Monday, Feb. 2, 2004
In 1992 the only way in and out of Stepanakert was by small plane, standing room only. Inbound passengers, mostly armed, leaned against ammunition boxes and leaking fuel containers; on the return flight to the Armenian capital of Yerevan people sat on coffins to stop them sliding as the plane corkscrewed up to avoid anti aircraft fire. Stepanakert, the capital of the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that had broken away from Azerbaijan in 1991, had an alpine feel, with crisp air and pine trees, but was terribly disfigured by near-constant Azeri shelling from the historic old town of Shusha 5 km away. Each morning the dead, often civilians, would be brought to a makeshift hospital in the center of town and left on stretchers in the corridors.
Few people knew where Nagorno Karabakh was then, and even fewer remember now. It remains unrecognized, except by Armenia, and largely unrebuilt, its population so embarrassingly low that its government says the figure is a state secret. The war for Karabakh was one of the most depressing chapters of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and today remains one of the most viciously intractable problems in the former USSR. Between 17,000 and 25000 people died in the fighting, over a million were made refugees as Armenia and Azerbaijan expelled and occasionally massacred their respective minorities. The displaced on both sides are still in camps or overcrowded hostels today, remembered by the Azeri or Armenian leadership (many of whom made their reputation over Karabakh) only at election time or during nationalist rallies. Ironically Armenia, the victor in the war, has withered in peacetime, its economy blockaded, while Azerbaijan — or at least its ruling élite — has grown rich on oil revenues.
Until 1988, Karabakh — 'Black Garden', in a mixture Turkish and Persian — was known in the west, if at all, for the beauty of its handknotted carpets. Since 1921 it had been part of Azerbaijan, even though three quarters of its population were ethnic Armenians. With the onset of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, as nationalist and secessionist movements began to develop along the periphery of the Soviet Union, Karabakh's Armenians saw their chance. Street demonstrations turned into ethnic tension, mutual pogroms, then war. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow reformers were unable to grasp what was happening, let alone solve it.
By 1992, as journalist Thomas de Waal tells us in his brilliant book, Black Garden — Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (NYU press), the remnants of the Soviet army were fighting for both sides, for a price. During one offensive in 1992, the Azeris deployed a powerful force of heavy armor against their Armenian adversaries. The tank crews were from the old Soviet 23rd Division. The Armenians responded by calling in Russian helicopter gunships, and the advance ground to a halt. Fighting continued for two more years before lapsing into an occasionally murderous truce where 2-3 people still die each month in cross border shootings.
De Waal's book will infuriate blind partisans on both sides, but for anyone who truly wants to understand what happened in this part of the Caucasus, it will not be surpassed for many years. He is cautious, meticulous and even-handed, and the breadth of his research is remarkable. He shows real affection for the ordinary people on both sides, and restraint in dealing with the self-serving politicians and field commanders in both Armenia and Azerbaijan who used Karabakh for their own political and personal ends. Perhaps most importantly in a part of the world where the conspiracy theory is common currency, he carefully and thoughtfully shoots down the myths advanced by both sides to justify their war. The most pernicious of these is that the Karabakh conflict was caused by "ancient hatreds." In fact, he writes, Azeris and Armenians had lived together, intermarried and spoken each other's language for centuries. Until the beginning of the 20th century, he adds, possibly with a touch of irony, they had "fought no more than any other two nationalities in this region."