I set out with Alexis Rowell of the BBC, a notoriously irreverent, bespectacled, sharp-witted hooligan of a young correspondent. He was one of the first to report on the capture of Kelbajar and the biggest shift in the undeclared war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
After crossing the new international frontier, we reached Stepanavan—a grim Sovietesque splinter of a town hugging the bank of the Dzoraget River. The main point of interest was a spot near the center of town. On this freezing morning, a gaggle of men had assembled around several dozen twenty-gallon jerry cans of precious gasoline.
We haggled first, not over the price, but over the source of the fuel; it was well known that some suppliers watered down their product with water. When asked if this was the case, one of the merchants shrugged, an answer translating as “there are no guarantees.” This could mean anything from our buying 72 octane—a smuggled Azerbaijani grade that would gum up an engine faster than cotton candy sticks to your beard—to jet fuel, which would fry the pistons in most Soviet-built cars such as our Niva.
I advised rolling the dice and filling up—we had only a quarter tank left. But Alexis—evidently trusting some hidden sixth sense—vetoed that. “Let’s drive on,” he said, sneering at the knot of dubious gasoline hawkers and confident we would not end up petrol-less in the middle of a frozen landscape.
We passed through the desolate southbound road toward Yerevan, winding a downward trajectory through Spitak, the epicenter of Armenia’s 1988 earthquake. It was littered with the remains of dozens of shoddily constructed Brezhnev-era high-rise buildings that had collapsed, killing twenty-five thousand people. Adding to the sense of gloom, we saw almost no lighted buildings. Occasionally a candle or an oil lamp flickered in a window. Azerbaijan had cut natural gas supplies to Armenia for the obvious reason that the two countries were at war, and a second gas line though Georgia was regularly sabotaged by Georgian citizens of Azerbaijani descent in acts of solidarity with their ethnic kin. To top it off, Armenia’s Metzamor Nuclear Power Plant had been shut down as a security precaution since the 1988 earthquake. In a word, Armenia was darkened into a brownout lasting years.
This was the infamous 1992–93 winter when park trees were felled in the capital, Yerevan, for firewood and scavengers allegedly burned parquet flooring to keep from freezing. Much of the suffering was real; but some stories—such as dog owners eating their pets to ward off famine—were most likely hyperbole. Still, hyperbole can be useful in galvanizing a sense of bitterness and victimization and tapping in to the omnipresent feeling of oppression, struggle, and survival through which many Armenians identify their national historical experience.
We approached Yerevan. At one windswept road, crossing under an inert stoplight, we espied another group of unshaven men hawking gasoline from large jars. The merchant claimed his product had been brought in from Russia and was “Super” grade. Alexis sniffed it with a discriminating twist of his nose, as if degusting a rare Cabernet, and told the man to fill up our tank. We paid him and sputtered into Yerevan, the engine backfiring only a dozen times or so.
• • •
ARE YOU ON our side or for the Turks?” screeched the reception woman at the grim Dvin hotel. It was the first thing she said, before anything about the keys or telling us what time breakfast would be. Pointing out that Armenians were fighting Azerbaijan and not Turkey was pointless. In this woman’s mind (and those of many others), it was all part of the same pattern: The Karabakh war was just another Turkish effort to exterminate them, a logical extension of the almost-impossible-to-fathom Mets Yeghern (genocide) of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the dying Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) during World War I.
I asked for coffee. “Turkish coffee, if you have it,” I said, biting my tongue a bit too late in requesting the thimblelike small cups heated in copper urns. The woman scowled. “Armenian coffee, you mean.”
The corridors of the hotel were dank and dark. Even when the power was on, the voltage was dreadfully low; lightbulbs glowed as if tarnished with wood stain. I caught myself hypnotically staring directly at the dim filaments, experiencing no discomfort.
Our floor woman, a busybody Soviet holdover who distributed room keys and kept an eye on guests, slowly prepared the coffee over a makeshift spiral heater that barely seemed to emit any heat at all. Attached to it was a piece of metal spiral plugged into a socket that seemed to be falling out of the wall, two misshapen holes between shards of copper. The death-trap sockets, the power outages, the pervasive feeling of deprivation and darkness, the stories of hunger, the stories of the shelling of Karabakh, and the siege mentality—all seemed to conspire to re-create the essence of the Mets Yeghern, echoes of excruciating pain.
Indeed, no other city I had been in conveyed the same sense of heaviness and a certain depression as did Yerevan in those days. A Muslim trading post turned into the happenstance capital of a rump Armenian empire, Yerevan could brood like no other city. The buildings projected a gloomy sternness; tufa rock facades with their hands on their hips, all defiantly facing in one direction: Mount Ararat.
It is doubtful that there has been a national symbol sadder or more compelling than the old volcanic cone where Noah and his ark allegedly found terra firma after the biblical flood. For centuries it has been regarded as the center of the Armenian experience. But since the 1921 Treaty of Kars between the USSR and present-day Turkey, this most resonant symbol of Armenian-ness has been just over the border in the land of the enemy and is thus thrust into the face daily, a symbol of national loss. Such is the importance of the mountain that apartments having an “Ararat view” in Yerevan go for 30 percent more than ones that do not.
After coffee at the hotel, Alexis and I set off to find out more about the official Armenian insistence that it was not officially involved in the Karabakh war, or in the forced exit of Azerbaijani civilians from Kelbajar. The official line was still that the conflict was purely between the Karabakh Armenians and Azerbaijan, and that the armed forces of the Republic of Armenia were not involved at all, aside from the participation of “volunteers.” Now that official line was starting to change, with pride starting to take the place of discretion.
“Taking Kelbajar was the only way to save Karabakh,” Tigran Naghdalian, the young, unflappable spokesman at the HQ of the nationalist Dashnaksutiun Party told us. The “Dashnaks” were the central champions of the Nagorno-Karabakh cause. “Without having created this ‘security zone,’ Karabakh would be reliant on a tiny strip of territory [the so-called Lachin Corridor] connecting it to Armenia and facing strangulation,” he emphasized.*
We pointed out that as a result of the Armenian actions, hundreds of non-Karabakhi Azerbaijanis were left to potentially freeze to death in the mountains. Naghdalian held his expression steadily, as if to say “I know … but war is war.…”
International condemnation of Armenian behavior, including a new Security Council resolution demanding the “immediate withdrawal of occupying forces” (which Armenia chose to interpret as meaning only “local Karabakh forces”), was starting to grow.
Of greater concern in Yerevan was saber-rattling in Turkey about a response to the Armenian offensive, and what could be done to aid Azerbaijan. The first act by Ankara was to close the frontier between the border towns of Kars and Gumri, which had been enjoying a lively trade since the border opening in 1991, but which remains closed as of this writing, two decades later. Predictably, Yerevan was rife with rumors that the Turks would do more than just seal the frontier and were planning to pour over the border and finish the eradication of Armenians begun in 1915.
“The Turks are coming to slaughter us again,” declared our receptionist upon our return to our cold and dark hotel. “But this time we won’t let them!”
We decided to go check the border for ourselves, climbing back into Alexis’s rattrap Niva, and headed in the general direction of Mount Ararat. It was partially obscured by clouds and mist until we came to a monastery com
plex called Khor Virab, when the glory of the famous mountain exposed itself to us. Khor Virab was also a deeply revered site, as it is believed to have been the site of the dungeon where Saint Giorgi the Illuminator spent thirteen years imprisoned for his faith before curing the pagan Armenian king Trdat from a bout of insanity. Trdat then declared Armenia to be the world’s first Christian “state” in AD 301 and spent much of the rest of his days building Christian churches on the sites of former pagan shrines.
Even though the monastery is just a few dozen meters from the barbed-wire border with Turkey, we saw no trace of any grand Turkish armies ready to sweep across the frontier. Instead, we were treated to one of the ritual animal sacrifices (matagh in Armenian) at Khor Virab that take place on a daily basis and which are a holdover from the pre-Trdat pagan epoch. This time, a rooster was being slaughtered as part of a traditional wedding pilgrimage to the site. A crowd of women in long dresses and men in leather jackets enthusiastically followed behind the bride and groom, the war in Karabakh, the prospect of the Turks pouring over the border, and the grim state of the country—for a few moments, at least—distant thoughts.
We got back into the vehicle and headed south along the empty road, thinking we might find some “real” activity in that direction, such as a more militarized area. Long shadows cast a melancholy air onto the brutal rocky, winter landscape. Why did people live here? I asked myself. In search of Turkish troops, we meandered down a back road toward the frontier. Ahead of us, on the right-hand side, was an unmanned sentry booth. Down in the gully, we could see barbed wire—and in the distance, the red and white, star and crescent–emblazoned Turkish flag. In the border guard huts on the Turkish side, nothing moved. We took out our cameras to take a picture of a silence so deep it seemed to breathe.
Suddenly, a short squat figure appeared in the distance on the Armenian side of the frontier. With one hand, he tugged on the strap from which his Kalashnikov was dangling and started to march toward us, reaching a jog and almost a gallop while dangling the AK behind him.
“NE FOTOGRAFIROVAT!” he shouted. “NO PICTURES!”
We laid down our gear.
“What are you doing here?” the now ex-Soviet (but still Russian) sentry snorted, with an equal mix of reproach and bewilderment.
“Hiii!” said Alexis, in his lilting, disarming London accent, blissfully unaware that that word of greeting in English means “Armenian” in Armenian.…
The sentry stared emptily at the glib Alexis as if he were from Planet X.
Just as the sentry started to mutter something, another, taller and thinner border guard appeared, tucking in his shirt as he approached us, yawning slightly.
“What do you want?” asked the taller one. By his epaulets, he appeared to be a captain.
We explained that we were reporters. There was talk in Yerevan, we explained, about Turkish troops massing on the border, and that we had come to check it out.
The captain looked at us curiously, smirked, and then opened a gate and waved us inside a barrackslike building.
The structure was perched on a promontory above the border area behind a maze of barbed wire and sinister-looking radio towers. We stopped to take a look. The captain told us to keep walking. “The border comes later,” he said.
Once inside the barracks, he led us into a larger, comfortable room with sofas and coffee tables. He slowly examined our passports and accreditations.
“Now, what is it you want?” said the captain.
“We want to see the border crossing,” I said.
The captain rolled his eyes. The border was closed, he said, emphasizing that there had never been a fully functioning crossing point here, not even in peaceful times. This has been a rare spot where NATO member Turkey met the USSR.
The captain’s wife and two more border guards entered the room. They sat down and urged us to do the same. Then the captain went into another room and returned with a bottle of vodka. His wife, a tall woman who took pains to look city-stylish despite her isolation on this rocky, lonely border raced off and roared back, her arms bursting with candies, bread, and some sausage, words flowing ceaselessly from her smiling lips.
“You boys must be so hungry. You know, it’s so quiet around here. No one to talk to. Nowhere to go, to have a good time. My girlfriends back in Russia can’t understand what I’m doing here. You know, there are some things you have to do in life.…”
Her border guard husband sized her up quizzically, then dismissively. My talk involving rumors about the Turks and paltry ruminations about the starkness of Ararat clearly did not interest him. He told us he was Russian and not Armenian and hailed from Sverdlovsk, in western Siberia. He lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union, and he let us know it in the form of melancholy vodka toasts. He said he had never met an American before. Now he was a man marooned on a distant, foreign border post in the middle of nowhere and did not know why aside from a lingering sense of Communist-era duty, which meant nothing anymore.
“Vy ponimaite?” he asked rhetorically and repeatedly. “Do you understand?”
He poured the vodka around, asking us questions about where we were from and what we were doing. It seemed to be his first human communication in months. His wife tugged at her kinky hair and nodded, adding a feeling of exaggerated importance to our impromptu encounter.
“This used to be the border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact,” he related. “Now I am guarding the border of a country that doesn’t exist anymore, my country, the USSR. It is difficult for me even to look at it that way.”
Alexis and I nodded in a kind of sympathy.
“Soon we will be humiliated into leaving here as well,” lamented the captain, muttering to himself.
We stayed for over an hour as the captain toasted to peace, love, and friendship between nations—the usual stuff. But as the vodka began to gain its hold, underneath he was clearly still preoccupied over the loss of the empire, and his new role as a foreigner guarding a border with another foreign country.
It was pretty sad, actually.
Finally, as we prepared to leave, the captain pulled me aside.
“I have something I want to discuss with you,” he said in a low tone.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Perhaps you and your friend would like to go into business with me.”
I thought for a split second. Drugs? Weapons running? Loose nuclear materials?
“We’re not businessmen, we’re journalists,” I said, but curious about his proposal nonetheless.
“Listen, what I have access to is rare stuff.”
“What do you have?” I asked, playing him like a trout, while remembering the would-be gem smuggler I had met back in Leningrad, years earlier.
“Snake venom,” whispered the captain, coming closer to my ear.
“Snake venom?” I asked, incredulously.
“Top quality,” he whispered. “The best.”
I tried to emphasize that I knew nothing about snake venom or how to maximize its commercial potential, but the captain seemed deaf to my words.
“Davay …,” he cooed. “C’mon! It is really good venom. If not you, then maybe you have some friends who we can do business with.…”
So far, our quest to capture the outbreak of hostilities between Turkey and Armenia that might lead to Russian intervention (and thus, theoretically, possibly to World War III) had been less than productive in raw news terms. We’d traveled up and down the border on wild rumors about Turkish troop movements but had only seen a rooster getting its head ripped off at a monastery and drunk warm vodka with a marooned Soviet border-guard-cum-snake-venom-peddler. Yet the day’s fragmented images made sense in a way—under the absurdity of it all, the war afoot, the political doublespeak on both sides of the front lines—people went on with their lives, adapting however they could. Another basic truth: journalists wandering around in conflict zones spend more time chasing after wild leads about nonexistent troop movements than actually seeing th
em.
WE SET OFF back in the direction of Georgia, making a special stop along the border between Armenia and the part of Azerbaijan where Kelbajar is situated. The road leading from the Armenian town of Vardenis was nothing but dried mud ruts. There had been reports that Armenian units had entered from Armenia itself, but this was officially denied in Yerevan, in keeping with the official but implausible line that the war was solely between the 100,000 or so Karabakh Armenians and 7-million-strong Azerbaijanis.
Escorted by several local officials who had intercepted us, we headed toward the zero zone on the actual frontier, and there we found our story.
The ground was damp, and clearly imprinted with telltale signs of moving war machines.
“BMP tracks,” said Alexis, using the Russian acronym for armored personnel carrier, or APC.
“Tractor tracks,” said our escort from the local administration.
“A tractor? Why would a tractor drive into enemy territory?” asked Alexis, rhetorically. “To harvest snow-covered wheat during the middle of a war?”
THE MEN GRINNED, sharing with us the silent inside joke of the Armenian government’s complicity in at least this part of the ghost war with Azerbaijan over Karabakh.
Officially, the Armenians justified their conquest of Kelbajar and areas surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh as the need to establish a “security zone” around Karabakh that would be given back to Azerbaijan when it recognized Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence or when some sort of permanent peace plan was arranged.
The man who imagined the offensive on Kelbajar on the Armenian side had other ideas. He was a newcomer to this war but a seasoned veteran of other guerrilla conflicts. An erudite, ascetic archaeologist by training, he had fought as a volunteer on the pro-Palestinian side in the war in Lebanon and against the Israelis during their invasion in 1982. Then he had taken up the cause of the Kurdish Peshmergas, and greatly admired the Bekaa Valley–based Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, the Marxist organization fighting for Kurdish rights in Turkey. But at core, his cause was Armenia, and his stated goal that of reestablishing control over what he considered historic Armenian lands, including Mount Ararat and much of present-day eastern Turkey. In the mid-1980s, he became a key figure in ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia), which engineered bombings against Turkish government targets in Europe and the assassination of Turkish diplomats. He traveled under fake Cypriot and other passports for years, finally ending up spending three years in a French jail on weapons-related charges and the possession of forged documents. To his enemies he was a terrorist; to his supporters, a national icon.
Eight Pieces of Empire Page 14