“If you don’t have liberty
and self-determination,
you’ve got nothing…”
Jack Kevorkian
Z. S. Andrew Demirdjian
When political boundaries are drawn without regards to indigenous minority claims on their ancestral homeland, later on it tends to give rise to a protracted territorial integrity versus self-determination conflict. Territorial right by conquest is artificial, while territorial claim by indigenousness is natural, yet many countries deny the self-determination rights of their native minorities.
More often than not, minorities’ numbers tend to dwindle over time due to discrimination, marginalization, forced assimilation, and downright persecution by the ruling class that has occupied the territory by moving in from another part of the world. Such a case exists today in Azerbaijan in the treatment of Lezgins as one of their largest native minorities.
It has been said that if a minority wants change, it has to instigate it, exert unflagging effort, persist and determine to succeed. Do the Lezgins have what it takes to materialize their age-long dream of self-determination, the unification of their ancestral homeland? Let us explore that in this article to see if the Lezgins are the soft belly of Azerbaijan, who would indirectly avenge Artsakh’s (Nagorno-Karabakh’s) second war defeat.
The Lezgins are the descendants of Caucasic peoples who have inhabited the region of southern Dagestan since at least the Bronze Age. Unlike the Azeri Turks, they are not the new comers to the region by any historical or archeological facts. Lezgins are part of a large and varied Lezgic ethnic groups native predominantly to southern Dagestan and northeastern Azerbaijan and they speak the Lezgin language.
Modern day Lezgic ethnic groups speak Northeast Caucasian languages that have been spoken in the region before the introduction of Indo-European languages.
The Lezgins inhabit a densely populated territory which saddles the border area of southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan. As the pink color in the map below indicate, of the two areas, they have a bigger population in Dagestan than in the contiguous area in northeastern Azerbaijan. In terms of religion, the Lezgins are predominantly Sunni Muslims, with a very small Shia minority living in Miskindja village in Dagestan.
The pink area indicates Lezgin settlements along the border of Dagestan and Azerbaijan.
The total population of Lezgins is believed to be around 700,000 of which 474,000 are living in Russia and a large number of their kin of 226,000 live south of the border from Dagestan. The separation over two countries makes them a divided nation.
In Azerbaijan, the government census puts them to be 180,300; but according to Lezgin national organizations, the real population size is much larger to the tune of 600,000 to 900,000 individuals. The disparity may be due to the possibility that many lezgins claim Azeri nationality to escape job and education discrimination in Azerbaijan.
For the sake of promoting Lezgin rights, in 1992 a Lezgin organization was established by the name of Sadval (Unity) which is an irredentist concept of a separatist organization with the express goal of creating a unified ethno-political entity over the bordering Lezgin inhabited areas of the Dagestan and Azerbaijan. Sadval has been campaigning for the redrawing of the Dagestan-Azerbaijani border to allow for the creation of a single Lezgin state.
Unlike Sadval’s radical demands, another Lezgin organization also was formed in Azerbaijan by the name of Samur (named after the River Samur) with a moderate agenda, advocating more cultural autonomy for the Lezgins in Azerbaijan.
In terms of complaints, Lezgins traditionally suffered from unemployment and a shortage of land to graze and cultivate crops. Lezgins got furious when in 1992 about 105,000 refugees from the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war were resettled on Lezgin lands. Another issue also fuelled the anger of the Lezgins when they were forced to fight in the Karabakh war against their wish. Thus, issues of land, employment, language and the absence of internal autonomy have sparked the drive for self-determination. These and other perceived inequities contributed to an increase in tensions between the Lezgin community and the Azerbaijani government.
The negative sentiments of the Lezigin people reached a crescendo during the war in Chechnya in 1994 when the border between Dagestan and Azerbaijan was closed. As a result, the Lezgins were for the first time in their long history separated by an international border restricting their movement. The border closure drove home the realization that their nation is divided.
One of the main grievances that the Lezgins have against the governments in Moscow and Baku is what they object to the artificial division of their ancestral lands that occurred when the Soviet Union dissolved. The normal border between Soviet Socialist Republics along the Samur River became an international border in 1991. The division was more than an inconvenience for Lezgin sheep herders who would bring their flocks to graze in Dagestan for the summer and spend the winter in Azerbaijan was stopped.
Consequently, the loss of the free passage for centuries over the Samur River prevented the ability to migrate. Moreover, many of the traditional Lezgin burial grounds are also predominantly in Azerbaijan further aggravating the frustrations over the division of their lands.
Many of the grievances led to the Lezgin National Movement named “Sadval” which was established in July 1990 in Derbent, Dagestan, Russia (then Soviet Union). They demanded unification of the Lezgin territories in Dagestan and Azerbaijan because they had been denied the opportunity to develop their language and culture both during the Soviet reigns and under the Azerbaijani rule. Later on, in 1991, the activists began to call for a nation-state formation for the Lezgin people, implying independence from Azerbaijan.
In 1991, another Lezgin movement called “Samur” was formed in Baku to demand unification of lezgins into a single sovereign unit. Both of the movements also sought the removal of the tight border controls between Dagestan and Azerbaijan. The Sadval separatists have been more willing to resort to acts of violence in order to achieve their goal of unification of the Lezgin people into one state.
At first the government in Baku tried to deal with the Lezgins more diplomatically, fearing a secessionist war. The mobilization of the Lezgins in Azerbaijan was at its highest in the mid-1990s and in 2020s, as a result of Baku’s policy of forcibly drafting Lezgin men into the army for deployment in the Nagorno- Krabakh wars. However, Lezgians refused to fight against the Armenians in the first Artsakh War of Liberation perhaps as a show of solidarity with a fellow minority ethnic group wanting independence from the untenable Azeri rule.
In the late 1990s, Lezgin nationalism seemed to have been in the doldrums, experiencing a calm period. The rather militant activities of the Sadval movement has shifted its focus from demanding independence to the maintenance of an open border between Dagestan and Azerbaijan, obtaining cultural rights for Lezgins in Azerbaijan, and improving the ecological situation north of the Samur River.
Tensions have increased of late, however, as Azerbaijan began implementing the change from Cyrillic to Latin alphabets for both Azeri and Lezgin languages in 2001. The change drew vehement protests from Lezig activists who complained the move would further complicate cross-border contact with their brothers in Dagestan and compromise, if not kill, the Lezgin culture. The flame for independence was reignited for a short time.
As Azerbaijan refused to support the Lezgin unification drive, Sadval became belligerent. For example, on March 19, 1994 they instigated a bomb attack in Baku subway during which 27 people were killed. For that operation, Azerbaijan classified Sadval as a terrorist organization.
To denigrate Armenia, Azerbaijani government claimed that there was ample evidence that the Armenian Secret Service had participated in the creation of Sadval, and that they had provided them with funding, training, weapons to the Lezgin militants.
Although things are calm now in Azerbaijan, but the minority discontent continues under the surface. Here is the lurking threat of Lezgins of Azerbaijan. Russia tries to resurrect the Lezgin question in Azerbaijan at a Moscow conference in 2008. On May 14 and 15 the Russian Academy of State Service under the President of the Russian Federation hosted the conference with the main theme as “Cultural Heritage, Culture of the Lezgin People: History and Modernity,” which was organized by the Ministry of Regional Development of Russia.
It has been analyzed that on the surface, the conference agenda included several legitimate academic topics, including the ancient history of the Lezgin people, the written language of Caucasian Albania, and Lezgin toponyms and their etymology. However, upon closer examination of the conference proceedings, it appeared that the event was designed to be a propaganda platform for advocating the creation of an independent Lezgin state or Lezgistan with accompanying territorial claims on the Lezgin-populated areas of northern Azerbaijan, something that Moscow has used many times in the late 1990s, when the Kremlin fomented secessionist sentiment among Azerbaijan’s ethnic minorities.
In Particular, one of the documents circulated at the conference was a brochure entitled “Contemporary Problems of Lezgins and Lezgin-Speaking People,” which was released jointly by the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of Lezings and the State Duma Committee on Nationality Affairs. According to the authors of the brochure, the delimitation of the state border between Russia and Azerbaijan is illegal and must be revised by incorporating northern regions of Azerbaijan into Dagestan with the purpose of establishing Lezgistan.
Naturally, the Azerbaijani government reacted promptly and strongly to the event in Moscow by statements made by the officials that Moscow conference was an attempt to create a new source of separatism in Azerbaijan. Baku accused Kremlin to have embarked on a plan to reignite lezgin’s hope and determination to finally succeed on getting their wish of joining the two parts of lezgin’s territories together.
Although many feared that Lezgin demands for the creation of an independent “Lezgistan” would soon result in another secessionist war in Azerbaijan similar to the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) struggle for freedom, these fears have thus far proved to be unwarranted for the time being, but they are looming on the horizon for the right moment to explode. Lingering and persistent threat of Lezgistan, albeit suspected but not acknowledged, as a looming crisis by the Azerbaijan government.
Political boundaries are artificially drawn most of the time without regards to national minorities with conflicting claims on the same territory. In the 21st century, the battle cry of the minorities around the world is freedom. The new definition of freedom today is, therefore, self-determination. Artsakh Armenians have earned their self-determination right through bloody wars, but then, freedom has always come with a high price tag.
There is a window of opportunity for the Lezgins when Russia’s relations with Azerbaijan sours, and if a leader like neo-imperialist Putin happens to be in power, the lezgins or Sadval dream may be realized just as it was done with the joining of south Ossetia with the north Ossetia.
There are now over 195 independent sovereign states in the world. According to UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency), today there are many millions of people around the world who are denied a nationality. Kurds of the Turkey are the prime example. As a result, they often are not allowed to have their own ethnic schools, speak their own ancestral languages, participate in the government, and have freedom of movement to cite a few deprivations. By the year 2024, it is anticipated that there will be perhaps 2015 independent sovereign states in the world; hopefully, Artsakh will be one of them. Lezgistan is expected to be another of them.
Armenians of Artsakh are Christians, Lezgians are Moslems. During the Artsakh first war, the Lezgins in Azerbaijan refused to be recruited to fight against the Armenians of Artsakh for Armenians were fighting to gain their freedom from Azerbaijan’s rule. This shows that the Lezgians are principled people, for they chose to be on the side of the righteous rather than consider ingratiating themselves with the co-religionist Muslim Azerbaijani government. So far, we do not know if the Lezgins refused to fight against the Armenians during the Artsakh’s second war.
Right now Lezgins are struggling to unify their homeland. Armenia should help a fellow persecuted minority by the Azerbaijani policy of forced assimilation. Now is Armenians’ turn to return the noble gesture. Another reasons is to heed Friedrich Nietzsche’s strategy that “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.” Azerbaijan will have to be disbanded by its own minorities that have been deprived of their cultural heritage for the sake of nation building.
For Lezgins, the eagle symbolizes their spirit for valor, for love of family, for love of homeland; it would be a cherished honor for them to die on horseback in a battle for liberty and freedom when the right time and opportunity presents itself to rally for self-determination and unification of their presently divided nation. One of the unintended consequences would be to see how Azerbaijan is being dismantled by other minorities than the freedom loving people of Artsakh for sooner or later they will prevail over their common oppressor.
A map representing Lezgins’ dream of the unification of the north and south of their homeland as independent state freed from the oppressive rule of Azerbaijan.