Word: azerbaijan
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Activists of the Azerbaijan Popular Front in Nakhichevan, a region bordering Iran, made no secret of their preparations for an incendiary New Year's Eve. They stockpiled axes, shovels and wire cutters, assembled trucks and buses, and held rallies demanding the dismantling of frontier barriers that separate them from Azerbaijanis living in Iran. On the last day of 1989 they struck. A mob of some 7,500 tore up boundary markers and pulled down border posts and watchtowers. Similar attacks over the next two days spread along 500 miles of the border, crippling the communications network in a string...
...Lithuania's Communist Party has already declared its independence from Moscow headquarters, and the Estonian and Latvian organizations are considering similar moves toward local autonomy. Gorbachev plans to visit the area this week in search of compromise. Now he must look southward as well, to festering nationality problems in Azerbaijan -- and the long-feared spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran into the six predominantly Muslim republics of the U.S.S.R...
Battled over for centuries by Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Russians and Persians, Azerbaijan was divided by treaties in 1813 and 1828. Today about 6.7 million ethnic Azerbaijanis, who share a Turkic language and the Shi'ite Muslim religion, live on the Soviet side of the line and about 4 million in the adjoining Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Stalin, ever expansionist, coveted that part of Iran and moved troops into it during World War II. Before Western pressure forced him to withdraw, he encouraged Azerbaijani nationalism and rigged an "autonomous" local government in hopes the province would break away from Iran...
...Russian republics of the Soviet Union have had their own reasons for responding enthusiastically to Gorbachev's campaign on behalf of self-reliance and decentralization. The nationalism that had lain largely dormant or been brutally suppressed rose to the surface. In the Caucasus, ethnic hatreds burst into violence. In Azerbaijan, which borders on Iran, the dominant Azerbaijanis, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people, are embroiled in a blood feud with the Christian Armenians in and around the enclave of Nagorno- Karabakh. The region has been besieged for 20 months, its road traffic and railways under attack by Azerbaijani nationalists. Vital supplies...
Riding atop the economic woes is the horseman of ethnic anarchy amid the 15 national republics that constitute the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan are nearly at war with each other, Moldavia has been crippled by ethnically inspired strikes, Georgians are demanding an end to the "Soviet empire," and in Lithuania the Communist Party has abolished its own monopoly of power, the most striking sign of Baltic nationalism to date...