Eight Pieces of Empire (18 page)

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 would 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

T
he 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.

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.