STARTING MECHANISM

Election campaigns in any country are often accompanied by a war of compromising dossiers. Armenia is no exception as the Armenian authorities, trying their best to undermine Levon Ter-Petrosyan's image, are revealing, in Yerevan's pro-Kocharyan media, some interesting details concerning the early stages of activity of the notorious "Karabakh movement". Specifi-cally, the press has reported details of the campaign of "mass poisoning" in Armenia in 1988-89. As we know, everything began from a frightening report in the "Vremya" news bulletin, alleging that the staff of a textile factory in Armenia smelled a strange odour as they opened boxes of yarn which had come from Sumqayit. Then they fell ill with a number of symptoms of poisoning and blamed it on Azerbaijan. Things reached a point of absurdity: a family of Armenians arrived in a district centre from Azerbaijan with all their belongings, including a Cinar fridge and a boiled chicken that they ate in Armenia after the journey from Baku. After the dinner, they suffered the "sickening" consequences, which resulted from carelessness, of course… After that, the townspeople immediately took to the streets, chanting "Find the poisoners!" All in all, "more than 70 cases of mass poisoning among workers and employees were registered at various factories in a short period of time (from 1 December 1988 to September 1989)". But they managed to find Azerbaijani raw materials in only seven of these cases.

An Armenian newspaper admits that the poisoners were actually Armenian "revolutionaries". It cites the story of one of them, a certain Vova Kharatyan, who was imprisoned for "having decided to make people unhappy with the authorities by disrupting the work of the factory, having a distorted idea of national interest". More than 800 people worked at our factory. We did not receive any raw material from Azerbaijan. The factory management was concerned about possible disturbances and demanded that the factory keep working although other factories did not work. I often went to rallies together with my family. I met guys from the movement on Theatre Square. On several mornings when we came to work we found hay scattered all over the factory premises. I think this was a hint that we were animals, because we worked at a time of a revolution. Once I found a note which said: "You are Turks because you work, but do not take part in the revolution."

And then Kha-ratyan decided to take action. "We had a substance called B-58 at the factory. It was sprinkled on trees in the factory garden. When you opened a bottle, it would give out a stench," he said. "This poisonous chemical was under the staircase leading to the second floor. Incidentally, this substance was always available at the factory and was sprinkled on trees every spring. I opened a flask that contained about 200 grams of this substance and left it on the staircase. The smell started spreading. People were happy, saying they were being poisoned and would not have to work. This was just an excuse. No-one would have come down with poisoning from this smell. We did not want to poison anyone. The idea was to avoid working, make a fuss and cause panic so that people would take to the streets. Two or three hours later, I led people to the Opera House." However, the poisoning was not always fictitious. Eight hundred people sought medical aid and 158 people were even hospitalized. The law-enforcement agencies had no doubt that it was a well-planned campaign directed from a single centre. Hardly anyone would have dared to doubt in Armenia at the time that Azerbaijan was behind this campaign.

It must be noted that among other things, the story about the mass poisoning in Armenia gives valuable food for thought, because the Armenian "revolutionaries" found it so easy to cause casualties among their own people in order to "raise the spirit of the nation"!

This was the basis of the wholly cynical provocation organized by Armenian nationalists in Sumqayit on 26 February 1988.

Despite the allegations by Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan, Sumqayit was not the "beginning of the Karabakh conflict" and not even its "first blood". 

Attacks on Azerbaijanis in Armenia began in 1985. According to the official version, the first victims were two Azerbaijani peasants in Xocali District, the then Askeran District, of Azerbaijan: A man who worked at a vineyard and a boy who was helping him. Of course, both were unarmed. There is no doubt that the peasants were killed with just one purpose - to provoke an outburst of indignation in neighbouring Agdam District.

However, it proved possible to stop that first wave of indignation. Genrikh Borovik later said in his famous TV programme, "Position", that one of the columns was stopped by a local mullah and the other by a party member from Baku. Then all the papers described how Xuraman Abbasova, a hero of socialist labour, threw her kerchief on the ground, and no-one dared to violate the ancient custom and step over a mother's kerchief.

It is notable that in Armenia, "the mass killings of Armenians in Azerbaijan" were spoken about as a fait accompli. In order to "cool emotions", the deputy prosecutor-general of the USSR and chief military prosecutor, A. Katusev, said at a rally in Yerevan that he was aware of two deaths and that neither was Armenian.

According to the official version, it was just this statement that acted as the catalyst for the Sumqayit tragedy which claimed 32 lives - 26 Armenian and six Azerbaijani. At least 400 people were injured, and the city sustained great material damage.

Journalists, especially from the central media, later admitted that the socioeconomic situation in Sumqayit was disastrous. Most of the local residents lived in makeshift houses. The presence of the "special contingent", i.e. former criminals, was far too high in the city. Some settled beyond the 101st kilometre and others were sent to work on the construction sites of chemical factories after being released on parole. What is more, the city had turned into a gigantic "gas chamber".

It must be noted that at the end of 1987, Azerbaijan was agitated by a report about a visit to Paris by Abel Aganbekyan, a person close to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

During that visit, at a meeting with Armenian "moneybags" whom he tried to talk into making financial injections into the Soviet economy, the economist said that the Kremlin believed it would be more expedient to place Nagornyy Karabakh under Yerevan's jurisdiction. Then the well-known Zori Balayan travelled the world with the same allegation, referring to a decision adopted at the Kremlin. But it is strange that Moscow did not even think of denying this. And when the first rallies began in the Nagornyy Karabakh Autonomous Region on 13 February and the regional government decided to merge with Armenia, Moscow's reaction was quite vague: for the time being, we are not planning to change the borders and then we will "solve the problem during perestroika".

But the situation in Sumqayit had its own specific features as well. Most of the people living in makeshift houses in Sumqayit, as well as in the villages of Saray and Fatmayi, were refugees from Armenia - the victims of the first "perestroika" wave of pogroms in Zangazur in 1985. The "new wave" of refugees from Armenia also arrived here - by the middle of January 1988, there were at least 11,000 of them in Sumqayit. The inaction of Azerbaijan's official authorities, which did not dare to identify this problem, only inflamed tensions.

It must be noted, too, that a well-established system of collecting "national kickbacks" - donations for the "Armenian cause" - was in place among local Armenians in Sumqayit. The whole thing was run by an Edik Grigoryan, a man with a criminal record. It was Grigoryan who committed five murders on 26 February, acting under the nickname of Pasha: he had two rapes on his conscience (if he had any conscience at all). A regular visitor to underground clubs where karate was taught, he had great authority within the local underworld.

That's why he had no problem knocking together an impressive gang. Later accomplices in the pogroms admitted in their testimony that Grigoryan had a large amount of alcohol and "stuff", i.e. drugs, which were not so common in the Soviet Union in those years.

But there is an even more surprising fact: the victims of the pogroms were Armenians living in Sumqayit who had refused to pay these same "national kickbacks". The thugs had a carefully prepared list of those Armenians. In order to avoid "mistakes", as someone could have been guided by the doorplates, representatives of many Armenian families left Sumqayit beforehand. Activists of the Karabakh committee which operated among Armenians living in Azerbaijan had started leaving the city en masse two months before the events, taking their money from savings banks and selling their property.

A detective of the investigative group of the Soviet Prosecutor-General's Office, Ukrainian Grigoriy Kotenko, later said: "Before the Sumqayit events in connection with the Karabakh problem, Karabakh and then Yerevan received information every second day about the reaction of the local population in institutions and organizations. Who delivered this information? Azerbaijanis? No. Russians? What did they need it for? Of course, Armenians, or to be more precise, Armenian girls. They were led by a woman called Stella. She received all the information and forwarded it to Stepanakert and Yerevan through Armenian agents working at post offices. Stella received a lot of money for such services. She divided the money she was given among the girls. After a curfew was imposed, the military expelled Stella from Sumqayit and she simply disappeared. First we wanted to find her, but we forgot about Stella because we had a lot of work to do. It has to be said that Stella was engaged not just in gathering information. She had several public houses in Sumqayit. Every evening, 15-25-year-old Armenian girls received various clients. We questioned one of them, Nairi. She said that they were afraid of Stella because she threatened them with the police. No-one even reprimanded the woman who was engaged in such a dirty business. Many in Sumqayit were aware of this, but preferred to keep silent. What's more, we found out from our conversations that Stella enjoyed great authority. Wherever she went, people were happy to welcome her. In a word, young boys and girls played a mediatory role between the governing force and the Karabakh committee. Once there was a problem, it was immediately solved. If the driver of the first secretary of the Sumqayit party committee and the secretary of the city prosecutor's office were people of Armenian nationality, then there is no need for further explanation."

But neither Moscow nor Yerevan wanted to publish the whole truth about Sumqayit. They worked very hard on the theory of "barbarian Azerbaijanis" who killed Armenians, and did not say a single word about the refugees and Armenian agent provocateurs among the pogrom-makers. Not only Yerevan, but also Moscow had to justify their own positions: Azerbaijanis had to be presented as "two-legged animals" and "barbarians" only fit for slaughter (now that it is clear why the West is interested in our country, we understand why Moscow had to blacken Azerbaijanis in the eyes of the world community) and Armenians had to be presented as "long-suffering" and "victims". But the most important point was to fan the flames of the Karabakh conflict… in order to speculate about "great blood" on the national outskirts, cancel the well-promoted "glasnost and perestroika" and start "moving towards a market economy with a heavy hand". All that talk about the "Chilean" and "South Korean" economic miracles was quite popular in the USSR at the time.

Alas, there is no guarantee that in reality there was nothing behind the promises referred to by Aganbekyan, Balayan and others, because the whole history of Azerbaijan as part of the Russian Empire and then of the USSR is a history of Azerbaijani lands being placed under Armenian control with Moscow's blessing.