Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

1988 –1990 
An Azerbaijani Tragedy 
O N   T H E   A F T E R N O O N  
of 23 July 1988, five Azerbaijani academics 
stood disconsolately on the pavement in front of the main Communist 
Party headquarters in Baku. They had just come out of a two-and-a-
half-hour meeting with the new Party leader of Azerbaijan, Abdurah­
man Vezirov, and they were depressed. One of the group, Leila Yunus­
ova, confessed that Vezirov had been even more conservative and 
blinkered than she had expected. Another, the physicist Tofik Qasimov, 
remarked that the best course of action he could think of was going 
home and finishing the repair work on his apartment. A third, the Ara­
bist scholar Zardusht Alizade, says that he declared that the only way 
forward was to set up a rival political movement to the Communist