History of Azerbaijan: A sequence of turmoil
-By Charles van der Leeuw

The history of Azerbaijan covers an immense time span detailing an almost endless sequence of invasions, occupations and complicated internal struggles. Few other nation’s histories illustrate how difficult it is to come home at last.

Azerbaijan has harbored human inhabitants since the dawn of Mankind. The first homo sapiens walked its plains and hills in the 40th millennium BC. Human settlements hark back to the 6th millennium, while the first organized state, Zamoa, was established in 881 BC, according to Sumerian and Akkadian annals.

Zamoa, and the larger state of Mannae that followed it, and which stretched from Lake Urmia in present-day Iran to the Kura river, was conquered first by the empires of Urartu and later by the Assyrians. A long sequence of struggles in the region ended in the area's incorporation into Persia under the Akhaemenids around 550.

The conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great, in the early 4th century BC, led to the formation of a vassal state to which present-day Azerbaijan owes its name: Atropatena, named after Atropates (He who is Protected by Fire), its Persian governor who had taken sides with Alexander against his overlord.

Atropates was a follower of Zarathustra, the Nakhchivan-born philosopher who in the 8th century BC had established the dualist doctrine and thus laid the ground for today's leading world religions.

After Alexander's death, the south of Azerbaijan remained part of the Seleucid empire whereas on the left bank of the Kura an independent kingdom called Albania developed. In later times, both Atropatena of old and Albania became the subject of fierce struggle between the Romans and the Parth kingdom. Nonetheless, these lands must have been extremely prosperous. Strabon, the Greek historian who traveled along the western shore of the Caspian in the early 1st century, described its cities, estates, irrigation works and other constructions as "superior to the wonders of Egypt."

Rome ruled Azerbaijan from 69 BC till 115 AD, when the Parth re-occupied it, followed by the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids as of 226. They were Mazdeists, neo-zoroastrists with a zeal that distinguished them clearly from the philosophy’s founder. But they could not prevent the king of Albania converting to Christianity in 313 and declaring the Albanian church a state institution.

Arabs and Selyouqs on the rise
It was during the heyday of the Albanian kingdom that the first Turkish migrant waves from the east occurred. Famine and tribal wars had driven them from their Central Asian homelands. The king allowed them to use the country's vast meadowlands to graze their herds, in return for reinforcing his army in his constant struggle against Persia.

While the newcomers from the east were able to keep the southern foe at bay, they were unable to resist the Arab armies sent in by the Caliph of Damascus from the mid-7th century onwards. Although formally abolished and incorporated into the Arab realm, Albania was in reality separated into petty principalities, the rulers of which behaved virtually like sovereigns. The most powerful among them was Shirvan, whose rulers, the Shirvanshahs, were involved in a longstanding struggle with the Arab lords of Derbent over the lucrative oil wells of Baku. This time period is known for the struggle by Babek, a follower of a mystical sect whose rebel army defied the Arab governors, for decades until he was defeated and executed.

A shake-up came with the last and most powerful Turkish influx in the first half of the 11th century. These are known as the Selyouq, whose realm by 1060 stretched from present-day Kyrgyzstan to the Red Sea. The Selyouq sultans, who took on the title Atabek, proved to be competent rulers in Azerbaijan, and restored many of the feudal princes' rights and privileges without allowing the country to plunge into anarchy.

Arts and sciences flourished, culminating in the work of Azerbaijan's most renowned classical poet, Nizami Ganjavi.

Mongol horror and strife
The Mongol invasions began in 1220 and ended with most of Azerbaijan being incorporated into their vast empire in within 30 years. The Mongols devastated all that had been built up under the Atabeks, and massacred and enslaved much of the population. Mongol rule proved to be unstable however; on several occasions, assaults by the rival Mongol clan of the Golden Horde only added to Azerbaijan's bleak state of affairs. The rise of Timurleng (known in the West as Tamerlane) in the late 1360s only meant more bad news, since the battleground Tamerlane chose to fight the Golden Horde was none other than Azerbaijan.

Tamerlane's disappearance in 1403 and the rapid disintegration of his realm led to a revival of the old principalities - Shirvan in particular - but also to renewed strife among Turkish tribes in Azerbaijan. The first to impose themselves were dubbed Kara-Kolunyu or Black Sheep, only to be challenged from 1435 on by a rival clan, Ak-Kolunyu or White Sheep - resulting in the latter taking the upper hand.

The Ak-Kolunyu were the first to seek help in Europe against two new dangers: a reborn Persia in the south, and the swiftly expanding Ottoman sultanate to the west. Thus, the scene was set for what followed. An Azeri clan of mystics, the Safavids, took over from the Ak-Kolunyu and consequently settled for no less than the Persian throne in 1500, and converted Persia and Azerbaijan from sunnism into shi'ism. The new shah, Ismail I, began to wage war on the Ottomans. Had the West answered Ismail’s urgent calls for assistance, the world's history might have taken a decidedly different course. As things were, war lasted for well over a century ending only in stalemate.

During the second half of the 17th century, the Safavid dynasty steadily weakened and, one by one, the feudal lords of Azerbaijan declared themselves sovereign. A period of confusion followed, during which the petty-rulers fought endless feuds, disrupting, among other things, the lucrative trade links between Britain and Persia through Moscow and Astrakhan. The state of affairs made Czar Peter the Great decide to occupy the eastern part of Azerbaijan in 1722. Further to the west, Armenian land-owners took the opportunity to rise against their Azeri peers, thus laying the grounds for an ethnic struggle that lasts up to this day.

Russian conquest and breakaway
The Russians withdrew in 1735, after they had restored the trade-link, now dominated by the Dutch. Azerbaijan's feudal lords only resumed their internal fights, however, thus making the country an easy prey for Persia to the south and Russia to the north.

The Persians struck first: in 1796, shah Aga Khan invaded Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Russians, engaged in their own European struggle against Napoleon and disputes over succession, only got their hands free in 1803, after which the principalities of Azerbaijan fell to Russia one after another. After yet another war against Persia, the last pieces of Azerbaijan were added to the Russian empire through the treaty of Turkmanchay in 1828, thus establishing the present-day border between Azerbaijan and Iran.

Under the Russian czars, Azerbaijan fell into oblivion, until Russia’s 1860s economic reforms led to the industrialization of Baku's oil riches. Pioneers in the local oil industry included the Swedish Nobel brothers who, during the 1870s, set up an extraction, refining and export system based on up-to-date standards. The Nobel’s were soon followed by the Rothschilds, Marcus Samuel, and the Royal Dutch. In the early 20th century, the latter took over all the former’s assets, resulting in the formation of the Royal Dutch Shell. After the October 1917 Russian Revolution put an end to the position of the Nobels --- who had always been close to the Imperial Russian family --- Royal Dutch Shell became Baku's undisputed industry leader - for the time being as least.

The Russian Revolution resulted in the breakaway of the three South-Caucasian countries --- Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, united in the Menshevik-dominated Tran Caucasian Federation, with Tbilisi as its administrative center. A communist coup in Baku, and war over territories between Armenia and Georgia on one side, and Armenia and Azerbaijan on the other, made sound governance impossible. In late May 1918 the republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were proclaimed one day after another.

Soviet peace-of-the-graveyard
The first task of the government of the Mussavat Republic, as the first republic of Azerbaijan has been dubbed, was to win back control over Baku, still in communist hands. They did so in September 1918 with the help of Turkish troops. But they were unable to stop the war in Upper-Karabakh, even though Nakhchivan was pacified.

At the end of World War I Britain had taken control over Azerbaijan - only to give it up in the summer of 1919, leaving the door open to Bolshevik Russia. In April 1920, Baku was taken by the Red Army without a shot being fired, though tens of thousands perished in ruthlessly crushed resistance movements in the countryside.

It was only the beginning of a long nightmare. Over the following two decades, hundreds of thousands more were killed and deported in the sovietization campaigns. Although accounting for 70 percent of the USSR's oil production on the eve of World War II, Baku fell into decline from the 1960s, after the development of major new oil and gas fields in Siberia. Social conditions also deteriorated in the 1960s, until the Kremlin made a half-hearted attempt to improve the authorities' poor image with the rise of Heydar Aliyev as Azeri party chief, taking over the reins in the republic in the early 1970s.

Aliyev’s relative success let him to become a member of the USSR Politburo under Andropov. But in 1987, after a fierce dispute with Mikhail Gorbachev, Aliyev resigned and took on the post he had started from: first secretary of the local party in his fief, the autonomous republic of Nakhchivan.

Unruly independence
In 1988 , havoc broke out. Bloodshed between Armenians and Azeris began in Upper-Karabakh, with busloads of Azeri refugees stranded in Sumgayt. Soon, fighting began there as well, leaving dozens killed and hundreds more injured. After two years of unrest, with the authorities unable to impose order, the Soviet army entered Baku, leaving hundreds killed. Meanwhile, Upper-Karabakh had become the scene of all-out war, and as Azerbaijan's independence was proclaimed in late 1991, two-thirds of the autonomous enclave had been emptied of all Azeris.

In Baku, former communist leader Ayaz Mutalibov had had himself elected in post-colonial style, claiming over 90-percent of the votes. The opposition which had played a key-role in the early 1990 protests which had led to Moscow's muscled intervention, declared the vote void and ousted Mutalibov the following year.

New elections were held and Abulfaz Elchibey, leader of the center-right Popular Front, became head of state. That summer, a military offensive was launched in Karabakh but was humiliatingly repelled. In early 1993, the last Azeri strongholds in Karabakh fell into the enemy's hands, along with all the lands between Karabakh and Armenia, and not a single Azeri alive remained in the area.

The debacle led to Elchibey's downfall under the threat of a military uprising, led by a young maverick named Surat Husseynov. Eltchibey called in Heydar Aliyev for support. The latter came to Baku, took on the post of vice-president. Still facing the threat of an armed clash, Eltchibey in his turn fled to Nakhchivan - not to return for a long time. After interim elections, Heydar Aliyev was elected head of state - which he remains today.

* Dutch-born journalist Charles van der Leeuw has lived in Azerbaijan for more than a decade, and is the author of: Azerbaijan - A Quest for Identity, 1999, St. Martin's Press, New York.