Word: karabakh
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...Major General Sergei Kupreyev his position within the Interior Ministry and he explains, with a smile, that he is actually deputy chief of the Higher Academy of Fire Fighters. The affiliation is appropriate: for the past year, he has been putting out symbolic fires in Nagorno-Karabakh, the mostly Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan and the scene of some of the region's worst ( bloodletting. A year ago, the Kremlin dispatched Kupreyev and four other outsiders to assume administrative control of Nagorno-Karabakh. In November the Supreme Soviet returned command of the enclave to the Azerbaijanis. Two weeks ago, Kupreyev...
Kupreyev was struck by how petty some of the conflicts were. "Once," he says, "the Azerbaijanis were offended that their republic's flag had been taken down by the locals from a building in Stepanakert ((the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh)). Put up the flag again, they said, have the Armenians offer a public apology, and we will end our blockade and let supplies through. Then Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh refused to receive food from Azerbaijan. If it was Azerbaijani margarine, they wouldn't take it. They wouldn't accept eggs from Baku. Our chairman finally told them it wasn...
...children not be called up or that they serve in their own territories," he recalls. "But can you imagine what would happen if there were two separate army units, one from Armenia and one from Azerbaijan? Actually there are few Armenians and Azerbaijanis among the troops there. In Nagorno-Karabakh it wasn't just a question of not using Azerbaijani soldiers, but Uzbeks, Tadahiks, Chechens -- any of the Muslim peoples. They were viewed with mistrust by Armenians, who feared that these soldiers would always defend the Azerbaijanis. We tried to see that boys of Slavic extraction, from Russia, the Ukraine...
...have everything to gain by keeping the waters troubled as long as possible," he says. "It is easy to carry on theft when a war is on and the police are practically out of action. We noticed just who was leading popular-front movements in the regions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh: the director of a lucrative car-servicing center, the head of a local food emporium. They profit by the disorders to carry on their business. If we can't jail them, let's at least intern them in a sanatorium on the Volga River. We have been cutting...
...gave the impression that it had been caught unawares, but it might be more accurate to say that officials turned a blind eye. Last August, for instance, the Central Committee responded to peaceful protests in the Baltics with stern warnings. But the simultaneous railroad blockade of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis met with official silence. Armenian activists in Moscow claim that in the weeks leading up to the crisis, they bombarded Gorbachev, the KGB and the Interior Ministry with telegrams and letters warning of an imminent...