Word: azerbaijanis
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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...
...successor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may have inadvertently fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Soviet Azerbaijan when he stopped off there last June after visiting Moscow. He told large crowds in Baku that bilateral agreements he had just signed would lead to increased tourism and trade between the two Azerbaijani regions...
Azerbaijan is turning into a permanent crisis for Gorbachev. There have been two years of something approaching civil war over the republic's mostly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where more than 120 people have been killed. In Baku, Azerbaijani gangs have systematically terrorized Armenians. Violence has also broken out in the southwestern city of Jalilabad, where two weeks ago mobs took over the local Communist Party headquarters and police station, and are threatening to elect their own leaders...
...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 are ferried in by helicopter. Some...
...Armenian born in largely Muslim Azerbaijan, Kasparov touched on disparate topics ranging from Gorbachev to the Azerbaijani crisis to the Communist Party yesterday, displaying the iconoclasm that has made him a symbol for Soviets backing social change...