Word: azerbaijani
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After almost 70 years as a republic of the U.S.S.R., Azerbaijan seemed to peel off its Soviet trappings almost overnight, turning into a foreign country under occupation by invaders. Enraged Azerbaijanis called for guerrilla warfare and swore to "fight to the last drop of blood" to drive the Soviets out. Almost a third of the republic's 380,000 Communist Party members burned their membership cards. Local government offices and police units ignored Moscow and looked to the ten-month-old Azerbaijani Popular Front for leadership. "If Gorbachev wants a second Afghanistan," shouted Ekhtibar Mamedov, the Front's representative...
...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...
...Just as Armenians fled from Azerbaijani pogroms the week before, some 15,000 dependents of the military and KGB divisions stationed in the republic were evacuated. "We could hear shooting in the city," Nadezhda Appakov, an officer's wife, told TASS. "We feared for our children most of all, because those militants stop at nothing." The newspaper Trud reported that a pogrom had begun against the remaining 85,000 ethnic Russians in the republic, but Popular Front officials offered assurances that the Russians would not be attacked by Azerbaijani nationalists. Moscow agreed to hold off on further evacuations...
...Azerbaijani legislature backed away from a threat to secede if military ( forces did not leave immediately, but the republic has called on the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. to withdraw army troops from Baku...
...matter how quickly the state of emergency is ended and peacekeeping troops are withdrawn -- and that might not be quickly at all -- Gorbachev will not be able to repair fully the political damage the invasion has wrought in Azerbaijan and the rest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...