Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

An Eventful History 
O N   A   C H I L LY 
spring day in 2000, a crowd of Azerbaijanis, all dressed 
in long black coats, was standing under a canopy of pine trees on a hill 
high above the curving Bay of Baku. Everyone was holding carnations 
and chatting to friends—and waiting for something to begin. We were 
standing at the entrance to the Alley of Martyrs, or Shehidler Khiyabani, 
formerly the Kirov Park, which had been dug up in 1990 to make way 
for the graves of the one hundred thirty victims of the 20 January 
bloodshed. Every year on that day tens of thousands of people walk 
along the alley of tombs and remember the victims of the Soviet army 
intervention. 
The twentieth of January would have been the day to witness a 
popular ceremony of grief and remembrance. But it was the thirty-first 
of March, and the crowd at the Alley of Martyrs had been specially in­
vited to mark Genocide Day, a recently instituted commemoration of 
the sufferings of the people of Azerbaijan. 
Azerbaijan’s story of itself is of a nation formed in adversity. In the 
eighteenth century, a series of semi-independent khanates  stretched 
from the southern Caucasus into northern Iran. Their rulers were Tur­
kic-speaking but were part of the Persian, not the Ottoman, Empire. 
Their legacy is a strong tradition of regionalism—the Azeri word is yer­
libazliq—in which local allegiances take precedence over national ones. 
The khanates were abolished by the Russians, who drew a new frontier 
along the River Araxes, under the Treaty of Turkmenchai in 1828, di­
viding the Azerbaijanis in two. After 1917, Russian rule briefly gave 
way to the short-lived first Azerbaijani republic but was brutally reim­
posed by the Bolsheviks in 1920. 
Even the simplest elements of Azerbaijan’s national identity are 
confusing. The Azerbaijanis are Turkic but mainly Shiite by religion, are 
of Persian lineage but with a heavy Soviet overlay. Nothing can be taken 
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B A K U :  A N   E V E N T F U L   H I S TO RY 
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for granted. In the course of the twentieth century, for example, the 
Azeri language was written successively in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic 
letters. It is now making a painful return to the Latin script. Azerbaija­
nis still feel their independence is vulnerable, and the Armenians’ cam­
paign to take over Nagorny Karabakh was perceived as an attempt to 
break up their fragile state. 
Many Azerbaijanis also feel, with some justification, that the out-
side world knows nothing of their sufferings. Neither the Soviet nor the 
international press gave much coverage to the often violent expulsion 
of roughly two hundred thousand Azerbaijanis from Armenia in 1988– 
1989. Few people know that roughly fifty thousand Azerbaijanis were 
deported from Armenia in the 1940s. Before that, thousands of Azer­
baijanis died in the bloody conflicts of 1918–1920. In 1998, President 
Aliev stitched these disparate events together in order to proclaim 
Azerbaijan’s Genocide Day. The thirty-first of March, the day the mas­
sacres of Muslims began in Baku in 1918, was chosen as the date of 
commemoration. 
The choice of the word “Genocide” to link the events suggested, 
however, that the commemoration was less about the past than about 
present-day politics. The message was, if Armenia could have a Geno­
cide Day, then why should Azerbaijan not have one too? By using the 
term, Aliev had initiated a duel of the martyred nations. 
At a press briefing on 30 March 2000, Aliev’s adviser on ethnic is-
sues, Hidayat Orujev, declared the duel open. According to the Turan 
news agency report, Orujev came up with an astonishing figure that 
outtrumped the Armenians: about two and a half million Azerbaijanis 
had been the victims of “the genocide that Armenians committed 
against Azerbaijanis in the 20th century.” Turan went on: “The state 
adviser said that without the Russian empire’s patronage Armenians 
could not have committed these mass killings of Azerbaijanis. He said 
that by falsifying history, the Armenians were trying to conceal the 
truth from the world and to portray themselves as innocent victims.”
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In the public language of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict there is no 
moral shading. 
In the Alley of the Martyrs the ceremony was about to begin. Lim­
ousines eased up at the curb and deposited the foreign diplomatic 
corps. The U.S. ambassador stepped out of his Chevrolet; the Russian