Hauptsächlich schüren die auf beiden Seiten gemachten Übergriffe auf die Minderheiten den Konflikt, Religion spielt hier eine untergeordnete Rolle zumal die Aserbaidschaner weniger religiös sind als andere muslimische Länder.
Wenn Sie den Konflikt wirklich verstehen wollen, dann sollten Sie "Black Garden" von T. de Waal lesen:
p.44
The depiction of Sumgait would also have been less black-and-white, if it had been more widely known that Azerbaijanis were expelled violently from Armenia. The violence, which happened in rural areas, was less dramatic than the Sumgait pogroms, but in the course of 1988, hundreds of Azerbaijanis suffered at the hands of Armenians.
P 62
Autumn of 1988 saw the Armenians turn against their Azerbaijani minority and expel them from Armenia. There is a misconception that the Azerbaijani population of Armenia did not suffer in the dispute. Many of them did leave peacefully, and there was little or no intercommunal violence in Yerevan, but Yerevan had only a tiny Azerbaijani population and it was not hard for the security forces there to keep order. In rural areas, there was widespread violence. Armenian gangs raided Azerbaijani villages; many of their residents were beaten, shot, had their homes burned, or were forced to flee on foot. By the end of the year, the Armenian countryside had dozens of deserted villages that had been depopulated of most of Armenia’s more than 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds.15