Word: azerbaijan
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...Azerbaijan, Moldova and Czechoslovakia were part of the world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn out to be the old business of history, not the wave of the future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris...
...neighbor wars, like those in Moldova; in Georgia, where South Ossetians have been fighting to break away and join ethnic brethren across the border in Russia; and of course in Yugoslavia and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, caught in a violent tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even peaceful secessions could spawn a slew of mininations, unable to support themselves economically and dependent on aid from richer nations for survival. At a recent international conference French President Francois Mitterrand worried out loud "whether in the future every tribal group will dispose of its own laws to the exclusion...
...anymore. Last week Armenian fighters cut a six-mile corridor through Azerbaijan to link Karabakh to the Armenian republic, then launched an artillery assault on the Azeri territory of Nakhichevan, which borders Iran and Turkey. Washington, Moscow and Tehran all strongly condemned the surprisingly forceful Armenian military moves. And in Ankara the main opposition party called on the Turkish government to send troops to Nakhichevan to defend the Azeris, who are ethnic Turks...
...even a temporary cease-fire in Karabakh suggests that the Commonwealth may go the way of its Soviet predecessor. Five of the 11 leaders invited to the most recent C.I.S. summit meeting failed even to show, and the leading Azeri presidential candidate last week declared his intention to withdraw Azerbaijan from the Commonwealth entirely...
...hope for peace rests on outside mediation. Almost every day for the past three weeks, commanders from Askeran, an Armenian town on Karabakh's border with Azerbaijan, and Agdam, on the Azeri side, have met along a dirt road on the front to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Alakhverdi Bagirov, the commander of local Azeri Popular Front forces, and Vitaly Balasanian, his Armenian counterpart, have known each other since childhood, long before their two towns were divided by war. Balasanian, 33, who managed a restaurant in peacetime, runs the headquarters of his battalion from a stone fortress built...