Libération, the unions, local party organizations, and so on— of the British authorities were already undermining the attempts of started for the first time to run from the bottom to the top, after
Irish bourgeois politicians to collabo-
70 years of transmitting Moscow's orders to the peoples. You rate in repressing revolutionary nationalists, the imperialist forces have to go back to the period between February and October demonstrated unmistakably that they are still following a policy of field executions.
He was referring not only to an unprecedented example of a local Soviet making a decision of its own in response to mass
Three IRA volunteers - Daniel
McCann, Sean Savage and Mairead Farpressure, but demonstrations of up to a million people out of rell - were gunned down on March 6 in
Gibraltar, where they had gone on a military mission. Subsequent reports in the
British press made it clear that the imperialist services had had them under surveillance for a long time. The operation was described as follows by an eyewitness, Mrs. Celecia, who was quoted in the March 13 Guardian Weekly.
*I was watching a couple walking down the road in the direction of the border, when I saw a blond man come up behind them and without any warning, he shot at them. The woman, who was carrying a large shoulder bag fell to the ground immediately. The young man...staggered towards the service station. The man fired at him four or five times more and he collapsed with blood all over the place." Then she said a police car roared up and took the killer away at high speed.
This was clearly
"counterinsurgency" assassination, and no police operation. It was exactly the same sort of thing as the incidents of the so-called shoot-to-kill policy which set off an outon some years ago and led to the Stalker at fair when the Northern Irish police tried to cover it up. In those cases, not only were republicans known to the imperialist forces shot out of hand, but a boy with no political connections was assassinated when he happened to walk near an IRA arms dump.
In response to questions raised by left
Labour MPs and the Irish government about the shootings, Thatcherite politiclans and the English gutter press have been whipping up a lynch-mob feeling against "Irish terrorists," in fact, against all Irish people who refuse to lie down. In so doing, they once again exposed the fact that they have no interest in a negotiated settlement, only in crushing Irish national aspirations. That opens the way for a new broadening of the anti- imperialist movement. But it also shows what the Irish people are up against: an imperialist murder machine forged in genocide. International solidarity with the
Irish people also has to be revived and widened. *
1917 to find a similar situation." control of the bureaucracy. GERRY FOLEY
G ORBACHEV had been forced to
turn to an unofficial organization to keep the mass demonstrations in Armenia under control, Karlinsky claimed, thereby accepting "a dual power situation." The organization in question was the Organizing Committee that led the mass mobilizations in Armenia after February 22, culminating in a rally of up to a million people on February 26, after which it called a month-long truce.
The major source of information about the organization of the Armenian actions has been Sergei Grigoriants, editor of the unofficial journal Glasnost, who seems to have been allowed by the Soviet authorities to move around freely and communicate by telephone with foreign journalists.
In a telephone interview with Karlinsky, published in Libération of March 11, Grigoriants reported "The radicalization is proceeding very rapidly." He went on to say that the local Communist Party organizations "have been bypassed and are paralyzed. The leadership is trying to infiltrate the Organizing Committee in order to take control, but without much success because the Party has lost all authority."
Armenians living in at least one nationally mixed area did not rely on the bureaucratic institutions for defence. The Soviet spokesperson, Gennadi Gerasimov complained that "groups of activists" were keeping guard night and day over the main streets and squares in Stepankert, the capital of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. He publicly admonished the local authorities: "The leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh must take urgent measures to improve the situation." On February 12, the soviet of the region had voted in favor of incorporation into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia.
Moreover, although the overall leadership of the movement passed to the Organizing Committee, led by the moderate Igor Muradian, the Union for National Self-Determination (UNS) led by the much imprisoned nationalist Piruir Airikian seems to have continued to play an initiating role. Sergei Grigoriants explained in an interview published in Libération of March 11 that the latter organization had distributed leaflets calling for the mass rally on March 8 at the monument to the victims of the genocide in the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
One-hour general strike call
According to Tamara Grigoriants, 300,000 to 400,000 people attended the rally (the total population of the Armenian republic is under 3 million). A mass meeting held in Opera Square after the march reportedly decided to call a one-hour general strike for Friday, March 11.
On March 12, Boris Karlinsky reported in Libération: "A one-hour general strike paralyzed Armenia yesterday. It was decided on by the Organizing Committee that has been at the head of the demonstrations for a month during a stormy session on the night of Wednesday-Thursday [March 9-10]. Some would rather have immediately called a three-day strike, but this was postponed until March 26." (There is an apparent contradiction in the reports about how the strike was called. This may well reflect a real democratic political process that could be expected to be complex. Why, for instance, did the Organizing Committee decide to support another mass is toot also 3 its month truce was over?) This report also
March 21, 1988 • International Viewpoint
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
EDITORIAL The British murder machine WHEN the brutality and arrogance EDITORIAL • USSR
USSR
USSR was based on information from Grigoriants, who also said that students had pressed the committee to demand a special session of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian republic to call on Moscow to transfer Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
Dilizhan
The students are supposed to have gone to all the deputies of the Supreme Soviet to ask them to sign the demand for calling such a session. Up until then, according to
Grigoriants, no deputy had refused, and it seemed likely that a quorum would soon be attained. The students reportedly issued a call to the population to withdraw their mandates from those deputies who refused
Lake Sevan (Gokcha)
It was the UNS, according to Karlinsky, that launched the petition for the reattachment of three territories separated from Armenia in December 1923 at the
Azerbaijan time of the formation of the Caucasian Soviet Socialist Republic (which was later abolished, giving way to republics based on the main nationalities of the area. Two of the territories were accorded to Azerbaidzhan — Nakhitchevan, which borders on Iran, and is surrounded by the Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh, three-quarters of whose population is Armenian but which is surrounded by the Azerbaijan SSSR. A third territory was turned over to
Conflict with Leninist nationality policy
The most important of the three was was Nagorno-Karabakh, an area that now has a total population of about 150,000, of whom about 126,000 are Armenians. In both Georgia and Azerbaidzhan, there are Armenian minorities of about half a million, equalling about one-third of the population
In fact, the present Armenian SSR is only a tiny part of the territory historically inhabited by Armenians. The Turks cleared large areas of Armenians both during and after the first world war. In its March 7 issue, l Unita, the Italian Communist Party national daily, published a resumé of, and quotations from, a document that it claimed had been submitted to Gorbachev along with the petition for return of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
The document said that Nakhitchevan was ceded to Azerbaidzhan specifically in response to Turkish pressure, because the Azerbaidzhanis were a Turkish and Islamic
"The interference of the Turks in the internal affairs of Soviet Russia was due to the anti-Russian policy of the Western powers. For example, in the accord between Russia and Turkey signed on March 15, 1921...at the explicit request of the Turks, Nakhitchevan was separated from the Soviet Republic of Armenia and trans-
Soviet republic, 4 document claimed, the decision to give it to In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, the International Viewpoint • March 21, 1988
Iran Azerbaidzhan was taken directly by Stalin in contradiction to earlier decisions by the Soviet government. "On July 5, Stalin managed to get agreement that the question would not be referred to Moscow, and in the meeting of the Caucasus Political Bureau personally took a decision openly in conflict with the Leninist nationality policy." The document also accused the Azerbaidzhani authorities of attempting to wipe out Armenian culture in
"The 80 per cent of the population that is Armenian does not even have the possibility of receiving TV broadcasts in Armenian....It is not even possible to send literature and text books in Armenian directly into Karabakh, even though there are more than 180 Armenian schools in the area. The Armenian teachers' institute was transferred from Baku to Stepankert.... For graduates of the Yerevan institutes from Karabakh, it is impossible to return to their country because, according to the indications of the plan, all Nagorno-Karabakh specialists are assigned only by Baku."
In fact, the statements made by the Communist Party authorities after the onset of the mass mobilizations in Armenia acknowledged that the cultural rights of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh had been honored in the breach. For example, on March 5, Pravda carried a TASS interview with the new first secretary of the Nagorno-Karabakh party committee, Genrikh Pogosian (by his name an Armenian, as was his abruptly ousted predecessor), who said, among other things: "I want to point out that owing to the fault of the former leadership of the party regional committee, unnecessary difficulties were created with respect to cultural exchange, support for literature and textbooks in the native languages and for the traditional ties of the working people of Nagorno-Karabakh with brotherly Armenia."
Since most of the population, including the formally elected officials are Armenian, as shown by the vote of the Autonomous Region Soviet on February 12, it is peculiar, to say the least, that such a state of affairs could have come about. It is possible that one factor is the Soviet doctrine that national differences should whither away as a result of the operation of economic forces. The region is dominated economically by the Azerbaidzhani capital of Baku. The other obvious factor is the "verticalism" of the Soviet system, in which the descending links are more subject to pressure from above than from below, in this case more from the Azerbaidzhani republic authorities than from the Armenians they were supposed to represent.
Nonetheless, the Armenian leaders seem not to have blamed the Azerbaidzhani authorities but the all-Union bureaucracy. For example, in his interview with Sergei Grigoriants in Libération of March 11, Karlinsky asked: "Are the testimonies given at the meeting last Monday at the Armenian cemetery in Moscow on the atrocities committees by the Azerbaidzhanis credible?"
Grigoriants replied: "Yes, but they underestimate the reality, which is much more terrible. The most regrettable effect of the anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan is that the Armenians have now lost confidence in the Russians. They say that the Azeris have been manipulated, while they have not, and will not, let themselves be provoked. It is dangerous to continue to about this question over the
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Georgia ARMENIA SSR • Leninakan YEREVAN Azerbaijan Turkey
Alexander Adler, a usually wellinformed and perceptive Soviet watcher, has speculated that the conflict between the Azerbaidzhani and Armenian authorities was paralleled by a conflict within the all-Union apparatus: "Gorbachev sent Lieutenant General Trushin, the number two official in the Minister of the Interior (the MVD), a sort of rival police of the KGB, to Azerbaidzhan. The chief of the MVD, Alexandr Vlasov, is a loyal follower of Gorbachev who was installed in office at the beginning of 1986. Trushin immediately announced that everything would be done to find those responsible for the anti-American pogroms. It recognized for the first time publicly that the city of Kirovabad had been affected by the troubles... But if Kirovabad had not been previously mentioned, it is because it is a 'closed city,' where major KGB facilities are located.
Power struggle within all-Soviet bureaucracy
"It will be noted that the national head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, did not take part in the working meeting in Moscow, when the work of his service was explicitly questioned in an issue of Moscow News."
Adler went on to point out: "The fact that the maintenance of order has been entrusted to the MVD, even though it is a normal procedure, could indicate a certain mistrust of the local and national KGB, where the former boss of Azerbaidzhan, Haidar Aliev, still holds influence."
A power struggle within the all-Union institutions of bureaucracy could explain why the central state has seemed relatively paralyzed during this crisis. But, at the same time, a massive repression could discredit Gorbachev's liberalization. Moreover, even before Gorbachev, Brezhnev himself retreated in the face of demonstrations of tens of thousands in Armenia and Georgia against attempts to degrade the status of the local languages in the new Soviet constitution adopted in 1978.
The most detailed account in the international press of the events leading up to the February-March crisis seems to be in the reporting of Karlinsky and Adler in Libération. It differs on one substantial point with report of two New York Times Service correspondents in the March 12-13 International Herald Tribune, who attribute the leadership of the petition campaign for reattachment of Nagorno-Karabakh and the initiative for the mass movement to Igor Muradian. In his telephone interview with Karlinsky, Grigoriants described Muradian as "a man who has always stayed away from the dissidents and the underground nationalist movement."
According to Karlinsky, the UNS launched the petition in August. He also reported that the UNS had been able to take the leadership of the ecological committees that were forming in protest against extraordinary air pollution in the Yerevan area blamed for a catastrophic increase in foetal malformations and miscarriages. In October, the Azerbaidzhani police roughed up some Armenians. The UNS organized a demonstration of 10,000 on October 10 in protest, but Nagorno-Karabakh itself remained quiet. But in early February, the burning of an Armenian primary school by Azerbaidzhanis touched off mass protests in the disputed region itself. There was a spontaneous rally on February 11 in front of Communist Party headquarters in Stepankert and a spontaneous strike by priand high-school students. On February 12, the Nagorno-Karabakh Soviet voted a resolution calling for re-attachment
On February 15, a series of demonstrations began against the project to build a rubber factory in Abovian, a city near Yerevan. "Combining ecological and national demands," as Karlinsky wrote, the UNSorganized demonstrations in Abovian and Yerevan. In the following days, the number of demonstrators continually increased, reaching 10,000 for the February 20 rally.
On February 21, the Communist Party youth paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article favorable to the ecological demands but saying nothing about the national ones. The demonstrations grew still more. The university and the factories went on strike. The local party units and the unions jumped on the bandwagon.
On February 22, the all-Union CP Central Committee adopted a resolution saying that Nagorno-Karabakh would remain in the Azerbaidzhan SSR and blaming the
"extremists." The protests widened beyond the UNS. The leadership was taken over by the Organizing Committee, a group of intellectuals from which the Communist Party was absent, that began to take form on February 17. It led the movement until February 27, when it called a one month truce. The movement reached a peak on February 26, when more than half a million demonstrators gathered in Yerevan. The head of the Armenian CP, Karen Demritchian, was booed when he called for an end to the demonstrations. But the Organizing Committee's truce call was obeyed the follow-
On February 25, Gorbachev had received two representatives of the Committee in Moscow, and sent them back with a message for the Armenian people. By this action, Karlinsky said, he had gone over the head of the local party authorities and de facto accepted a dual power situation.
In the March 12 Libération, Karlinsky wrote that the Organizing Committee consisted of more than a thousand people representing base committees established in all the Armenian cities and factories. He reported on a news conference given by Grigoriants in Moscow in which a film of antiArmenian pogroms was shown. It included pictures of Armenians wounded in a "punitive expedition" by Azerbaidzhanis against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh at the
USSR time of the big demonstrations in Yerevan. Grigoriants' collaborator Andrei Shilkov showed pictures of the Armenian quarter of Sumgait, an Azerbaidzhani town near Baku. The 16,000 Armenian residents had
The conference relayed alleged denunciations of "criminal manipulation" from the Organizing Committee. It said that Politburo representatives Dolgikh and Kukyanov had tried to set Armenians against Azerbaidzhanis. Sent to Yerevan in late February, they had "warned the population" that the Azerbaidzhanis would react violently to the Armenian demands. Moreover, printed leaflets were distributed in Nagorno-Karabakh that were designed to frighten the Azerbaidzhanis and incite them to flee They promised that they would be given jobs and housing in Azerbaidzhan.
The housing was provided precisely in Sumgait, massacres of Armenians started on February 28, the same day that the deputy general prosecutor Katushev spoke over Azerbaidzhani TV recounting the troubles in Nagorno-Karabakh. He placed the blame for the troubles on Armenians and mentioned only Azerbaidzhani victims.
Two political facts stand out from these dramatic events. The first is how rapidly mass explosions can occur once the totalitarian bureaucracy loosens its grip even a little. The second is that when there is real conflict, glasnost is honored in the breach. A political process involving an entire nation actively, millions of people, was only faintly reflected in the all-Union press.
Fundamental democratic questions raised
There was a series of soporific tales by local bureaucrats about the beauties of brotherly love among the peoples, exemplified by the opportunities a multinational union had offered them. But there was absolutely no discussion with those involved in demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, not even with the local party officials who supported the Armenian
Another fact that the Armenian developments seem to show is that even a national movement not challenging Russian domination, not demanding independence or even a greater degree of autonomy, still raises fundamental democratic questions. A great number of very different national questions remain in the USSR, but that they all seem to have in common. Only honest and open discussion can offer possibilities for solving them, and that is in the interest of all the peoples and people of the Soviet
Moreover, the linking of the ecological question and national feeling also indicates the underlying democratic issue. Such pollution was possible only because the feelings of the local people as individuals and as communities erasegnored by bureau 5 crats acting behind closed doors.
March 21, 1988 • International Viewpoint