20 January 1990 and the Unity of Azerbaijanis
Recently, both Elin Suleymanov and Tabib Huseynov made the point that, in the wake of the massacre of unarmed Azerbaijani citizens by Soviet troops on January 20, 1990, Azerbaijanis demonstrated an unprecedented level of national unity and resolve (Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy Biweekly Newsletter, Vol. III, No. 3, February 1, 2010). I was not present at those events so cannot speak from experience but whether or not, as is stated, one million people turned out in demonstration in Baku, it was clearly a momentous occasion. But I am still mystified as to exactly what it represented. Was it a show of unity? If so, unity against what? The Soviet Union? Or was it simply an outpouring of revulsion against the slaughter of innocents?
Even today, amongst those aged 40+ there are many who hanker after the days of what they consider the ‘unity’ of the former Soviet Union. Those people do not view the Soviet Union as the foe but as the protector. I recall on one occasion in 1995 speaking to a very senior government official who, pondering his future if the economic prospects for Azerbaijan got any bleaker, said he had many highly-placed friends in Moscow who would find him a job. Not much sign of national unity there.
Many of those who lived in Baku in 1990 have since left the city. No doubt the harsh economic outlook prior to 1997 drove many to look elsewhere but even without that impetus many would have left in any case, especially amongst that strata some would have called the ‘intellectuals’ of Baku. They did not express much unity for Azerbaijan as a nation. Indeed, President Abulfaz Elchibey (1992-93) looked to Turkey not only as a model but as a parent, going so far as to introduce not Azerbaijani but Turkish as the national language.
Increasingly from August/September 1993, when I made my first visits to Azerbaijan, people would complain to me about the influx of refugees to Baku and how they were making such a mess of their beautiful city. “Why don’t they go back to the front to fight?” was the common refrain. Many valiant and patriotic Azerbaijanis did fight and die for Azerbaijan but I certainly got the sense, particularly amongst the educated middle and upper classes of Baku, that this was not Baku’s war, that Baku was somehow not part of Azerbaijan, that Baku was cosmopolitan, superior, and that Azerbaijanis were essentially peasants who should fight their own wars and leave Baku and Bakuvians alone. Admittedly, this is purely anecdotal. The people I met in those war-torn days were no doubt an unrepresentative sample of Bakuvians but it didn’t give me the impression of unity. And whilst Elchibey’s government was hardly a model administration, I was never left with the impression that Azerbaijan would emerge the victor in its war against Armenia, not so long as Baku did not stand behind it. It pained me at the time to think so.
It seems to me that the very idea of a modern unique identity of Azerbaijan was the creation of Haidar Aliyev, the former Soviet Politburo member who almost single-handedly brought Azerbaijan back from the brink of total defeat and started the hard slog of putting right the utter mess in which Elchibey’s administration had left the country. It was President Aliyev who made Azerbaijani the national language and he himself, unlike many of his senior administration of the day, spoke eloquently in stirring Azerbaijani. Elchibey had never quite succeeded in making people feel that the new state was a continuation of the first independent Azerbaijan Republic of 1918-20 but somehow it seems to me that President Aliyev magically achieved this feat.
Still, I do wonder whether national unity really was there in January 1990. If it was, was it so easily lost between then and September 1993? And has it truly come back since? It would be an interesting study to answer these questions.
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