Azerbaijan, 1995 — military coup attempt
Event Summary
On 13 March 1995 Colonel Rovshan Javadov, deputy interior minister and commander of the OPON special police unit in Azerbaijan, mounted a coup attempt against President Heydar Aliyev, seeking to seize power and reinstate Aliyev's ousted predecessor Abulfaz Elchibey. Javadov's OPON troops, an armed paramilitary force that had become a law unto itself, rose against Aliyev's government in Baku in a bid that formed part of the chronic instability plaguing Azerbaijan since independence, amid the trauma of the lost war with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh and the struggles among rival armed factions and militia commanders. But the attempt failed.
Aliyev, the wily former Soviet Politburo veteran, rallied his forces, and, reportedly bolstered by a warning to the plotters from the Turkish president Suleyman Demirel, moved to crush the revolt. Government forces defeated the OPON units, and Javadov was killed in the fighting. Aliyev used the victory to disband the troublesome OPON, break the power of the militia commanders, and consolidate a firm authoritarian control over Azerbaijan that he maintained until his death in 2003, when he was succeeded by his son.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
37303131995- Albrecht/Koehler/Schutz (CAM) id
CAM-373-1995-03-13
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Heydar Aliyev crushed Colonel Javadov's March 1995 OPON coup attempt and consolidated his rule.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
CSP
Wikipedia
New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →