Eight Pieces of Empire (17 page)

Meanwhile, back in Tbilisi, the passage of time had brought in changes. In 2003, a brash young former minister in Shevardnadze’s government had gone into opposition, calling election results corrupt and demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation. The brash young man, of course, was Mikheil Saakashvili, and the movement he led to depose Shevardnadze became known as the “Rose Revolution.” In an act of national reconciliation and to finally get beyond the hot-and-cold state of civil war that had existed virtually from the time of Georgian
independence in 1991, President Mikheil Saakashvili called on Russia to send Zviad back to Georgia so that he could be reburied on Mtatsminda Mountain, a sacred area near a cathedral in Tbilisi. Tens of thousands of mourners marched in the procession for this, the fifth burial of Georgia’s first president.

A WORD ABOUT WAR

I
never planned to become
a “war correspondent.” I’m not even sure I knew what one was. There are no “war reporter” schools. There are reporters who cover places that happen to be strewn with conflagrations. I was one of those.

There are, of course, those who choose the designation willfully and with alacrity, for many reasons—ranging from a sense of duty to inform the world of the latest massacre, injustice, or other outrage—to the addictive high from that first rush of adrenaline after narrowly missing being hit by a tank round.

As I said, my “inclusion” into the profession was not premeditated and can be traced to a first bloody dustup—in ex–Soviet Moldova, early 1992, pitting the “pro-Romanian” government forces against the Slavic “pro-Soviet” separatists of “the Transdniester Republic.” Mission completed, my editor deduced (incorrectly) that I had an inborn proclivity for covering wars and whatever human stupidity accompanied them. Given this set of “qualifications,” I was sent on to Georgia for the next round of bloodletting, then back to Russia, where ethnic Ossetians—aided and armed by the Russian army—and Muslim Ingush died by the hundreds in a nonsensical week-long melee over a piece of Ingush territory Stalin had given to the Ossetians, who as Orthodox Christians were natural Russian allies. This all happened by chance or pure stupidity—I was asked to go, and I agreed to do the job. Then it was back to Georgia, and a host of other places, for more. Slowly, covering wars or bloody conflicts
becomes completely normal, or one convinces oneself of this—that one can always stop, always leave, go back to whatever one was doing before “this,” no consequences to mind, spirit, or health.

By the spring of 1993, I was supposed to be making plans to leave Georgia and to return to Moscow—that was the agreement, actually—but my editor would have none of it: for I had in his estimation somehow now qualified as a “war correspondent.” I was not going anywhere soon, except to the next post-Soviet dustup, and amid the empire’s ashes there were any number to choose from.

Chaos at Kelbajar helicopter field, Azerbaijan, April 1993.

AZERBAIJAN: LIFESAVING CARPETS

I
t was hard to fathom
that we were nearing the site of battles and an unfolding humanitarian emergency. Driving deeper into Azerbaijan, there were no signs of war: no army transports, no armed columns, and no sense of alarm. Moving closer to the point where refugees were reportedly pouring out, we saw only the occasional car or farm tractors, tilling fields. It was not until we got to the base of the mountains, near the town of Khanlar, that I saw the large crowd gathered in a clearing.

A woman among hundreds flailed her face with dirty fingernails the size of small daggers, blood squirting as she ripped flesh from her own cheeks. Her delirious screams were soon joined by others in a cacophony of ritual mourning, reaching a peak with blood streaming from scores of self-gouged faces, turning patches of melting snow scarlet.

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.