The Independent, UK
January 20 1990, Saturday
This week in history:
1990: Baku reverts to ancient hatreds
by RUPERT CORNWELL in Moscow
THE CITY is magnificent and malign, one that nature herself might have intended as a theatre of splendour and tragedy. Few views in the world are as majestic as Apsheron Bay at night. Yellow refinery flares stream into the sky. An evil moon plays upon the oil derricks miles out into a Caspian Sea twinkling with the lights of one of the great metropolises of the Orient.
Baku is not only built on oil, but swimming in it. The black pitch which even today oozes there from the surface of the earth made it famous in ancient times as a seat of eternal fire. It was one of the first centres of the modern petroleum industry. Crumbling mansions along the seafront bear silent tribute to the magnates who once made their own and the city's fortunes.
But they are just one part of a stage-set whose character even the grey uniformity of communism has failed to extinguish. After 70 years, the veneer of the Soviet Union is only skin-deep. Baku is the Orient, a place of ghosts and memories – and of a violence which you can almost touch in the air.
Today its Armenian colony which once numbered a quarter of a million has all but vanished. Even in September the trellised houses in their dusty old quarter of Armenikend up on the hill behind the bay were shuttered and empty.
Before the latest pogroms, only 20,000 at most were left, in shanty towns like Khutor on Baku's northern edge, or in the bleak high-rise blocks which disfigure the outskirts of Baku like those of any other large town in the Soviet Union. Now most of those have gone too, either fleeing by ship or plane to safety or – in the case of a few wretched dozen – dragged from their homes and murdered in the last few terrible days. How many died like this no one may ever know. Their possessions have been commandeered or destroyed, their homes occupied by Azeri refugees who in turn have fled from Armenia.
Like Byzantium or Beirut, Baku has seen everything before – even events like those of this week. In 1905, oil installations and whole areas of the city were set ablaze in another witch-hunt of Armenians. Then it was the Cossacks, crack troops of the Tsar, who were sent in to restore order. In 1990, Soviet Army and Interior Ministry troops are trying, apparently in vain, to perform an identical task.
The city's natives are warm and friendly to the visitor – their hospitality and generosity can be overwhelming to the Westerner. But well before the present horrors, a sense of impending calamity was almost tangible. On street corners groups of idle youths loiter. Obviously unemployed, they seemed even then the casual guns of a future shoot-out. Talk to an Azeri and within minutes the conversation would revert to Armenians and their supposedly favoured status in Moscow, and the eternal issue of Nagorny Karabakh.
The worst has now happened. Baku's seafront boulevards are reported blocked by demonstrations. Columns of tanks are prevented from entering the city by crowds of protesters ready to lay down their lives. What comes next is quite unpredictable. All that is certain is that Baku itself, whether run-down or resurgent, will survive. It always has.
Foreign News Page 12