Armenia and Azerbaijan

Abstract

The Battle for Baku, capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan took place in January 1990 after an Azeri cleansing pogrom had been mounted against resident Armenians. After his efforts had failed to reconcile the Armenians and Azeris, who had been in active confrontation with each other for many months, President Gorbachev reluctantly decided to mobilise the military against these Soviet citizens and authorised the dispatch of Soviet armed forces to that city. There had been over 200 000 Armenians in Baku, according to the 1989 census, but owing to the hostilities many had since left. Nonetheless a few thousand remained. The main reason for this ongoing hostility was the disputed sovereignty of the autonomous oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave with an Armenian majority population but situated within Azerbaijan.