TWO SIDES TO THE STORY: NAGORNO-KARABAKH FEATURES BOTH A THRIVING REGIONAL CENTER AND GHOST TOWNS
By Shaun Walker
Russia Profile, Russia
Dec 12 2006
STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh. As we approached the Karabakh military
post, I felt a vibration in my pocket. "Azercell welcomes you to
Azerbaijan," said the message on my cell phone. Indeed, we were several
kilometers inside Azerbaijan proper, but standing on territory where no
Azeri has walked for over a decade. When the Nagorno-Karabakh region
– which was an autonomous territory inside the Soviet republic of
Azerbaijan – declared full independence from its parent state after
a bloody war in the early 1990s, a further 9 percent of Azerbaijan’s
territory was also occupied to act as a buffer zone of defense.
Our exact location remained unclear. "It’s secret information," said
the guide from the Karabakh foreign ministry. "Maybe the enemy will
read your material." We had come along the road from Karabakh’s capital
Stepanakert, past the deserted shells of Azeri villages strewn across
the arid, monochromic landscape. We were well outside the official
territory of the Karabakh republic, possibly somewhere near Aghdam,
formerly a thriving Azeri city with 50,000 inhabitants, but now a
sea of rubble; only the mosque remained standing.
The soldiers at the post did their best to look upbeat, but it was
clear that theirs was a miserable task. In the bitter cold, they
surreptitiously breathed warmth onto their gloveless hands when they
thought no one was looking. Mice scuttled across the floor in the
unheated barracks, and the trench dug into the muddy ground was more
reminiscent of First World War than 21st century.
The Azeri front line was just 600 feet away, visible from a command
post through binoculars. "We do have occasional exchanges of fire,"
said the officer in charge of the post, a tanned giant with a crude
heart tattoo on his hand and a face etched with years of conflict. "A
week ago one of our men was shot in the head by a sniper at the next
post down," he added.
A timid boy of 18 quietly mumbled answers to the questions of a young
Russian television reporter about the living conditions. "He doesn’t
see many beautiful women, so he’s shy," chirped the foreign ministry
official. "Maybe the American army is all about posing, but this army
is here to defend its motherland."
The motherland in question is the odd-one-out of the post-Soviet
breakaway zones. Over the years of its de facto independence,
Nagorno-Karabakh has developed many of the institutions of
a functioning state, and is more likely than the other three
(Transdniestr, South Ossetia and Abkhazia) to gain some kind of
official independent status in the medium-term future.
There are two key reasons for this: first of all, the fact that
Russia, while most certainly an interested party, is not a defining
player in this conflict, meaning that the West would not see Karabakh
independence as a strategic gain for Russia; and secondly, the presence
of an influential and vocal Armenian Diaspora to lobby for the state
on the international stage. Calls from Washington and Brussels to
preserve Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity are far more muted than
those demanding that Georgia’s remain intact.
While Russia is accused of "meddling" in the other three breakaway
zones – providing financial and military support to segments of land
that officially are part of another state – Armenia’s "meddling" in
Karabakh is of a different type altogether. While Karabakh claims to
be a separate country, there is no border post, and people come and
go freely. Armenia contributes around half of Karabakh’s budget and
trains the army, making it far more than just a friendly ally.
At the consulate in Yerevan, travelers can obtain a brightly colored
Karabakh visa, although no one will check it, and the officials
seem more intent on offering maps, hotel rooms, and taxi rides to
Stepanakert than investigating the purpose of the trip.
Karabakh does not directly border Armenia, but is connected by a small
area of occupied Azerbaijani territory known as the Lachin Corridor,
where the switchback road from Yerevan to Stepanakert reaches a height
of 2,600 meters. The road itself is symbolic of the support that
Karabakh has not only from Armenia, but from its Diaspora – despite
the isolation of Stepanakert, hundreds of kilometers from any airport,
the road to Yerevan was a multi-million dollar project completed just
a few years ago. It was financed by a Diaspora foundation, and halved
the journey time to Yerevan.
Another Referendum
But despite the fact that Karabakh feels like a province of Armenia,
local officials talk of nothing but full independence. On Dec. 10,
the republic held a referendum on a new constitution, affirming its
existence as an independent state, and repeating the independence
referendum held in 1991, when the war was raging. It was the final
act in a flurry of breakaway state referendums that year, giving the
people of Karabakh the same chance to assert their independence as
the residents of Transdniestr and South Ossetia had in the fall.
"The children of those who voted for independence in 1991 have
reaffirmed that desire," said Karabakh President Arkady Ghoukasian
after casting his vote. "We have managed to create a state and to
resurrect the hope we had at the beginning. Any other route except
independence is a route to war."
Negotiations to find a solution to the conflict, which are conducted
bilaterally between Armenia and Azerbaijan without representatives
from Karabakh itself, have so far come to nothing, including earlier
this year at Rambouillet, and again in Minsk, when the two presidents
met and many analysts predicted a major breakthrough. There is a fear
in Stepanakert, reinforced by frequent bellicose announcements by
Azeri officials, that Azerbaijan is biding its time before waiting
to launch a military offensive to recover the lost territory. "The
Azeris are becoming richer, buying weapons, and preparing for war,"
said Masis Mayilian, Karabakh’s deputy foreign minister. "But we are
ready for it."
There seems to be little appetite for further conflict, however,
and even the referendum itself was ignored not only by most of the
international press, but by the citizens themselves. Although there
was clearly some activity at the polling stations, the general apathy
encountered among a sample of people at Stepanakert’s central market
suggested that the official figure of an 87 percent turnout (with
98.5 percent voting in favor) might have been somewhat exaggerated.
Regeneration and Destruction
Stepanakert itself bears few scars of conflict, and is a pleasant –
if architecturally unappealing – provincial city. Although everyone
has war stories of lost friends, children taken away before their
time and careers interrupted, the locals are on the whole upbeat and
friendly, and there are far more shops, cafes and restaurants than
one would expect from such a backwater.
Despite the fact that the enclave is now almost exclusively populated
by ethnic Armenians, Russian is everywhere, and the locals speak it
more readily than in Yerevan – testament to the cosmopolitan past of
the region, when Russian was the lingua franca.
But Stepanakert is a new city. A few decades ago, it was a mere
village. Nowhere tells the story of Karabakh better than Shushi (in
Azeri, Shusha), a town just a few miles from Stepanakert that was
once the capital of Karabakh, and for many decades a regional center,
famed for its curative mountain air and sanatoria. The Armenian part
of town was razed by Azeris and Turks in 1920, and by the 1980s,
the vast majority of the town’s inhabitants were Azeri. During the
war, it was an Azeri stronghold, before the Armenians took it in June
1992. The Azeris were driven out, and Shusha now lies in ruins. In his
book Black Garden, Thomas de Waal writes that the Azeri residents now
live in a makeshift town on the coast north of Baku – Shusha in exile.
A bright sign on a ruined building in the central square proclaims
that: "This is historical Armenian territory; we will never give it
up to anyone." Some of the apartments have been inhabited by Armenian
refugees from Baku, making the best of what remains of the town. The
population now is estimated at around 3,000, a shadow of the 14,000
that lived there before the war. But the strategic importance of
Shushi (the Azeris shelled Stepanakert from the ridge above the town
during the war) means that the return of Azeri refugees any time soon
is unlikely.
A beautiful, rose-pink facade stands on one of the main streets, with
nothing behind it but rubble and a view over the mountains. Once,
it was a hospital; now it stands forlorn, looted for anything of
value, right down to the star in its Soviet crest. The slogan over
the main door, in Cyrillic Azeri, has been whitewashed out, an empty
head-shaped space above it, where the incumbent (Lenin, perhaps)
has been unceremoniously removed.
The expansive Persian marketplace still has four walls and some ornate
carvings, but no roof and empty holes where there were once windows
– in another city it might be an ultra-chic architectural project;
here it is a reminder of what has been lost. The 1883 mosque remains
intact from the exterior, its handsome minarets still standing, but the
inside is open to the elements and strewn with rubble. From the top
of the minaret, the view across the hills reveals Karabakh’s Grozny:
everywhere, the empty shells of apartment blocks and sanatoria. The
nineteenth century Ghazanchetzots Cathedral has been restored, but
for all intents and purposes Shushi is a ghost town, and looks set
to remain so for some time.
But Shushi is far from the most depressing reminder of the war.
Fizuli, halfway between Stepanakert and the border with Iran, was
captured by the Armenians in summer 1993, and completely razed. A
sizeable town that stretched over several square miles, it is now
simply a pile of stone and rubble, with only the occasional structure
rising above a few feet. Like an ancient ruin, it was a guessing game
to work out what had been where – the twisted shell of a bus stop;
a contorted teardrop that must have once been a Soviet monument;
a flight of stairs that led nowhere but the sky.
The only life visible in the city was a small, rusting truck with a
plume of steam coming from its rear. Its interior had been turned into
living quarters for two Armenians, who spent their days sifting through
the rubble for scrap metal. After more than a decade of looting, they
were searching out the last reminders of humanity in what looked like
a nuclear holocaust, to sell them in Yerevan.
While its hard to see the Azeris gaining any kind of meaningful
control over Nagorno-Karabakh, the first stage of a deal might well
involve the return of territories like Fizuli, and a chance for the
resettlement of some of more than half a million Azeris who lost
their homes. But looking at the ruins of Fizuli, it is unclear just
what they would be coming back to. It would take years for the piles
of stones to become once again a functioning community. They served
as yet another reminder that even if a solution is reached to the
conflict, its scars will remain for decades to come.