Azerbaijan is no Lithuania. True, resurgent nationalism arouses people in the Caucasus just as it arouses the Baltic republics. But there the comparison ends – and the trouble for Moscow begins.

Nationalists in Lithuania are struggling to wrest independence from Moscow by nonviolent, political means. Nationalists in Azerbaijan also talk of independence, but their protest includes bloody pogroms against their Armenian neighbors. Nor do Azerbaijani nationalists limit their actions to Soviet Azerbaijan. They transgress the border with Iran to make common cause with Azerbaijanis there.

The European Parliament

A. having regard to the resumption of anti-Armenian activities by the Azeris in Baku (an initial estimate talks of numerous victims, some of whom died in particularly horrific circumstances) and the attacks on Armenian villages outside Nagorno-Karabakh, such as Shaumyan and Getashen,

B. whereas there is severe tension on the border between Armenia and Nakhichevan which could lead to serious incidents,

C. whereas the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh has been reinstated by Azerbaijan as harshly as ever,

The European Parliament,

A. having regard to the earthquake which recently shook Soviet Armenia,

B. whereas the Soviet authorities have arrested all the leaders of the Kharabakh Committee,

C. whereas this committee requested the reattachment of the autonomous region of Upper Kharabakh to Soviet Armenia, it having been arbitrarily given by Stalin to Azerbaïdjan,

The Soviet human-rights campaigner Andrei D. Sakharov asserted yesterday that more than 130 Armenians had been killed by Azerbaijani mobs in the city of Kirovabad during the spreading ethnic unrest in the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

”With the authorities’ connivance, the murders, rapes and arsons are continuing now for a fifth day and are spreading to other cities and towns of Azerbaijan,” Mr. Sakharov said in a statement from Newton, Mass.

The European Parliament,

A. having regard to the recent public demonstrations in Soviet Armenia demanding that the Nagorno-Karabakh region be reunited with the Republic of Armenia,

B. having regard to the historic status of the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh (80 % of whose present population is Armenian) as part of Armenia, to the arbitrary inclusion of this area within Azerbaijan in 1923 and to the massacre of Armenians in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait in February 1988,

The Karabagh File. Documents and Facts, 1918-1988

First Edition, Cambridge Toronto 1988
By the ZORYAN INSTITUTE
Edited by: Gerard J. LIBARIDIAN

In late February 1988, the world was shocked by a week-long series of demonstrations in Yerevan, capital of the Armenian S.S.R., one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. Although peaceful, the place, size, length, and apparent suddenness of the demonstrations brought to world consciousness names of people and places as intractable as the issues they embody. The sights and sounds of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators seeking to influence policy makers in the central government of the U.S.S.R. and bring about changes in internal boundaries highlighted the promise and challenge of glasnost and perestroika. The question of Mountainous Karabagh also raised the thorny issue of Soviet nationalities policy.