ANALYSIS: DO AZERBAIJAN’S ETHNIC MINORITIES FACE FORCED ASSIMILATION?

RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
June 26 2008
Czech Republic

Over the past 10 days, representatives of ethnic minorities in
Azerbaijan have issued two separate public statements affirming their
fear of assimilation and soliciting international support. Azerbaijani
commentators have dismissed those appeals as unfounded and orchestrated
by Moscow.

The ethnic groups in question are the Avars, Tsakhurs, and Lezgins,
and according to official statistics together they constitute less
than 1 percent of Azerbaijan’s total population of 8.65 million. They
live compactly in several districts of northern Azerbaijan bordering
on the Russian Federation. Avars are the largest ethnic group in
neighboring Daghestan, where they account for approximately 29 percent
of the population, and Lezgins the third largest (13 percent). The
Tsakhurs, who number around 8,000, constitute less than 0.5 percent
of Daghestan’s population.

Estimates of the number of Lezgins in Azerbaijan range from 178,000
to 400,000 or even 850,000. Azerbaijan’s Lezgins have lobbied
sporadically for greater protection of their rights since the early
1980s; some Lezgins in both Daghestan and Azerbaijan have gone so far
as to propose creating an independent state that would encompass their
historic homeland to the north and south of the Samur River that forms
the border between Russia and Azerbaijan. A conference on the Lezgins
organized in Moscow last month under the aegis of the Russian Foreign
Ministry was construed by some Azerbaijani commentators as possibly
heralding a new Lezgin separatist threat.

On June 16, the website rossia3.ru posted an appeal "To all people
of good will" signed by eight separate organizations representing the
Avars, Lezgins, and Tsakhurs. One of those organizations is the Imam
Shamil Avar National Front headed by Dagneft President and Russian
State Duma Deputy Gadji Makhachev, who many observers believe has
close ties with, and on occasion acts on orders from, the Kremlin.

The appeal deplored the fact that the creation in 1918 of the
Azerbaijan Democratic Republic effectively split the ancestral homeland
of the three ethnic groups, and that during the seven decades that
those lands were part of the USSR, they were subjected to "nightmarish"
discrimination. It claimed that they were the only ethnic minorities
in the entire Soviet Union who were obliged to pay for secondary and
higher education. It further argued that Azerbaijan’s secession in
1991 from the USSR was illegal as it was not preceded by a referendum,
in which they would have voted against (Armenia was in fact the only
Soviet republic to comply with the referendum requirement), and that
"twice during the 20th century Azerbaijan occupied our homeland and
unlawfully seized power there."

The appeal claimed that the leadership of the newly independent
Azerbaijan Republic then embarked on the systematic annihilation of the
three ethnic groups, sending "tens of thousands" of young men to fight
in Nagorno-Karabakh, of whom "thousands" were killed. (That figure is
difficult to reconcile with official population figures.) Members of
the intelligentsia from all three ethnic groups were allegedly thrown
into prison, and Azerbaijanis from other regions of Azerbaijan or from
Georgia resettled in their abandoned homes in what the appeal terms
a systematic "Turkicization" process. Those resettlers allegedly hold
most official posts in the districts where the three groups constitute
the majority of the population. The most recent crackdown was in
March 2008 against the predominantly Lezgin population of the Kusar
and Khachmas raions of Azerbaijan. The appeal concluded by requesting
help in clarifying what has happened to those arrested and support
for the creation of autonomous regions for the three groups.

Two days later, on June 18, the Daghestan-based Avar National Council,
which was not a signatory to the June 16 appeal, addressed an open
letter to Daghestan’s President Mukhu Aliyev (himself an Avar) to
"protect" Azerbaijan’s Avar minority from the threat of "genocide,"
kavkaz-uzel.ru reported. The agency quoted Magomed Guseinov, a
leading Council member, as estimating the size of Azerbaijan’s Avar
minority at 200,000, and the number of Avars currently imprisoned
in Azerbaijan at almost 300. Guseinov repeated the claim that in the
Zakatala, Belokany, and Kakh raions Azeris, mostly resettlers from the
Naxcivan Autonomous Republic, occupy most prominent political posts
even though they account for just 27 percent of the population. He
contrasts the plight of the Avars in Azerbaijan unfavorably with that
of Daghestan’s Azerbaijani minority, which at the time of the 2002
Russian Federation census numbered 111,656 people, or approximately
4 percent of the republic’s population. As one of Daghestan’s 14
titular nationalities, the Azeris have the right to radio broadcasts
and education in their native language.

Guseinov recalled that during a visit to Baku in late April 2007,
President Aliyev discussed the plight of Azerbaijan’s Avars with
President Ilham Aliyev, who declared on that occasion that the Avars
have no grounds for complaint and accused unnamed "forces" of seeking
to stir up unrest among Azerbaijan’s ethnic minorities. Mukhu Aliyev
is scheduled to visit Azerbaijan again on June 26.

Meanwhile, political scientist Vafa Quluzade, who served as an adviser
to Ilham Aliyev’s late father Heydar, was quoted by kavkaz-uzel.ru on
June 19 as accusing Russia of deliberately seeking to fuel disaffection
among Azerbaijan’s Avar, Lezgin, and Tsakhur minorities on the eve
of a visit to Baku by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Quluzade
suggested the objective is to coerce Azerbaijan into accepting
a recent offer from Gazprom to buy natural gas from Azerbaijan’s
offshore Shah Deniz field. A commentary published on June 19 in the
online daily zerkalo.az similarly argued that separatism on the part
of the Lezgins, the Kurds, and the Talysh (who live in the southern
districts of Azerbaijan bordering on Iran) constitutes a very real
threat to Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, and compared the Lezgins
in Azerbaijan with the Ossetian population of the breakaway Georgian
republic of South Ossetia.