimate purpose of Abdul-Hamid wasn’t to exterminate the Armenian population, but rather to point out that they have to follow the policies of the Ottoman Empire. Particularly, to look up at Europe was a forbidden act. His successors aimed at creating an entirely socionationalistic frame of the state, free from Armenians, rather than just preserving a political status quo.⁶ The only way to achieve the goal was to whip out the entire Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire territory.

In early 1913 the Young Turk government was overthrown by its militaristic and nationalistic wing, with Enver, Taalat, and Jemal Pashas in head of it. This threesome involved the country into WWI as the ally of Germany. Later in 1915 the same government outlined and put into effect a plan for the elimination of Armenians, estimated between two and three millions subjects. The plan was carried out in phases. In April 1915 people represented the Armenian religious, political, educational, and intellectual authority in the Western tradition, variously one thousand individuals, were jailed throughout the entire Empire, and consequently killed within few days. The next phase consisted of liquidation of the young male adult population, which mainly were recruits of the Turkish army. The number approximated 200,000. They were purged through mass burials, incineration, executions and weakness in labor battalions. The leftovers of those who survived those phases were primarily children, women and aged people. All of them were to be deported to distant regions of Empire. Within six months of deportation half of those who survived first two phases were killed, buried alive or thrown into the sea or the rivers along the way.⁷

The murder of Armenians was characterized like the war against Entente, as a jihad or holy war. Throughout the Empire it became illegal to assist the survivors. The governmental decree established a penalty for everyone who broke the law, which was to hang those who were helping Armenians in front of their own house; the house was to be burnt.⁸ Yet, history records the removal of some governors from the office for the resistance to the supreme order. Many Kurds and Arabs throughout Empire were saving the refugees. The outcome of the genocide was catastrophic. Out of two to three million Armenians in Western Armenia, a million and a half perished during the massacres. Thousands of those who escaped the purge and fled to Russian Armenia died because of starvation that had been dwelling in Russia after the WWI. Those Armenians, who converted to Islam and remained within Ottoman Empire borders never regained the status of citizens and lost the ability to retain a sense of religious or national identity. ⁹

The history of the massacres in Nagornyi Karabakh and Baku took the following path.

The survivors of the genocide have been affected by a deep psychological shock, caused by the pathos and negligence that the European community attributed to the Armenian Question on the brink of the twentieth century, and Turkish endeavor to deny the crime. Once the horror seemed to be over, a totalitarian and oppressive, yet protective system of the Soviet Union gave guarantee to its subjects to prevent any external attack or invasion, or in a case of such to defense. Armenia’s fear of Turks has almost vanished, even though neighboring Azeris by their culture, group language and historical background belonged to Turks. Armenia had to barter its right to seek justice and the recognition of the Genocide for the security provided by the USSR. This illusion of peace and fear-free life crashed in 1988. The aura of the past became vivid again. It occurred after the doctrines of Mikhail Gorbachev on glasnost’ and perestroika became an essential part on sociopolitical aspects of the domestic policy. The president of the USSR declared that the time had come to correct past errors of the Stalin era. The message seemed to be addressed directly to the Armenian population of Armenia and Nagornyi (Mountainous) Karabakh, for despite the prevailing percentage of Armenian population located in Karabakh, the administration of this region was conferred upon Azerbaijan by the central government in 1921.¹⁰

Since late nineteenth century and especially after 1915 nationalism has been on a wave amongst Armenians. This preoccupying doctrine of “biological survival, identity, and nationality” became the dominant argument for trading-off national independence in 1920 to Soviets, aiming thus, to escape another assault by the Kemalist Turks. However, the protectorate of the Soviet government employed brutality and violence towards the new republic. It led to an uprising in Armenia against Soviet system in February 1921. However, the revolt was suppressed by Bolshviks, and later on the territory was attached to the republic of Azerbaijan populated primarily by Shi’ite Moslem Turks. In 1923, the Karabakh region was defined as the “Autonomous Region of Mountainous Karabakh,” the population was 94 percent Armenian at that time, and it was 75 percent Armenian in 1988.¹¹

The conflict over Nagornyi Karabakh didn’t come about overnight. Nationalism and feeling of insecurity drove Armenians to petition to the Soviet Supreme for unification of Armenia with Nagornyi Karabakh, however, the central government didn’t take into consideration any of the appeals. Granted