Nagorno-Karabakh War - Interethnic Violence

Interethnic Violence

Armenians refused to allow the issue to subside despite a compromise made by Gorbachev, which included a promise of a 400 million-ruble package to introduce Armenian language textbooks and television programming in Karabakh. At the same time, Azerbaijan was unwilling to cede any territory to Armenia. Calls to transfer Karabakh to Armenia briefly subsided when a devastating earthquake which hit Armenia on 7 December 1988, leveling the towns of Leninakan (now Gyumri) and Spitak and killing an estimated 25,000 people. But conflict brewed up once more when the eleven members of the newly formed Karabakh Committee, including the future president of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan, were jailed by Moscow officials in the ensuing chaos of the earthquake. Such actions polarized relations between Armenia and the Kremlin; Armenians lost faith in Gorbachev, despising him even more because of his handling of the earthquake relief effort and his uncompromising stance on Nagorno-Karabakh.

In the months following the Sumgait pogroms, a forced population exchange took place as Armenians living in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis living in Armenia were compelled to abandon their homes. According to the Azerbaijani government, between 27 and 29 November 1988 thirty three Azerbaijanis were killed in Spitak, Gugark, and Stepanavan and a total of 216 in the 1987–1989 period. According to Azerbaijani MP Arif Yunusov in November of the same year twenty Azerbaijanis from the Armenian village of Vartan were reportedly burned to death. However, according to Armenian sources, the number of Azerbaijanis killed in the 1988–1989 period was 25.

Interethnic fighting also spread throughout cities in Azerbaijan, including, in December 1988, in Kirovabad and Nakhichevan, where seven people (among them four soldiers) were killed and hundreds injured when Soviet army units attempted once more to stop attacks directed at Armenians. Estimates differ on how many people were killed during the first two years of the conflict. The Azerbaijani government alleges that 216 Azerbaijanis were killed in Armenia, while the researcher Arif Yunusov gives 127 to those killed in 1988 alone. An October 1989 piece by Time, however, stated that over 100 people were estimated to have been killed since February 1988, in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

By the end of 1988, dozens of villages in Armenia had become deserted, as most of Armenia's more than 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds left.