Word: baku
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much more ethnic violence can the Soviet Union endure? A month after anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku and a brutal clampdown by the Soviet army, Kremlin control seemed to hang by a thread last week in yet another Soviet republic. This time rioting and looting, followed by direct intervention by the Soviet army, took place in Dushanbe, capital of Tadzhikistan, a little-known republic (pop. 5.1 million) tucked into a mountainous fold of Central Asia between Afghanistan and China...
...Hotel that we realize something ugly is happening. Do we know about the big demonstration, the Tadzhik driver asks? "The Tadzhiks have demanded that the 2,500 Armenians leave," he says, "and gave them 48 hours to get out." What Armenians? "The Armenians recently came here as refugees from Baku," he continues, as good- naturedly as though referring to the light snow that is falling. "The government gave them apartments that we have been waiting for for eight years or more. So the Tadzhiks attacked the central-committee building. There is a state of emergency in the city...
...Tadzhik Telegraph Agency, the official news source of the republic, the Russian deputy editor says only 39 Armenians actually arrived in Dushanbe after the January pogrom in Baku, and every one of them stayed with either friends or relatives. The rumor of the 2,500 was never even remotely true, he claims. Elsewhere we are told that Tadzhik militants methodically phoned threats to every single family in the phone listings whose name sounded Armenian. "They called my son," says a middle-age Russian woman whose husband, now dead, was Armenian, "and they said, 'You are Armenians; you had better leave...
...Caucasus were a disabusing revelation for him. He saw Lithuanian Communists declare their independence from the central party. The Lithuanian party was playing a leading role all right; it was leading the way to secession. And then, at the height of the civil war in Azerbaijan, angry citizens of Baku tore up and burned their party cards in protest against Moscow's use of armed force to reassert control...
...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...