Bonanza Fuels Hopes of Wealth and Peace

SUMGAIT, Azerbaijan — Ever since their past was swallowed up by war in 1993, the members of Azerbaijan's Karabakh soccer team have lived the shiftless lives of refugees, carrying on with their sport even though they have not set eyes on their homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh since its Armenian majority drove the men out of the disputed enclave in a vicious ethnic war.

The dispossessed soccer stars slowly reassembled in this filthy industrial town 300 miles east of the sparkling, but now deadly, hills of their birth. Helped by Sumgait's sports stadium director, a Karabakh-born Azerbaijani named Chingiz Orudzhev, they found a training ground, makeshift homes and a bus to take them to matches.

"The games help channel the guys' energies, but unless there's a peace agreement soon, who knows how long the team can hold together?" said Orudzhev, whose team of refugees was champion of the Azerbaijani domestic league last year.

"What we are all really hoping now," he added, "is that Azerbaijan's new oil wealth, and the West's new commitment to us, will mean we can soon make peace and go home."

The oil bonanza in the Caspian Sea basin, which is creating major commercial and strategic interests for the United States, has also kindled a new mood of hope among millions of people in this beautiful but quarrelsome region. They dream of a better life, with a real chance of prosperity, peace and economic independence from the area's most recent colonial master, Moscow.

Oil revenue will "let our long-suffering region flourish at last," predicted President Eduard A. Shevardnadze of Georgia, an embattled nation bordering Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Ominously, however, the oil that is now seen as a force for peace in the region helped start the wars of the early 1990s. In some cases, control of the oil itself or an oil pipeline was the goal of the combatants. In others, the government in Moscow, which had controlled the Caspian's mineral wealth before the Soviet collapse, bankrolled one side or another as a way of destabilizing the region and regaining control of the wealth Russia had lost.

For centuries, the Caspian Sea area and the Caucasus Mountains have formed the disputed frontier between Russian, Turkish and Persian empires. They are still full of pugnacious peoples, steeped in long-standing grudges that have flared into a series of wars in the past decade.