In Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, polite officials stamped our passports and wished us a pleasant stay.
They’re happy to welcome foreigners to the Armenian- populated republic in the southern Caucasus. That’s because no country in the world acknowledges its status.
Nagorno-Karabakh is one of a small club of unrecognised statelets left stranded by the Soviet Union's collapse. It officially belongs to Azerbaijan, but was captured by Armenia 20 years ago, after a war that cost more than 30,000 lives.
From the Armenian capital of Yerevan, it took us seven hours to reach the territory, whose name means "Black Garden". The road traverses mountains with fantastic rock formations and dense beech forests. The last 65 kilometres of tarmac was constructed with $10 million (€8 million) from the Armenian diaspora, replacing a mountain track that cut off Nagorno-Karabakh in the winter.
Stepanakert has been rebuilt since it was partly destroyed by Grad missiles in the 1990s. There are boulevards, fashionable shops and cafes with free wifi. Our final destination was Martakert, another hour across a featureless plateau, where my wife Zhanna has relatives.
Desolate landscape
Along the highway, old Ladas and modern army trucks lurched around each other to avoid deep potholes and flocks of sheep. To the east was an endless drab landscape of deserted villages. The roofless houses were once occupied by Azeris, who lived at peace in Soviet times but were forced to flee when war broke out.
The house we stayed at in Martakert was just far enough away so that we didn’t hear the occasional sniper and machine- gun fire down the road. The war may be over, but there is as yet no peace. The town lies beside an active front line, which divides two armies and stretches for hundreds of kilometres in each direction. It’s marked by concrete bunkers, sandbags and camouflage netting.
In the week of our visit, 20,000 shots were reportedly fired along the lines, and an Armenian officer and two Azeri soldiers were killed. There is no formal contact between the troops, not even a telephone line, though local conscripts have been known to meet at night in no-man’s land to exchange cigarettes and recall how their parents were friends in the Soviet era.
Many of the recruits stationed in Martakert are from Armenia proper, here to do their national service, for “independent” Nagorno-Karabakh is a practically a province of Armenia. The money in circulation is the Armenian dram. Yerevan provides services such as the free gas that flows through yellow pipes into every Martakert building.
There is much poverty. Still, our host, like every everyone else in town, has a large garden with vegetables,walnut trees, and pears, figs, grapes, persimmon and pomegranate. Over a meal of dolmadas and lavash bread stuffed with herbs and excellent home-made red wine, we talked of young men from Martakert who had become casualties in the war or were forced to seek a decent life elsewhere, usually in Russia.
The adjacent house was wrecked by a shell in 1992 and the family never returned. The official population of Nagorno- Karabakh is 138,000, down from 200,000 before the war. Remittances from those living in Russia have dwindled with the falling rouble.
At night we watched Moscow television channels. Russia is allied with Christian Armenia and provides a sense of protection against a full-scale invasion from Moslem Azerbaijan, which has been investing petro-dollars to upgrade its military with the declared aim of recovering lost territory.
Accidental war
The danger on this East-West fault line is war by accident, which could draw in Russia, Iran and Turkey. This year has seen the worst casualties along the front since 1994.
In August, Russia president Vladimir Putin – in the unfamiliar role of peacemaker – presided over an emergency summit of the Armenian and Azerbaijan presidents to try to reactivate a peace process that would involve a phased return to Azerbaijan of occupied regions around Karabakh and an eventual referendum in the status of the region.
People in the “Black Garden” are preparing to hold special commemorations next year to commemorate the 1915 Armenian Genocide. They hope it will not be remembered for more bloodshed.
