Tottenham’s preparation for their Europa League clash against Qarabağ consisted of an underwhelming smash-and-grab job against Championship Coventry City and a much more assured victory over Brentford. For the Azerbaijani outfit, it was arguably events off the pitch that dominated proceedings, with President Ilham Aliyev laying the foundation stone for their new Imarat Stadium, due to open in 2026, on land that four years ago was under Armenian control.
Brentford manager Thomas Franck made the point that they were “playing against a team whose end stand is bigger than our stadium in terms of capacity.” Whilst Qarabağ’s new ground will have a modest 11,700 capacity, it is built on land only recently de-mined, soaked in the blood of tens of thousands of casualties, to the backdrop of millions of displaced civilians, countless war crimes, and after over 30 years of conflict, a region still on edge.
This is the first season that the Azerbaijani outfit has started with its regional namesake in its entirety under the control of Azerbaijan. But despite the triumphant homecoming, replete with messaging proclaiming national sovereignty over the region, that win, and the team itself, is entangled in a history of conflict, horrendous crimes committed by both Armenians and Azerbaijanis against one another, and the rule of the long-time authoritarian government.
As the Soviet Union began to splinter, Stalin’s chickens came home to roost, and the borders he drew to delineate the ethnic republics of the USSR on a ‘divide and rule’ basis began to throw up all sorts of tensions. Nagorno-Karabakh was a predominantly but not exclusively ethnically Armenian region within the Azerbaijani Soviet Republic, and voted to join Armenia in a referendum in 1991 on an 82.1% turnout (ethnic Azeris in the region boycotted the poll, with 99.9% of voters in favour).
There had been conflict since 1988, but full-scale fighting broke out at the end of 1992, and it wasn’t until…
Source link : https://www.footballparadise.com/qarabag-fk-caught-in-the-crossfire/
Author : Thomas Law
Publish date : 2024-10-15 14:05:21
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