Word: azerbaijan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hundreds of Azerbaijani Muslims who had illegally entered into Iran returned home, many of them bearing weapons. Ayatullah Abdul Karim Moussavi Ardebili, a former Iranian Chief Justice, said in Tehran that Communist states are "anti-God" and that Soviet Azerbaijan is now a "great market for the introduction of Islam." Though Iranian officials played down the crisis, perhaps fearing that Iran's Azerbaijani minority might take a lesson from events across the border, Ardebili's speech raised the possibility that Gorbachev should be less worried about Azerbaijan's becoming another Afghanistan than about its turning into another Iran...
...Communist Party youth daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, disclosed last week that two senior colonels, both veterans of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, sent a telegram to Gorbachev and Defense Minister Yazov two weeks ago urging them not to use force in Azerbaijan. Military intervention, they warned, would lead to a "complete disruption in relations" with the local people and "trigger the growth of anti-Russian feeling...
...Soviet Minister of the Interior, Vadim Bakatin, told a press conference in Baku that Azerbaijan's own police force suffered only a "temporary" loss of control when mobs broke into Armenian homes and killed dozens of people. He suggested that the Front confer with the police on restoring order. "There are," said Bakatin, "undoubtedly healthy forces within the Popular Front with whom the police must actively cooperate." But Bakatin obviously had a different opinion of the police than his ministerial colleague at Defense did: Yazov publicly accused the police of supplying guns to the Front...
...matter how quickly the state of emergency is ended and peacekeeping troops are withdrawn -- and that might not be quickly at all -- Gorbachev will not be able to repair fully the political damage the invasion has wrought in Azerbaijan and the rest of the country. The head of the Azerbaijani Communist Party was dismissed for "serious mistakes" and replaced by the republic's premier, Ayaz Mutalibov, but the move cannot redeem the prestige of a party now identified with the military occupation. Yazov seemed to confirm last week that Gorbachev intervened not to save Armenian lives but to prevent...
Even without a head-to-head challenger, continued upheavals in the non- Russian republics and perestroika's failure to fill empty stores with food and clothing are sending Gorbachev's popularity plummeting among ordinary citizens. How Mikhail Gorbachev handles the occupation of Azerbaijan -- and how the Azerbaijanis react -- will affect not only the future of his policies but the fate of the policymaker himself...