by ZHANNA ANDREASYAN & GEORGI DERLUGUIAN
Thousands of protesters took part in the demonstrations PHOTO/Al Jazeera
The three-week-long occupation of Yerevan’s main avenue ended on a bitterly comical note, worthy of a William Saroyan short story. As riot police moved in, on 6 July 2015, to dismantle the trash-can barricades and evict the last remaining protesters, the Chief of Police was heard urging his troops to be careful, in avuncular tones: ‘Easy, easy, these are our brothers and sisters; they won their victory for all of us.’ With tv cameras recording the scene for the national news, such pleas might sound patronizing, if not downright cynical; but perhaps in the Armenian context this is not the whole story. In the early days of the protests, sparked by the government’s sudden hike in electricity prices, our colleague Petr Liakhov recorded a typical observation from an onlooker: ‘These kids look so full of romantic energy, just like myself back in 1988! I used to sit-in at the very same spot. Well, you know how it all ended . . .’ [1] It turned out he was a colonel in the Armenian Army. ‘How did I become what I am? A logical progression. First, in 1989, abandon graduate studies and join an “illegal armed formation”’—Soviet-era policespeak for the nationalist guerrillas—‘then, once your “illegal armed formation” wins the war, it becomes a legal national army in which, with a degree of diligence, you can rise through the ranks.’
The war was fought over the Armenian-populated enclave of Mountainous Karabagh, in Soviet times an autonomous province of Azerbaijan. [2] Armenian forces still hold nearly a fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory, within a heavily fortified perimeter, including the unrecognized Karabagh Republic and the depopulated buffer zone around it; the whole area is now contiguous with Armenian territory. Meanwhile, oil-rich Azerbaijan—with thrice the population of Armenia and an economy eight times bigger—has trumpeted its rearmament, with weapons expenditure over the past decade exceeding Armenia’s entire national budget, while Baku reasserts its sovereign right to resume hostilities. During the perestroika period of the late 1980s, vast and impassioned mobilizations on the streets of Yerevan and Baku led to violent ethnic conflict between the two Soviet republics, both hitherto loyal to Moscow. The standard explanations of ‘ancient hatreds’, or a clash between Islam and Christianity, cannot explain the timing of the outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence in the Caucasus over the past century: 1905, 1917–20 and again between 1988 and 1994. Each time, contested political control and generalized uncertainty helped to bring to a tipping point existing structural and demographic tensions in agrarian markets, urban trades and professional strata; in a multi-ethnic setting, these tended to acquire sectarian dimensions. And in moments of historic transition, the impact of small peripheral events can be magnified in unpredictable ways: in the late 1980s, the gruesome pogroms in Azerbaijan and the emergence of Armenian fidayin guerrillas served to expose the impotence and disorientation of Gorbachev’s government, thus helping to precipitate the dissolution of the superpower.
A not-so-coloured revolt?
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