An estimated 120,000 Armenians rallied today to protest the loss of part of their homeland, the second such gathering in recent days and one of the biggest unofficial demonstrations ever reported in the Soviet Union.
Moscow dissidents Alexander Ogorodnikov and Tamara Grigoryants said the streets around the Opera House in Yerevan, capital of Soviet Armenia, were mobbed with people demanding reattachment of a small mountainous region to the Armenian republic.
Grigoryants said the region in the Caucasus Mountains, named Nagorno-Karabakhskaya, was seeded to the neighboring Soviet republic of Azerbaijan in the 1920’s even though the majority of its inhabitants are Armenians.
A woman who said she lives on the outskirts of Yerevan, about 1.100 miles south of Moscow, said by telephone that demonstrations also occurred in Nagorno-Karabakhskaya itself during the week-end.
In a highly unusual step, the government acknowledged the earlier protest today by noting that a “breaching of public order” occurred and that the demonstrators “contradict the interests of the working people.”
Grigoryants said that earlier this month, the local government council asked that the disputed region become part of Armenia. The request was rejected by the Communist Party Central Committee, she said.
[…]
Grigoryants and Ogordonikov said in separate telephone interviews that protest demonstrations in Yerevan’s center had lasted from late Monday night through today.
Ogorodnikov, a former political prisoner, said 70,000 people marched through the streets late Monday to demand that Nagorno-Karabakhskaya become part of Armenia.
[…]
Both dissidents said the police behaved with restraint.
Since the 1915 Turkish invasion of Armenia in which at least 1.5 million Armenians are said to have been killed, there have been more Armenians living abroad and in other parts of the Soviet Union than in their historic homeland south of the Caucasus.
Yerevan is home to about one-third of Armenia’s 3.3 million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Armenians.
[Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1988]
The Karabagh File, Documents and Facts, 1918-1988, First Edition, Cambridge Toronto 1988, by the ZORYAN INSTITUTE, edited by: Gerard J. LIBARIDIAN, pp. 90-91.
