by Simon Reeve
Back in Georgia we found American and British troops training Georgian soldiers, and entire trains loaded with troops and tanks, waiting for the call to head to the front line. It was clear war could erupt between Georgia and South Ossetia at any time.
Heading west across Georgia an overnight train took us to the western Black Sea coast and Ajaria, a holiday destination and summer paradise with beaches that attracted tourists from across the former Soviet Union. It was rejoining Georgia, largely because of local anger at the former strongman dictator. His son would close the best road every night and race his Lamborghini up and down the seafront. Strangely, this did not go down well among locals earning £20 a month. They kicked out the strongman and were welcomed back into Georgia. But they still had a thing or two to learn about leadership: the new governor took us to a restaurant which was immediately cleared of other customers by henchmen who looked like extras from The Sopranos.
Abkhazia may well be a lovely place to visit, but we barely made it across the border before the Abkhaz government kicked us out. No Western government operates in Abkhazia, although organised crime gangs are thought to be based there.
All of the breakaway regions of the country were a shock, but perhaps the single most bizarre and chilling place I visited in the region was actually a former secret Soviet military base inside Georgia. The sprawling base had been abandoned when the Soviet Union collapsed, and even when I visited, more than ten years later, it still contained thousands of tons of almost completely unguarded high explosives in artillery shells and anti-aircraft munitions. A local scientist, who had taken it upon himself to rally some help from other retired experts and deactivate some of the weaponry, showed me into a corrugated-iron shed, locked by a single piece of string, inside which were 30,000 rusting shells still containing the military high-explosive TNT. He claimed that if any explosives at the base detonated, the chain reaction would destroy most of the hill the base was sitting on and register on seismic charts around much of the world.
Then to really put the fear of God up me, the scientist took me further up a grassy, overgrown hill and showed me dozens of rocket pods holding even more powerful surface-to-air missile systems. Each one contained, he told me, more than 200 kilograms of TNT.
‘One can destroy almost anything, they are extremely powerful,’ said the scientist. ‘For example, a skyscraper, no problem.’
He was clearly frustrated, exhausted and worried. I asked him how easy it would be for someone to take out the explosive and use it in a terrorist weapon. He smiled wanly.
‘Everything is inside,’ he responded, ‘that’s why a small spark or static discharge will detonate them. You could detonate one with a small battery.’
I looked around at the edge of the base. There were fence posts, but no fences. The scientist told us that some houses in local villages had been destroyed when locals tried to extract explosives from some of the smaller artillery shells. He also said he had no money for petrol for a lawnmower, which meant long dry grass had grown around the missile systems, creating a real risk that a fire could detonate the weapons. Nobody was willing to cut the grass with a hand scythe because the area was infested with snakes. The situation was set to get worse.
‘Soon, the base will be reclassified,’ said the scientist. ‘At the moment it has five guards, but soon it will no longer be a military base, so even those five guards will be removed, and the base will be completely and totally unguarded. Isn’t this crazy?’
I had to agree.
Militants were active throughout the volatile region, but there wasn’t even fencing around the base to protect the missiles from theft. I found it astonishing governments were warning us of the threat from terrorism, and troops were hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the same time, yet so little was being done to safeguard powerful weapons abandoned in the former Soviet Union. The scientist had rung the US embassy to warn them the stockpile could be stolen, but nobody even bothered to return his calls.
I wanted to move on across the Caucasus mountains to breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh, a small, mountainous, landlocked region in the South Caucasus. But on the phone from London we had only been able to find one person there who spoke English and could act as an interpreter. His name was David, and he was on holiday visiting relatives. We had to delay our journey for a week until he returned, so instead we headed to Azerbaijan, which had gone to war over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Historically Nagorno-Karabkh had been mainly Armenian Christian, but Stalin, who was skilled at using division to control people, gave it to Azerbaijan, which is mainly Muslim.
After the Soviet collapse Azerbaijan and Armenia got their independence. When Nagorno-Karabakh then wanted to become independent, neighbouring Armenia sent troops into battle and helped the Karabakh army push out local Muslim Azeris who had been living there for decades.
Both sides committed terrible atrocities during the conflict. When I visited, Azerbaijan was still officially at war with Armenia. With a young, passionate guide called Tural we started our journey on the Azeri front lines looking into Karabakh. Active conflict had halted, but it was still one of the world’s forgotten hot spots. Azeri soldiers spoke of their fury at losing family homes just across the front lines. They seemed genuinely determined to get them back. Some still had keys to homes now occupied by Armenians. Ethnic Muslims were forced to flee, leaving towns and villages destroyed so there was no way they could return.
It might have been the twenty-first century in the rest of the world, but on both sides of the border between Karabakh and Azerbaijan young soldiers were still manning trenches. We had to sprint across the open ground of no-man’s-land to avoid sniper fire. I heard shots, but nothing came close.
The conflict over Karabakh actually began in the dying years of the Soviet Union. Back in 1988 there were demonstrations in Karabakh and Armenia calling for unification. Then an Azeri march degenerated into a riot and clashes in which there were deaths and injuries on both sides. Azeris and Armenians had lived among each other for generations on both sides of the border, but more outbreaks of violence erupted and people began fleeing to safety, often running through the night with their families. Armenians fled back to Armenia, Azeris to Azerbaijan.
I remembered reading about the conflict and the war that followed while still a teenager. Back then it had seemed like an unfathomable conflict in a very faraway corner of the world, in countries I could not understand involving people I could not comprehend. Now I was there. Talking with them. And their motivations were completely understandable. I could see clearly how a chain of individual events, dislikes, hatreds, connections and disconnections, had led to tragedy.
Reading about the situation from afar I had been tempted to criticise and condemn when I arrived. But it’s all too easy for outsiders to misunderstand and underestimate the complexity of relationships and situations that lead to such conflict. Nagorno-Karabakh was one of my first real tastes of what I had always thought of as medieval hatred and tension. So often we don’t understand situations and try to suggest or impose simplistic solutions. Yet the problems between the Armenians and Azeris had developed over generations. People from both sides might have got stuck in the past, but for them that past mattered. Understanding that was a starting point in my own attempt to try and fathom what had happened, and I reminded myself that Europeans were in no position to criticise, given the wars we had started and the conflict that raged across our land mass just a few decades before. Anyway, criticising wasn’t my job, then or now. I wasn’t there to cast simple aspersions. I was there to try and offer a balanced view of the situation, show an unrecognised state to the viewers, and encourage them to learn more about the chaos and tragedy that exists in our world.
We drove back into Azerbaijan and discovered there were still thousands of refugees from the war living in appalling conditions. Although the country has vast oil wealth, and once used to supply half the world’s oil, children and the elderly were surviving
in rusty train carriages on a railway siding.
We walked among washing lines strung between the boxcars like a community from the Great Depression. It was bitterly cold and dozens of families were trying to survive with no electricity, no water and no heating.
Walking past one boxcar I heard children’s voices and our guide told me it housed a small school. Inside teenagers were being taught with almost no resources. I spoke to one teenage girl and asked her how long she had lived there.
‘We came in 1993,’ she said. ‘I was very young, I don’t remember before. This is the only home I remember.’
I struggled to comprehend. She had spent more than a decade living in a railway car designed to carry freight. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes it would have been inconceivable. No one was giving up hope of going home, but, as is often the case, refugees like this had become pawns in a bigger game. Azerbaijan didn’t want to assimilate the refugees into the country and give them proper homes, because if they did they could no longer be used as evidence of loss. Integration would be a tacit acceptance that they were never going to get Nagorno-Karabakh back, and the government and the country could never allow that. The desire to maintain a hold over a breakaway state would keep those refugees exactly where they were on a railway siding at the border.
We drove on, feeling sombre. Everyone mentioned the war. We stopped to grab something to eat in a wooden hut of a café that, at one time, had been a brothel. A wandering minstrel came in to sing us a melancholy song. He explained it was about the homeland he had lost and longed for. The emotion was heartfelt.
The border between Azerbaijan and Karabakh was closed, so to get there we took a monumental detour across the border into Georgia, passing through stunning snowy mountains and then on into Armenia.
The journey took a few days and the camera rolled most of the time because we knew just about anything could happen. Our car skidded off the road and had two punctures. We had a row with some truck drivers, spent hours listening to strange Azeri and Georgian music on cassettes, and ate plates of unidentifiable food at mountain truck stops. It was a challenging but brilliant adventure, so I was gutted when the programme was later put together and so little of the journey made it into the cut. But we only had thirty minutes and the other footage we had filmed was much stronger.
Finally we headed south over icy mountain passes and into Karabakh. A sign set above a snow-capped landscape bade us welcome. It was early evening and the moon was out. I felt snow crunch under my boots as I looked out at the disputed landscape. A twisting, empty road through the mountains led to Stepanakert, the capital, past eerie, burnt-out villages destroyed after the Azeris left.
In Soviet times Stepanakert, which sits on a high plateau, had been a provincial town under Azeri control. Now the only inhabitants were Armenian-Christian Karabakhians. It was a town stuck in a mindset of continual conflict. In the morning I was taken to visit a school, where young men were being trained to strip down a Kalashnikov blindfolded.
The scenery and churches of Karabakh were impressive, but it was difficult to visit without asking awkward questions. Before Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan its population was split between Azeris and Armenians. After the bloody war only a handful of Azeris remain.
Everyone in Karabakh had their own, very different take on the conflict and division. It was the other side of the story. But it was also another side of the truth. Two peoples can go to war and endure decades of conflict and division, but both can still be right. Both can still deserve our sympathy. We can go through the events that created the situation and identify who on each side made mistakes and who committed crimes, but when the end result is long-term suffering, everyone deserves understanding.
David took us back towards the border region, much of which had been mined. We were walking through a gully at the side of a road when we saw the skeleton of a cow. Its back legs had been blown off. Then someone screamed: ‘Don’t move, we’re in a minefield!’ I froze rigid. We were there for a few moments, calling to each other and trying to reassure everyone that we would be all right. We knew how to get out of a minefield but it is, of course, exceptionally dangerous and takes hours. Then we heard a vehicle pull up on the road above the gully, and an army officer in a camouflage uniform appeared.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘there are only tank mines here, so your weight will not detonate them.’
We retraced our steps. Very carefully.
David took us to see the work of the magnificent British charity, the HALO Trust, which runs demining operations around the world, has cleared vast areas of mines and saved countless lives. They were working hard to clear mines in Nagorno-Karabakh and a former British Army officer showed us a plot they were surveying. I wanted a closer look so he lent me a flak jacket and a thick curved perspex mask supposed to deflect at least some of a blast.
Walking towards the minefield was nerve-wracking. One of the teams was working close to a village. They told me pigs occasionally wandered onto mines, sometimes when deminers were working in the same area. The HALO deminers explained to me that whenever they saw pigs or other animals straying into a minefield they would have to suspend their work and retreat, rapidly.
There are hundreds of different types of landmines. Some only detonate after they have been trodden on three times, or ten. Some explode immediately with a blast directed upwards. Some are designed to leap half a metre into the air before blasting hundreds of ball bearings around a huge radius, severing limbs and turning attacking soldiers into casualties that become a drain on their colleagues. Others will spray ball bearings at head height over an area the size of a football pitch. One mine detonation can cause others to explode, like dominoes. They are astonishing works of evil, and they can sit in the ground for a decade or much longer, just waiting for the unwary to stray across their path.
We got down on our hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the minefield, ready for them to begin demining, poking very slowly through the ground with plastic spikes designed to identify but not trigger a mine. Whenever they found something they would need to place a marker on the ground and then, very slowly, excavate the area to remove the deadly threat. I was learning all about this while we were on the ground right on the edge of the minefield, when suddenly we realised there were people, villagers, actually walking through the minefield in front of us. One of them was carrying their shopping bags. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so stupid. They had crossed into a clearly marked minefield.
I did just about the exact opposite of what I was supposed to do. Rather than burying my body in the ground, or leaping up and running away to find hard cover, I stood up and started shouting at the villagers.
‘What are you doing?!’ I said, in English, rather unhelpfully. ‘Go back, go back!’
In fairness, other people were roaring at them as well.
Rather than standing stock-still and begging for help, the villagers just looked irritated. They actually wandered over to our position, causing me to raise my hands to the heavens in despair.
‘What are they doing?!’ I said in vain to the lead HALO deminer.
‘It’s very tricky, because they can live somewhere like this for years and perhaps nobody gets injured and so they stop being afraid of the minefield and become blasé about it,’ he said. ‘We often find people letting their cattle wander through areas that we know and they know are littered with ERW [explosive remnants of war], or using the minefield as a short-cut to get to shops or even school.’
He was despairing, and I really felt for him. His team were already risking their lives on demining operations, and they also had to deal with foolhardy local villagers. What a task.
Despite the willingness of people in Nagorno-Karabkh to wander through minefields, they seemed to be a surprisingly long-lived people. My guide David took me to a cemetery high in the mountains where we found headstones of both men and women who had lived to become centenarians. David was convinced pe
ople from the region lived longer than anyone else on the planet. It sounded unbelievable when first suggested, but then I found a headstone in the cemetery for someone who died aged 115.
One other gravestone indicated the plot contained a husband, and had space ready for the wife, whose date of birth was already inscribed on the headstone. But there was no date of death, and David said she was still alive. I stared at the date, did a quick calculation, never my strong point, and realised that if she were still alive she would be 120. It is most likely she had been displaced in the conflict and never made it to her resting place, but David was convinced she was still alive. ‘If we had international recognition,’ he said proudly, ‘then everyone would know people in Nagorno-Karabakh live longer than anywhere else in the world.’
In the years since I have heard similar claims in other mountainous regions of the world. Perhaps it’s the fresh air, perhaps it is the organic mulberry vodka people kept pouring down our throats, or perhaps it is the fact mountain people are forever walking up and down the hills, and exercise keeps them fit and healthy. Whatever it is, I think someone should investigate.
We left the cemetery and drove back to the plateau. I suggested we should finish our time in Nagorno-Karabakh on the front line. We took another long drive up into the mountains and hiked to a remote outpost manned by young men, boys really, and looked out to the Azeri trenches in the distance where we’d been just under two weeks before. It all felt very sad and remote.
Although international recognition seems highly unlikely, wealthy Armenian exiles in the United States still provide massive funding to encourage the Karabakh government’s claims for independence. This annoys many Armenians, who are sick of the conflict dominating their lives and draining their government budget.
There seems no easy end to the situation. In 2016 dozens were killed and a helicopter gunship and a tank were destroyed in ongoing clashes between Azeri and Armenian forces battling over Nagorno-Karabakh. One day full-scale conflict may erupt again, causing huge problems for the supply of oil from Azerbaijan and the Caspian region to the outside world. Perhaps it’s only when oil pipelines are switched off and petrol prices in the West rise as a result that the rest of the world will wake up to the ongoing crisis of breakaway states.