Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  The Azerbaijani woman had just walked three days through the icy passes of the Murov Mountains, together with thousands of her fellow townsfolk from Kelbajar, which had just been conquered by Armenian forces. Kelbajar Province had once been home to sixty thousand. But now all who survived were on the move over the still snow-covered mountains. The first wave of refugees had been able to jam themselves into overloaded trucks that inch along through the icy passes laden down with everything from goats to refrigerators. Another small batch was plucked to safety by overloaded Azerbaijani helicopters, with minimal possessions, on the day of the final Armenian assault. The third wave—like the hysterical woman gouging her face into a cratered valley of scars—had been forced to flee on foot, hiking over the treacherous Murovs, while dropping virtually everything of value when it became too heavy to carry as exhaustion set in. The least lucky were the unknown numbers of people who fell into snowbanks and froze to death along the way, or those taken hostage, to be used as future bargaining chips for everything from fallen bodies to fuel.

  THE MORNING HAD begun languidly enough; part of what made living in the conflict-strewn Caucasus Mountains in the early 1990s was Tbilisi, with its sad, but elegant, decrepitude. The Georgian capital then was essentially lawless, but there was still that casual tranquility to it all, another paradox to its “war zone” label.

  The dawn hours in my unheated (and usually electricityless) apartment were deceivingly peaceful. I lived in the heart of the city. The pace of Georgian mornings is deliciously slow. Only Kurdish women sweeping the streets broke the silence, alighting with their straw brooms before dawn and disappearing quickly, rendering themselves seemingly invisible during daylight. Men on horseback trundled by the window occasionally. They barked, “Matsoni!” to advertise homemade Georgian yogurt in glass jars covered with scraps of old newspapers, jangling in rough-hewn satchels at the side of their mounts. Muffled arias wept from the windows of the Tbilisi State Conservatory across a narrow lane. It was all in vivid contrast to the standard Tbilisi night noise of squabbling drunks, the fighting packs of feral dogs, some rabid-looking, and the occasional rapping of random, unexplained gunfire. (The bursts of bullets bred frequent morning speculation, focusing on the question of whether there had been a very real shoot-out, or just celebratory volleys from a drunken wedding reception or party.)

  Tbilisi lies at the rough geographic center of the Caucasus, and those few reporters living there were thus never more than a few hours’ drive from any number of ethnic and civil wars or upheavals: Abkhazia, Chechnya, Russia’s violent North Caucasus region, the South Ossetian-Georgian conflict, and the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the mountainous territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh.

  One early April morning of that year, my rickety rotary phone began clanging away.

  I hesitated to pick up the receiver, wanting to believe it to be maybe just another wrong number. It rang and rang, and I began to fantasize that I could hurl the phone across the room or rip it out of the wall and no one would ever know; telephone connections from anywhere to Georgia were by now notoriously unreliable. At one point, the entire country had exactly eight international phone lines (we wined and dined two of the international operators—sisters by the names of Nato and Nanooka, who thus allowed us to jump our turn, which was indispensable as even calls to Moscow had to be ordered up to two days in advance).

  The ringing subsided. But as I drifted back to sleep, it began to rattle again, this time not stopping. This was not the typical short ring of an inner-city connection, but the telltale nonstop bell-hammer that in the USSR indicated a long-distance call. This was never a good sign, because it was almost certainly some Reuters editor in London demanding news from another conflagration, battle, explosion, or other calamity in a place that he or she couldn’t pronounce.

  I picked up the phone. On the other end of the line, speaking through an echo chamber of static, I heard the voice of an apologetic young British woman calling from the central Reuters desk in London. It was about Nagorno-Karabakh. There were reports of thousands—no one knew how many—of Azerbaijani refugees fleeing an Armenian offensive, and Reuters wanted me to check out fact from fancy, and fast.

  Nagorno-Karabakh (“Black Garden”) was the first of many long-dormant ethnic disputes to erupt as Gorbachev loosened the reins over the empire. The Azerbaijanis and Armenians had been quietly disputing control over the technically autonomous Azerbaijani region for decades.

  Armenians claim that the region is an indelible part of the Armenian motherland, and thus part of the first self-declared “Christian” state in the early fourth century. Many Azerbaijani historians maintain that it was part of the ancient Alban state (not Albanians!), most of whom converted to Islam in the seventh century and Turkified themselves in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the remaining Alban Christians, the Azerbaijanis maintain, were forcibly “Armenianized” in the nineteenth century—a notion utterly rejected by most Armenian historians as complete delirium.

  And that is the easy part.

  The trigger was set off by the low-level violence going on in and around Nagorno-Karabakh since the late 1980s, anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan, and a plea by the local Supreme Soviet, dominated by the majority Armenians there, to be transferred to Armenian control (they contended Stalin had “illegally” transferred the region to Azerbaijani control), partially as a divide-and-rule tactic.

  I hung up and started dialing contacts for more information, the sum of which was that the Armenians had attacked a particularly strategic and vulnerable part of Azerbaijan called Kelbajar, which was a “pure” Azerbaijani province—not part of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomy. This raised the specter of a total war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, not just over the relatively isolated mountain region—a situation that might provoke Azerbaijan’s ally Turkey to get involved, or Russia on the Armenian side, others speculated. Just as ominously, then there were the reports of the thousands of Azerbaijani refugees fleeing through the few icy passes of the Murov mountain range, which peaked at 3,700 meters, or 14,000 feet, and which bottled up Kelbajar to the north. Some reports suggested that hundreds might have frozen to death.

  Only a few media outlets, the BBC, for example, and the veteran war reporter Thomas Goltz, who was based in Azerbaijan, had gotten hold of a crisis emerging in Kelbajar. Given the tiny foreign correspondent contingent in the region, Nagorno-Karabakh was a war competing for shelf space with a host of other tragedies—most notably in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Still, rumored reports of “tens of thousands” of refugees pouring out of a place few could pick out on a map demanded attention.

  Wearily, I prepared to drive toward the calamity. I called Nodar, my nicotine-fingered, cigarette basso profundo–voiced driver. Good spirited but unenthused, he set us off south toward the border with Azerbaijan in his moving chunk of scrap metal, a three-speed 1972 Soviet Volga.

  Even though there was a “border” post in those early post-Soviet days, it was a casual one, to say the least. On the Georgian side, two or three men sat in an old traffic police booth, rarely bothering to stop anyone except the drivers of Turkish- and Iranian-plated long-haul trucks from whom bribes could be extracted. The barrier was a dirty rope, which, from inside the booth, the ever-smiling Georgians simply let droop down to the ground so we could pass. The Azerbaijani side was more formal, crawling with customs bureaucrats. Despite the legions of them, there was nothing that could not be brought through for the right informal “fee.” There were layers and redundant layers of border police asking the same questions—often scouring passports to check whether one had visited Armenia—a red flag meaning a possible “spy” had been nabbed. Likewise, Azerbaijani stamps could elicit suspicions at the Armenian frontier.

  An Azeri guard let us through, entranced in the importance of raising a red and white steel bar rather than lowering an old rope, as on the Georgian side. We entered Azerbaijan at war.

  The road scenery was deceivingly majestic. The sun
was coming over the spectacular mountains in the distance, as if the war we knew to be ahead were a mirage. We passed shepherds driving herds of sheep, like they did every day. Smoke drifted from chimneys as teahouse keepers by the side of the road stoked fires to prepare shish kebab for customers.

  After two or three hours of driving, we finally came to the clearing with the woman digging bloody trenches into her face and screaming. At least she had made it to the bottom of the mountain.

  ONE STILL MISSING, stuck in the high ranges of the Murov pass—was one of our local reporters, my friend Khalid Asgarov.

  Himself a native of Kelbajar, his father, Shamyl, was the acknowledged head of the Kurdish community in Azerbaijan and the chief of the prized local carpet museum. While Khalid had for several years been living in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, he went home to Kelbajar as a reporter. Khalid stayed because his father had refused to leave, believing that the Azerbaijani garrison would stand and fight, and that reinforcements were on the way. An Armenian grad rocket ripped a hole in the roof of his house. Even then, sensing he would never see his homeland of Kelbajar again, Khalid’s father insisted on gathering up whatever represented his life’s work—the library, the carpets—before escaping when it was almost too late.

  Khalid’s father, Shamyl, was not the only one to choose those painstakingly handwoven, naturally dyed carpets to carry over the bone-chilling mountain passes, rather than their old family cars or abundant flocks of sheep and goats. The carpets would be the surviving shards from their fragmented lives. Sentimentalism was not the only driving force for choosing carpets over livestock.

  Khalid and his family set out over the pass together with some of the last refugees to get out, on foot, snow and wind at times blinding. Many did try to drive their goats and sheep up the mountain, only to see them collapse and freeze to death along the way.

  “There were no guarantees a sheep or a goat would make it through. We knew the carpets could,” Khalid later told me, after the ordeal ended. A thoroughly gentle person, he somehow managed a smile.

  At the summit, as the temperatures and wind turned lethal, the carpets, stars shining overhead, were unfurled right there, in that moonscape, and put on like robes, those struggling toward safety wrapping themselves, their offspring, and their elderly safely away in them through the pass.

  The carpets, spun from the same wool as the sheep left behind, literally saved them.

  The carpets would then perform another mini-miracle—serving as sustenance at the end of the road, when the hellish trek ended in homelessness—the cherished fabrics a form of hard currency to restart their fragmented and homeless new lives as refugees. A single one could cost hundreds of dollars. Even in those threadbare days, an extended family with enough of them could trade them for cash, enough to eat for a while, with maybe something left over to start a tiny business.

  WITH NO SIGN or word from Khalid, I looked around for any indication of the usual “international relief effort” associated with conflict zones.

  It was timid, to say the least. What I had seen so far had been a single Azerbaijani man with a megaphone shouting himself hoarse in the throat trying to instill some sense of order at the makeshift camp near Hanlar.

  News about the catastrophe, as it were, consisted of the decision of the government of President Albufaz Elchibey to declare “Emergency Law” throughout the land—the Armenian conquest of Kelbajar, the people freezing to death in the mountains buried at the end of the story, almost an afterthought.

  Later that evening, I bedded down for the night in a fleabag hotel in the nearby city of Ganja. In the grim, tacky bar in the hotel’s first floor, blaring with unlistenable Soviet pop music and decorated with cheap disco-style lighting despite tragedy all around, I met Billy Nordstrom, a stocky, lonely, and lone logistics coordinator from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

  “This is the most challenging situation I’ve ever faced,” he said grimly. He knew that people were freezing to death in the mountain passes, but using Azerbaijani helicopters to try to pluck people from the side of the mountains was simply an invitation to the Armenians to shoot them down, military helicopters being indiscernible from those ferrying refugees. The UNHCR man spoke of organizing a “humanitarian corridor”—an internationally backed agreement to allow a more aggressive rescue effort. But time was short, organizational details daunting. Nordstrom’s limited ability to achieve results had him frustrated and angry; as a “logistics man,” he assumed there were dozens of bureaucrats between him and decisions that determined who might live and who might die.

  Just getting news out that the exodus was continuing was maddening; the people manning the phone at the hotel made halfhearted attempts to dial the operator and hand me the phone, the operator indifferently responding that all the lines to Moscow were busy and that I should try again in the morning. Finally I lost my temper, mixing expletives with a half-coherent ramble about the crisis afoot and people freezing to death in the mountains and nobody—in their own country, what’s more—caring. The operator kept up her outer indifference, but evidently at the expense of some of her conscience; after five minutes, I was on the phone to Moscow, relaying new information to the desk from the UN man that tens of thousands could be trapped. The story was getting bigger.

  The next morning I ventured up the road leading back to Kelbajar, where I met more frozen-to-bone refugees coming out, straggling to safety, some holding babies, others with a few possessions or their beloved carpets, now their only currency and nest eggs for starting over.

  “I am a new refugee; I will give you a good price on my family rug,” one mumbled, tugging at my arm.

  Others, like a farmer in tattered clothes, were more philosophical:

  “Where is the help? We were left to die up there in the freezing mountains. Yesterday I was walking next to an old man. He finally could go no farther and just collapsed in the snow,” he said, adding, “I don’t know where the international community is looking,” revealing sophistication as to how the international system (and Azerbaijan) worked (or did not).

  The war over Nagorno-Karabakh had already created hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides and widespread destruction. Amid the hundreds of battles, Kelbajar was just another previously unheard-of dot on the map.

  BUT THIS BATTLE was very different in two ways.

  The first was simple treachery.

  On this, a day after having arrived in the area, I still failed to encounter a single Azerbaijani soldier. This, I thought, was extremely odd; if the Azerbaijanis were being driven out of Kelbajar, then I thought it certain that troops would be sent in to at least reinforce what remained of Azerbaijani positions or to help with the rescue effort. Instead I saw nothing.

  The reason for this, it quickly emerged, was that Surat Huseinov, the former Azerbaijani “generalissimo” recently stripped of his overall command because of the Azeri military collapse in recent weeks, had ordered his troops back to barracks, leaving the defense of the front lines up to policemen and green national army troops under a different (and incompetent) command.

  A wool merchant who had managed to amass a fortune in the declining days of the USSR, when access to state-subsidized goods mixed with a little entrepreneurial imagination could lead to quick and substantial gain, Huseinov had committed this act of brazen self-interest out of a political disagreement with Azerbaijan’s Popular Front president, Albufaz Elchibey. (His surname was self-adopted, intended as an important-sounding moniker meaning “Mr. Ambassador.”) Huseinov had essentially chosen to cede Azerbaijan’s most strategically important regions in order to humiliate and bring down the Elchibey government before promising oil deals with foreign petroleum companies could be signed and implemented, evidently so greedy for a cut that he was ready to help effectively sell off part of his country for it.

  Weird and wicked, yes—yet such clan-based intrigues plagued Azerbaijan throughout the war and were ultimately a major factor in what wou
ld turn into an astonishing defeat at the hands of the numerically smaller but highly motivated Armenians.

  The fall of Kelbajar marked another turning point in the war. The conflict had started as a battle over Nagorno-Karabakh but now washed outside that territory as defined on maps. Thus it was the start of a long and painful process that would last another full year, and which would see Azerbaijan lose vast tracts of territory while gaining hundreds of thousands of refugees as its leadership bickered over responsibility for each tactical defeat. At the end of the process, represented in a poison-chalice cease-fire agreement in May 1994, Armenian forces would occupy some 14 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including all of Nagorno-Karabakh and more, an accurate demonstration that the often Kremlin-designed borders of USSR republics held little sanctity.

  Khalid Asgarov and his relatives miraculously did finally reach the capital, Baku, where Khalid had been living since student days and his career as a photographer. At one point, twenty-two relatives were living with him in an old rented house, miles from the city center. He pleaded with me to buy one of the carpets from his aunt. I said I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want one, but I eventually relented, Khalid insisting that the deal was vital to the family’s well-being and fair. He refused my offer of cash with no carpet as compensation, offended with me, disgusted with the idea.

  Each of the intricate, spectacular multicolor rugs was eventually sold off in this way, until finally they were gone, their roles and destinies fulfilled.

  ARMENIA: A FADED TINTYPE OF MOUNT ARARAT

  The night landscape after crossing the border from Georgia into Armenia changes almost immediately, pine forests warping into a rocky, harsh, and often treeless terrain of severe mountain slopes covered in snow. With little foliage to absorb the bright moonlight, the earth takes on a surreal appearance, and the icy cold takes on a strange sense of lunar warmth.