THE CAUCASIAN NATIONAL FRONT

Stephen Handelman experiences Gorbachev's ethnic nightmare

Meysari ON THE main highway from the Caucasus to the Caspian oil port of Baku last week, our taxi suddenly bumped to a stop in a dreary, dusty mountain town. Zakhit, the eager young man accompanying us from the Azerbaijan National Front, pointed out the group of men gathered in front of the local town soviet. 'You ought to see this,' he said.

We stopped and got out of the car„and walked through the silent throng of serious men, all of them in faded suits. A young man, unshaven and speaking quietly, was telling the crowd the latest details of a court case of a dissident in Baku. A row of solemn boys carrying the blue, green and red banners of the National Front fidgeted directly in front of him. Behind the men were the women, bundled in coloured scarves despite the sunshine, listening im- passively. It was curious to note that this rally was being held under the eyes, so to speak, of the local government. Where, I wondered, was the local party chairman? Zakhit shrugged. 'In the crowd, some- where,' he said.

Eight months ago, this entire scene would have been unimaginable, if not criminal. But the Azerbaijan Front, one of the newest of the grassroots popular move- ments springing up around the Soviet Union, already operates to all intents and purposes as a government-in-waiting. The

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republic's authorities, from the top Party leadership down to the district apparatch- iki, have been roughly pushed to the fringes.

It is a bittersweet development. While the rise of independent mass popular orga- nisations has to,be counted as a remarkable step forward anywhere in this country, in the Caucasus it is tinged with blood. The ethnic tragedy unfolding on the southern borders of the old tsarist empire owes as much to democratic yearnings as it does to history.

The loosening of the reins from the centre has released long-dormant energies across the Caucasus. But it has also rekin- dled old feuds and hatreds among Azerbai- janis, Georgians, Abkhazians, Armenians and the other nationalities who inhabit this ancient barrier between Asia and the West. Even Soviet journalists no longer hesitate to describe the quarrel between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh as a potential Soviet Lebanon.

Saying that, or reading it in the worried despatches from correspondents in the Soviet Central press, is not quite the same as experiencing it first-hand. When we stopped for the meeting, we had been en route from a little village, high in the mountains, called Meysari. Just above the old Azerbaijan capital of Shemakha, Meysari offers a peculiarly bleak perspec- tive on the conflict.

Two years ago, it was largely inhabited by Armenians, who cultivated the vine- yards surrounding the village for a local state collective, or used it as a summer retreat. Now, it is home to about .80 Azerbaijani refugee families who fled across the border from their homes in Armenia soon after the outbreak of vio- lence in the autumn of 1988. Only a handful of Armenians are left, the majority having sold their houses and moved off in obedience to the prevailing political winds.

The refugees' tales eerily echo the stor- ies already published in the international press about the suffering of Armenians forced from their homes in orgies of mob violence. Hidayat Bairamov, who walked 150 miles across the mountains with his wife and eight children, remembers the `bearded Armenian vigilantes' who appeared outside his two-storey home. They came with rifles and machine-guns in the middle of the night,' he said. 'They shot out our windows. One woman holding her child was wounded. But we were lucky to survive. The snow in the mountains was waist-deep, and nine people from our village froze to death on the way over.'

A rickety table covered with a stained tablecloth appeared in the Bairamovs' front yard. With traditional Caucasian hospitality, they offered us tea in glasses, and home-made jam made from mountain berries. Before long, the inevitable crowd gathered to look at the strangers. Over tea, we heard, in truncated form, what the Caucasus was now doing to its inhabitants.

The new residents of Meysari had found their way here from dozens of Azerbaija- man settlements in Armenia. Life with their Armenian neighbours had never been ideal, but now the government of their ancestral homeland was barely paying attention to them. Most were still wearing the clothes they had crossed the mountains in- Angrily, they displayed their internal passports to show that their residence permits for Armenia had been cancelled, while they had inexplicably been given no stamps by Azerbaijani authorities. Under Soviet law, that makes them unable to get a job. The memories of what they had gone through still seared. One woman pushed a dark-eyed, seven-year-old girl to meet us. `This is Reihan,' she said, holding up the girl's maimed finger. 'They cut off this finger to get her gold ring.'

The local schoolteacher took us up one of the village's dirt roads to the local school. It met the educational needs of some 200 children in three rooms. The floorboards were rotting, daylight poked through cracks in the wall and there were wasps' nests on the ceiling. 'This is sup- posed to be the 20th century, but we have no roads, no water, no medical clinics,' said the teacher. 'Conditions are like the days of the tsar.'

There may be no worse fate than to be a refugee inside the Soviet Union. But the plight of these people is all the more bitter for the way they are being used to fuel the politics of nationalism. In Baku, author- ities wax lyrical about the refugees' hardships while apparently doing as little as possible to make their lives easier. The rhetoric is as passionate as it is hollow. A top government official told me quite proudly that if the issue came to civil war, he would 'follow the destiny of his coun- try'. Fifteen minutes drive away, his more unfortunate countrymen were forced to live out their destiny in tin shacks and cast-off wooden huts used to house thousands of refugees.

Meanwhile, a leading member of the Baku intelligentsia contemptuously dismis- sed Armenians as a people without a culture. The best that could be said about the venom and spite I heard in Azerbaijan is that similar sentiments are to be found in many places in Armenia.

If they were not accompanied by so much blind hatred, the various national- isms boiling in the Caucasus could be seen as a comic-opera version of the battles that embroiled Europe in the 19th century. There is the same romantic identification with the 'national land' to the cynical exclusion of the people living on it. But there is nothing funny about the armed gangs patrolling the roads, and the growing trade in weapons of all kinds. Only military planes can get into Karabakh now. Civilian aircraft, according to some, have been fired on by anti-aircraft guns. The argument between Armenia and Azerbaijan is not new. In 1964, thousands of Armenian Karabakh residents peti- tioned the late Nikita Khrushchev for a redrawing of territorial borders, a month before he fell from power. But the fact that a centuries-old ethnic feud has been stirred into bloodshed by the processes of mod- ernisation underway in the country has alternately embittered and worried Mos- cow. 'The situation is changing rapidly, and it is changing for the worse,' reporters were told recently by Arkady Volsky, the chairman of the special committee

appointed by Moscow eight months .ago to take temporary control over the Karabakh district. see no grounds for optimism.' . Into this combustible mixture has step- ped the new Caucasian representatives of people's power — part victims, part insti- gators of the dangerous forces now sweep- ing the region. Abulfaz Aliev, a quiet- spoken former history teacher with striking looks, is head of the Azerbaijan National Front. Although the Front has been label- led by Andrei Sakharov, for instance, as an `extremist' group with Muslim funda- mentalist influence, Aliev would much rather think about plans for running candi- dates in the March local elections than crude ethnic chauvinism. 'The matter of Karabakh is not as crucial to us as the movement for democratisation,' he told me in the Front's crowded offices on Baku's main street. 'It has become an obstacle for the entire Caucasian region.'

Obstacles or not, Karabakh has cata- pulted the Front to its startling position of influence in the republic. Only last month, it used a general strike to force the local Supreme Soviet to pass a new constitution more radical in some aspects than the plans of the independence-minded Baltic repub- lics. Among its provisions are the right to call a referendum on the question of secession from the Soviet Union if Moscow violates its territorial integrity, namely by separating Karabakh from the republic.

There are certainly positive signs of a resurgence of confidence, after decades of living by corruption and Moscow rules. But the flowering of democracy here remains a hostage to Azerbaijan's odd coalition of nationalists, pro-democracy activists and bureaucrats-turned-patriots. Even if a compromise on the central territorial ques- tion were in the offing, few would see any political advantage in promoting it. Mean- while the refugees — at last estimate about 400,000 of them -- wait helplessly, and probably fruitlessly, on both sides of the Caucasus for the politicians to come to their senses.

Stephen Handelman is Moscow bureau chief of the Toronto Star.