A few words on Nagorno-Karabakh

Monday 25 September 2023

I´m reading The Psychology of Nationalism, by Joshua Searle-White, 2001. Not a great book, but still useful. As it happens, one of Searle-White’s two case studies, is Nagorno-Karabakh (the other is Sri Lanka).

I thought the following passage was illuminating:

... “Black January” is a national tragedy for the Azerbaijani people. On January 20, 1990, Soviet troops entered Baku, ostensibly to protect the Armenian population there. (Most of Baku’s substantial Armenian population had fled or been evacuated from Baku several days earlier after anti-Armenian rioting.) Instead of protecting anyone, the Soviet troops killed at least 130 Azerbaijanis and wounded many more.20 This event is now memorialized in “Martyr’s Lane,” an area on a hill on the south side of Baku. A long lane is flanked on each side by gravestones bearing the names, birthdates, and pictures of each of the Azerbaijanis killed on that day. The Azerbaijan government has subsequently added graves on each side of the lane for those who were killed in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. At the end of the lane, on the site of a former Soviet monument, an eternal flame burns. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, features a similar monument. It stands atop a hill with a commanding view of the city and is accompanied by a museum honoring the genocide of 1915. It too features an eternal flame, surrounded by obelisks that represent the various regions in which Armenians have traditionally lived. It is accompanied by a museum dedicated to honoring the victims of the massacres.

SW quotes at one point Ernest Becker:

Men try to qualify for eternalization by being clean and by cleansing the world around them of the evil, the dirty. . . . The highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted.

We’ve all seen the videos of Azerbaijanis who destroyed every Armenians cross and tombstone they could find, in a great effort to try and erase every remaining sign that could remind them that Armenians lived there at one time. Perhaps this is also a not entirely conscious attempt to resolve the conflicting narratives that Armenians and Azerbaijani hold about the region by simply destroying the evidence.

I sometimes think something like: while there are many flawed individuals, at least collectively humanity makes some kind of progress. However, we’re also quite capable of acting like insane people collectively.