David Hasret in Baku and Jonathan Rugman in Ankara

AFTER two weeks of intense fighting, Armenian forces yesterday broke through Azeri lines, opening up a land corridor into the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and capturing the strategic town of Lachin.

As the first convoy of relief supplies set off from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to Stepanakert, the capital of the enclave, the rout of Azerbaijani forces caused the defense ministry in Baku to issue an immediate call-up of all men aged between 18 and 45. The Armenian victory ends the long siege of Stepanakert and will allow thousands of civilians in the beleaguered city to come out of the basements where they have been sleeping to avoid constant bombardment The wounded will be able to leave overland and the city will get medicine and food.

The Azeris have now lost almost the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians. The historic city of Shusha was engulfed in the Armenian advance and 60,000 Azeris have fled from the enclave. The Azeris claim Armenia has opened up a second front by attacking the Azeri enclave of Nakhichevan on the border with Iran and Turkey, which is far away from the main scene of the fighting. Turkey warned yesterday of dire consequences, and Iran denounced Armenia’s “flagrant aggression”. The war now shows the first signs of spreading through Trans-Caucasia.

Azeri sources said a big battle was going on yesterday for control of Sadarak, which controls a strategic bridge crossing into Turkey. Five Azeris were killed and 54 injured when the town was attacked with tanks, artillery and rockets. Armenia denied that its forces had entered the Azeri enclave. But the region’s president, Gaidar Aliyev, said Armenian forces backed by tanks had seized three hills near Sadarak. Armenian sources acknowledge that the bridge at Sadarak was blown up as a warning to Turkey not to put any troops into Nakhichevan, or try to activate the 1921 Turkish-Russian treaty guaranteeing the territory.

Turkey issued a statement describing Armenia’s actions in Nagorno-Karabakh as “expansionism’’. President Turgut Ozal was quoted as saying that troops should be sent in. He is fond of shooting comments from the hip, and reflects popular feeling, but he has lost much of his grip on foreign policy since last year’s general election. The prime minister, Suleyman Demirel, emphasised that peace should be achieved by peaceful means.

Nakhichevan’s foreign minister, Reza Ibadov, told the Itar-Tass news agency: “Armenians do not react to diplomatic pressure. It’s vital to speak to them In a language they do understand.” He appealed to Turkey to provide the enclave with arms.

The Armenian offensive appears to be hardening the will of ordinary Azeris to fight and is consolidating support for the new Popular Front regime. While the centuries-old dispute over the ownership and ethnicity of Nagorno-Karabakh started this war, the conflict is now being seen increasingly in Baku as a fight to save national territory and the homes of Azeris cut off from Baku. Attitudes are hardening in Baku and the view that the Armenian offensive could not have been possible without the support of the Russian army is taking hold.

Russia officially remains neutral but Moscow has a long history of helping both sides against each other with the purpose of neutering nationalist independence movements. Evidence of overt Russian military involvement came from the testimony of two Russian soldiers, Yuri Babkin and Andrei Koptsev, who appeared in Baku this week. They were members of a Spetnaz special forces unit based in Lagadek, Georgia. On May 8, they were part of a unit of 30 soldiers sent in to storm the town of Shusha just before it fell. The two soldiers refused and escaped to Baku but they said their division was acting on the orders of the GRU army intelligence and received its orders directly from Moscow.

Meanwhile, on the political front, the nationalist Popular Front which last week ousted the communist president, Ayaz Mutalibov, yesterday reinforced its grip on power. Their deputy leader, Isa Gambarov, was voted in by parliament as the republic’s acting president, and chairman of the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet. He defeated a former head of the KGB in Baku and a Soviet politburo member, Gaidar Aliyev, who now heads the government in Nakhichevan. The previous acting president, Yagub Mamedov, resigned. The atmosphere in Baku remains tense as Azeris grow used to the idea that they will have to fight for their country. Roadblocks manned by soldiers and policemen were thrown up all over the city stopping cars and searching for arms.

One man in Baku said yesterday: “If they call me up, I’ll fight I may not have done this for the other regime, but I’ll fight for my country.”

Enclave waits for the big assault

Jonathan Rugman, recently in besieged Sadarak, describes the town’s fears

IN THE cellar of Sadarak’s schoolhouse, unshaven Azeri militiamen took their lunch sitting on children’s desks and boxes of ammunition. Life was tense but leisurely; they smoked, looked at their rifles, filled up the gaps in their stomachs with crunchy nut health bars — American food flown in from Turkey. The militiamen protecting the town of 14,000 people seemed to be an irregular bunch of Azeri patriots. Like their cousins in Nagorno-Karabakh, they were handicapped by bad organisation and inferior weapons. The home guard kept their numbers secret “in the interests of national security” but in reality there were few of them—even fewer now.

Sadarak has come under heavy bombardment from Armenia just a mile away in the second attack this month. It lies in a thin strip of land called Nakhichevan, sandwiched between Turkey, Armenia and Iran. The history of the territory, now home to around 300,000 Azeris, is just as bizarre as that of Karabakh. Earlier this century Turkish Tatars, Armenians and Kurds lived here, but in 1921 Turkey signed a treaty with Russia ceding the fertile planes of Nakhichevan to Azerbaijan. A fragile Azeri state was born, cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenian territory. The Nakhlchevanis fear they are next in line in an Armenian attempt to redraw the map of the Caucasus before the world sits up and takes notice.

“The Armenians want our territory just like they want Karabakh,” said Hajir Hassan in his hospital bed, fingering the remains of the Armenian rocket which maimed him. “The Christian world should come and see and stop Armenia,” his doctor added.

The Azeris of Nakhichevan say they are under siege. There is no road link to Azerbaijan, the railway was cut at the end of March, and the Nakhichevani leader, Gaidar Aliyev, says he has received an Armenian warning that Nakhichevani aircraft are no longer safe.

“They promised to stop the shelling [of Sadarak] but it took intense telephone conversations with President Petrosian before they did,” Mr Aliyev said of the first attack. “Our economy is suffering, it’s getting difficult to survive.”

Outside Mr Aliyev’s office a workman is dismantling a statue of Lenin, while the museum to the Bolshevik leader is being converted into an investment bank. Communism may be on the way out in Nakhichevan, but its chief administrator was once one of the most powerful communists of them all.

Gaidar Aliyev, former KGB career officer, head of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party and deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, is proof that anti-Armenian nationalist credentials matter more here than a Moscow past Mr Aliyev has eight telephones on his desk but none of the lines stretch to Europe. Instead he talks daily to government officials in Ankara, calling for Turkey’s help in stopping his land from becoming a new battleground.

In the Turkish border town of Aralik, just a few miles from besieged Sadarak, people cluster round the television news in tea shops and tut tut at recent events.

“Turkey should intervene,” said Ismail Isik, one of thousands of Azeris who live along the border. “I would like to go and fight on the front because I have relatives there.”

Under the 1921 treaty Ankara is a guarantor of the status of the republic, but despite outrage in the Turkish press, it has been reluctant to move against Armenia on its own. To do so would test Turkey’s ability to stand up for ethnic Turks without Western support, a policy employed disastrously in Cyprus. Military action would also pitch former Muslim and Christian enemies against one another, re-awakening memories of the hundreds of thousands of Turks and Armenians who died during the first world war.

Last defenders… Wounded Azeri soldiers are evacuated by helicopter from Lachin (Photograph Michael Evstafiev).

Publication date 05/20/1992

Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform