Word: baku
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After hesitating for four days, the Kremlin was finally compelled, in the words of the official news agency TASS, "to take the measure of last resort" and declare a state of emergency. Early Saturday morning, Soviet troops stormed the center of Baku in tanks and armored cars, smashing through makeshift barricades of buses and trucks. The troops exchanged fire with extremists, armed with submachine guns and sniper rifles. Eyewitnesses described streets awash with "pools of blood" and corpses strewn on the road to the highway; there were even unconfirmed reports that Soviet tanks had opened fire on the demonstrators...
...matchstick that ignited the powder was struck the previous Saturday when a rally, staged in Baku by Azerbaijanis demanding independence from the Soviet Union, gave way to anti-Armenian rioting. Marauding bands of Azerbaijanis armed with guns and makeshift weapons ransacked Armenian homes, beating and sometimes killing the residents. Within days, vigilante groups from both sides were organized and dispatched to assist their ethnic brethren in the contested autonomous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and along the border with Armenia...
Initially Moscow declared a state of emergency in parts of Azerbaijan, banning strike actions, rallies and demonstrations; inexplicably the restrictions did not extend to Baku. Then the Kremlin dispatched 11,000 troops from the army, the navy, the KGB and the Interior Ministry to assist the nearly 6,000 troops already in the region...
...most recent round of fighting began in February 1988, when ethnic hatreds erupted in the port town of Sumgait, north of Baku, resulting in an official death count of 32, most of them Armenians. Over the next two years, more than 220,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan. Those who remained behind in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh have lived under a virtual state of siege, relying on supplies airlifted from Armenia. Last month the Supreme Soviet voted to return administrative control over the region to the Azerbaijanis. Enraged, the Armenian parliament voted two weeks ago to include Nagorno-Karabakh...
Although most of the 220,000 Armenians living in Baku fled after the 1988 pogrom in Sumgait, up to 20,000 Armenians still remained. But even as their numbers shrank, Azerbaijani refugees flooded the city. Most of them were unemployed farmers and goatherds who claimed they had been chased from Armenia. These 130,000 new Azerbaijani settlers transformed the once cosmopolitan capital into a city ringed with slums and squatter districts. Their simmering rage against the Armenians triggered the riots that led to last week's battles...