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were leaving of their own free will. After they had gone, a hitherto un
advertised part of Operation Ring was enacted as Azerbaijani refugees,
who had fled Armenia in 1988–1989, were brought into Getashen/
Chaikend and took over the recently abandoned Armenian houses as
living quarters.
Successful in military terms, Azerbaijan’s operation against the vil
lagers bore a heavy political cost. The new Russian parliament, whose
speaker
was Boris Yeltsin, had formed a close alliance with the ANM
administration in Armenia; and they saw that they had a common
enemy in the Soviet security establishment. Russian parliamentarians
took up the cause of the beleaguered Armenian villagers. Later on they
were to hold their first-ever parliamentary hearings on Operation Ring.
It was the beginning of a new Armenian-Russian political relationship.
Another operation was planned for 6–7 May against the village of
Voskepar on the northern section of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.
Voskepar was inside Armenia but had been involved in skirmishes with
Azerbaijani settlements across the border. Azerbaijan’s operation to
“neutralize” the village shows how blurred the line between official and
unofficial security forces had become. Outside Voskepar, a minibus car
rying about thirty Armenian policemen
was ambushed by soldiers of
the 23rd Division; eleven were killed and the others were taken captive.
As far as the Azerbaijanis were concerned, they were Armenian para-
military fighters; the Armenians could point out with equal justice that
they were the uniformed policemen of a Soviet republic, killed on their
own territory.
Four Russian parliamentary deputies arrived on the scene and one,
Anatoly Shabad, stayed in the village. Shabad is half Armenian, but his
main motive for getting involved seems to have been passionate oppo
sition to the Communist security apparatus.
When full-scale war broke
out, he distanced himself from the Karabakh Armenian movement, and
later still become one of the leading critics of Russian military action in
Chechnya.
Shabad recalls scenes of anxiety and confusion in Voskepar. He says
he did not see armed fighters, who appear to have been on the edge of
the village and acting on their own. Through a loudspeaker, a Soviet
army commander gave the villagers a deadline to surrender their weap
ons. When no one reacted and the deadline had expired, an artillery
bombardment opened up. Most of the shells were fired over or away
from
the village, but three villagers who had fled in fright were killed.
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Shabad says that he later realized the bombardment was meant to in
timidate the civilians into submission rather than to hit the fighters. He
saw exactly the same tactic used by the Russian army in Chechnya in
1995–1996:
Armed men, who fight in wars, are not frightened by these things.
They are only frightened when the firing is aimed at them. I under-
stood later that if there is only noise all around you and the shells are
flying in another direction, you can simply drink cognac and not react
at all. All these things are designed to sow panic among the civilian
population. Women begin to weep, dogs bark,
cows moo, and a situa
tion is created.
18
The presence of a Russian member of parliament evidently saved the
villagers of Voskepar from becoming additional victims of Operation
Ring. The division’s troops did not enter the village, and Shabad man-
aged subsequently to extract the surviving Armenian policemen from
Azerbaijani custody by means of a large cash payment provided for
him by the Armenian Interior Ministry. A week later, however, all of the
inhabitants of seventeen smaller Armenian villages in the Hadrut and
Shusha regions of Nagorny Karabakh were deported. Human rights ac
tivists estimated that during the first
phase of the operation, five thou-
sand Armenians were deported and between twenty and thirty were
killed.
AN ATTEMPT AT COMPROMISE
If Operation Ring had been planned as an act of intimidation against the
Karabakh Armenians, it began to achieve results. After its first phase,
with villagers from Getashen flooding into Stepanakert, the Karabakh
Armenian movement showed its first serious cracks. On 19 June 1991,
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