Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

en masse to Armenia to bury one of their dead.” The fedayin movement 
was only gradually overhauled as fighters were assigned special tasks 
within the more regular armed forces. Vartan Hovanisian uses the Russ­
ian word shturmovik, or “assault-man,” to describe their role. They were 
the ones who had the courage and fanaticism to be able to attack an 
enemy trench by night or in fog, causing panic among the defenders. 
“We had to succeed in quality, not quantity,” says Hovanisian.
22 
A handful of Armenian volunteers from the Diaspora arrived to 
fight in Karabakh. The most famous was Monte Melkonian, a Califor­
nia-born archaeologist who had been a member of the ASALA terrorist 
organization, which assassinated Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 
1980s. Melkonian had been on the run for several years before ending 
up in Armenia in 1990. When war broke out in Karabakh, Melkonian 
was given command of the southeastern Martuni region. Melkonian, 
who went by the nom de guerre of Avo, was a professional warrior and 
an extreme Armenian nationalist who saw Karabakh as a sacred cause. 
He forbade his soldiers to drink alcohol and tried to stop their looting. 
This, says his widow Seta, caused him problems as he took command 
of an irregular post-Soviet fighting force: 
People would come and offer [Monte] bribes. He wouldn’t even un­
derstand what they were talking about. “What? What?” It wouldn’t 
enter his mind that this was a bribe being offered, for example, to 
take his family out. Someone wants to take his family out, and Monte 
says, “No.” If the civilians are not here, the soldiers will not fight 
well. And they bring a bottle of drink, for example, and he wouldn’t 
understand. He was against looting, which a lot of people didn’t like 
because that was something that made them feel better and good for 
their families, they thought. He was against torturing anybody, in­
cluding Azeri soldiers, when they are wounded. Several times he 

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would punish Armenians for harassing or hitting or doing something 
to wounded Azerbaijanis.
23 
Melkonian was killed in June 1993. Around this time, as the Karabakh 
Armenians broke out of their own territory and began rampaging their 
way through Azerbaijani towns and villages, even loyal Armenians no­
ticed a shift in attitude. “When we were fighting for Karabakh, people 
put up pictures of [Armenian guerrilla heroes] Andranik or Njdeh in 
our barracks,” said the military adviser Gurgen Boyajian. “When we 
were in Aghdam, people put up pictures of naked girls. The psychology 
was completely different.”
24 
Azerbaijan’s commanders had to build a fighting force from very 
disparate elements. The experience of the professional officer Isa Sady­
qov was typical. Sadyqov, an Azerbaijani, moved to Azerbaijan from 
Georgia in the summer of 1992 and was given command of the Kazakh 
district in the Northwest of the republic. He inherited an undisciplined 
ragged group of soldiers: “The first problem at that time was drunken­
ness.” Then “there were volunteers, who were already quite old, people 
with beards. It was difficult for me to shave their beards, but I had them 
shaved off.” Sadyqov says he imposed strict penalties for desertion and 
refused to let soldiers evacuate their families from the region. He ex-
plains: “The war basically had a psychological character. The Armeni­
ans shot at large population points, created panic, people fled and after 
them went the army. I saw the main thing was to stop this flood of 
refugees. I managed to do that.”
25 
When they had the upper hand in the summer of 1992, the Azer­
baijanis lacked the men and expertise to exploit their advantage. In Oc­
tober 1992, the army was bogged down in the northern hills of Nagorny 
Karabakh. Some film shot by the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense shows 
a passionate argument between officers as to the reasons for their lack 
of success. The Azerbaijani commander Najmedtin Sadyqov complains 
that Grad missiles are being launched indiscriminately and squan­
dered. Leila Yunusova, deputy defense minister, adds: “We hear that we 
have a huge quantity of rockets and that we fire them and simply de­
stroy the forests.” Worse than that, the attempts by inexperienced sol­
diers to use powerful weapons led to some horrific cases of “friendly-
fire” casualties. On one occasion Azerbaijani planes bombed the Azer­
baijani town of Fizuli. Kemal Ali remembers: “It often happened that I 
shot for a whole day at some mountain. Then it turned out that our men 

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were sitting there. They’d spent the whole day firing at us. The same 
happened to the Armenians.” 
The Armenians performed perhaps the most spectacular act of self-
destruction in the war. They had only two SU-25 attack aircraft, but one 
was shot down by Karabakh Armenians, who mistook it for an Azer­
baijani airplane. The pilot parachuted to safety and was surrounded 
and beaten up by local villagers, who realized only belatedly that he 
was an Armenian. After this, Karabakhis joked that they had “de­
stroyed fifty percent of the Armenian air force.”
26 
In the longer run, the Armenians proved better at husbanding their 
resources. To defend themselves against Azerbaijani air attacks, the Ar­
menians set up an antiaircraft system in the fall of 1992, a move that 
Leila Yunusova believes was done with Russian help: “We had air-
planes, in Stepanakert there were open skies. Then within a matter of 
weeks they had created a fine antiaircraft defense system.” From that 
point on, an air force was an expensive luxury in the war. 
The Armenians also recycled captured equipment. An Armenian 
military expert estimates that after every battle 15 to 20 percent of the 
equipment was put out of order and that the life expectancy of a Soviet 
tank in battle is only one and a half days.
27 
To deal with this problem, 
the Karabakh authorities converted a tractor-repair plant into a work-
shop for the repair of tanks. The American reporter Lee Hockstader 
visited the workshop in September 1993 and saw thirty T-72 tanks and 
at least a dozen APCs under repair. “We can fix 90 percent of the tanks 
that come in here, depending on the extent of the damage,” said An­
drei Musayelian, the thirty-seven-year-old engineer in charge of the 
tank yard. He told Hockstader that 80 percent of the tanks in the ware-
house had been captured from the Azerbaijanis. Many of them still 
had the Islamic crescent painted on their barrels. The remainder, he 
said, were “ours.”
28 
THE TIDE TURNS 
The fall of 1992 was the high-water mark of Azerbaijan’s military suc­
cess in the war. At one point, the Azerbaijanis possessed the village of 
Srkhavend to the north of Stepanakert and the road to the east of 
the town, and were poised to recapture the Lachin corridor. The Min­
istry of Defense in Baku was making plans to bring in buses to ship the 

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Armenian civilian population out of the territory Azerbaijan planned to 
conquer. By October 1992, however, the advance had halted and the of­
fensive had run out of steam. 
In both Karabakh and Armenia, an irregular fighting force became 
more organized. In Karabakh, the creation of the Defense Committee 
began to have an effect. The twenty-seven-year-old former garage me­
chanic Samvel Babayan employed ruthless tactics to form a Karabakh 
Armenian “army” of at least ten thousand men. Other commanders, 
such as Arkady Ter-Tatevosian, the conqueror of Shusha, went back to 
Armenia because they were unable to work with Babayan. 
In Armenia itself, Ter-Petrosian appointed his old comrade and 
rival Vazgen Manukian to be defense minister in October 1992. Ma­
nukian, who was not a military professional, worked with Norad Ter-
Grigoriants, the chief of the General Staff, to create a new army. He ad­
mits that public declarations that the Armenian army took no part in the 
war was purely for foreign consumption: “You can be sure that what-
ever we said politically, the Karabakh Armenian and Armenian army 
were united in military actions. It was not important for me if someone 
was a Karabakhi or an Armenian.” Manukian says that on several oc­
casions he deliberately ordered the Armenian military into action with-
out properly informing the more politically cautious Ter-Petrosian.
29 
Meanwhile in Azerbaijan, support for Elchibey’s grip on his coun­
try was weakening. Heidar Aliev, who ran Nakhichevan as a semi-in-
dependent principality, was one source of worry. Aliev’s relations with 
the Baku regime cooled after local Popular Front activists tried to re-
move him from power in October 1992. Aliev was a master of the long 
game and the building of alliances. He used the opening of a land 
bridge with Turkey in May 1992 to build a separate relationship with 
Ankara while also keeping up contacts in Russia. 
Aliev also decided to do everything to prevent fighting between 
Nakhichevan and Armenia. After one bout of serious cross-border 
fighting in May 1992, both sides decided they did not want to open a 
second front in the war. Aliev was in daily touch by telephone with 
Ashot Manucharian, the Armenian presidential security adviser, as 
they sought to defuse cross-border tensions, and Manucharian regu­
larly gave clearance for Aliev to fly from Nakhichevan to Baku across 
Armenian territory. In April 1993, the story goes that Aliev needed to fly 
back home from Turgut Özal’s funeral in Ankara over Armenian air-
space. He called Manucharian at home, seeking clearance to fly but 

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found only his mother, with whom he had spoken before. She promised 
to pass on the message to her son but was unable to locate him. An Ar­
menian aircraft tried to intercept Aliev’s plane and the pilot asked Aliev 
who had given him permission to fly across Armenian airspace. The 
message came back: “Ashot’s mother!” 
In Baku, President Elchibey began to face open insubordination 
from his defense minister, Rahim Gaziev, and his main commander, 
Suret Husseinov. It increasingly looked as though both men were work­
ing with the Russian military. 
In February 1993, the commander Zahid Neftaliev saw direct evi­
dence of the two top Azerbaijanis’ treachery. The Armenians were be-
ginning to win back territory in the North of Nagorny Karabakh, and 
an Azerbaijani unit had been surrounded in the village of Haterk. Nef­
taliev says that when he arrived at the nearby staff headquarters, a 
telephone operator he knew ran to him in tears. She said she had over-
heard Gaziev telling Husseinov by telephone that he was deliberately 
abandoning the soldiers encircled in Haterk to their fate. Neftaliev 
immediately called in the interior minister, Iskender Hamidov, to in­
vestigate this apparent treachery. “Iskender Hamidov came to Rahim 
Gaziev’s office,” said Neftaliev, “and they began to quarrel loudly. 
And he forced Gaziev to give a command for our brigade to leave 
Haterk. After that, our men left Haterk and got out of there with heavy 
casualties.”
30 
After this incident, Husseinov moved two brigades away 
from the front line. Elchibey sacked him from all his posts, but Hus­
seinov simply moved his 709th Brigade back to base in Ganje and re-
fused to disband it. Soon afterward, on 20 February, Gaziev was forced 
to resign as defense minister. 
KELBAJAR 
Suret Husseinov’s departure from the front left a gaping hole in one of 
the most sensitive parts of Azerbaijan’s defenses, the mountains of its 
largest region, Kelbajar. The Kelbajar region is a sliver of land running 
between the Northwest of Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia. A place of 
great strategic importance for both sides, it is also the source of most of 
the rivers in the region. 
The Armenian offensive began on 27 March 1993. Kelbajar had only 
a small group of defenders protecting it and no reinforcements came to 

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assist them. “We got no help from our side,” says Shamil Askerov, the 
leader of Kelbajar’s large Kurdish community.
31 
The main thrust of the 
Armenian attack came from the west, from the Vardenis region of Ar­
menia—although this was denied at the time for political reasons. A 
supporting offensive came from Karabakh. 
The operation sharpened the divisions in the Armenian leadership 
between President Ter-Petrosian, those who were interested in a diplo­
matic settlement to the war, and those, like Defense Minister Vazgen 
Manukian and the Karabakh Armenians, who wanted to press their 
military advantage. Manukian says that he had deliberately omitted to 
inform Ter-Petrosian of the full extent of Armenia’s involvement in the 
Kelbajar operation because he knew that the president would have 
misgivings about it. “I presented a small part of this operation,” Ma­
nukian said. “Receiving permission for this small part, we did more.” 
Ter-Petrosian sent a letter to the Karabakhi leader, Robert Kocharian, 
calling on him to stop the assault.
32 
On 3 April, the Armenians captured the town of Kelbajar itself. Mil­
itary losses were minimal, and most of the soldiers had left with the 
civilian refugees. A new desperate tide of refugees set off in flight, this 
time along the only route the Armenians had left open: the fifty miles of 
snowy road north across the Murov Mountains. Askerov’s house—and 
also his unique library of thirty thousand books—had been destroyed 
by a Grad missile. He was among the fifty thousand refugees on the 
roads. “On 2 April we climbed to the top of the Murov Pass,” Askerov 
said. “One villager wanted to drive eighty lambs. They surrounded me. 
They all died. There was snow and wind. I took one lamb under my 
coat. My tears froze.” The vast majority of the several hundred civilians 
who died in the capture of Kelbajar perished from cold. The Armenians 
occupied the whole region, having suffered almost no casualties. 
The loss of Kelbajar shook the Popular Front regime. President 
Elchibey declared a sixty-day State of Emergency to cope with his first 
big military defeat. Press gangs began to conscript young men into the 
army.
33 
At the same time Elchibey’s administration came under new 
pressure from Moscow to accept a peace agreement involving a Russ­
ian peacekeeping force. Even if the Russians had not directly taken part 
in the capture of Kelbajar, it evidently suited their purposes as a lever 
against Azerbaijan. 
For the Armenians, the success of the Kelbajar operation threw an-
other land bridge from Karabakh to Armenia, but it came with a heavy 

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diplomatic cost. For the first time, strong evidence was produced that 
troops from the Republic of Armenia had fought inside Azerbaijan and 
outside Karabakh. Allegations were also made that soldiers from the 
Russian 7th Army had taken part in the operation.
34 
The capture of a region of Azerbaijan outside Nagorny Karabakh, 
together with the allegations of outside involvement, brought interna­
tional condemnation on Armenia. On 30 April 1993, the United Nations 
Security Council passed its first resolution on the Nagorny Karabakh 
conflict. While calling on both sides to cease hostilities, the resolution 
singled out the Armenian side and demanded an “immediate with­
drawal of all occupying forces” from Kelbajar. Armenia’s fragile rela­
tionship with Turkey was also wrecked. In 1992, Turkey had not opened 
diplomatic relations with Armenia but neither did it sever all ties; it had 
for instance agreed to allow 100,000 tons of wheat from the European 
Union to pass through its territory en route to Armenia. After Kelbajar, 
Ter-Petrosian tried to keep up the contacts and even went to the funeral 
of Turgut Özal in Ankara, but Turkey decided to curtail the relationship 
and the second half of the EU wheat shipment was halted. 
Responding to this pressure, Ter-Petrosian threw his support be-
hind a new peace plan sponsored by Russia, the United States, and Tur­
key. It stipulated that the Armenians would withdraw from Kelbajar in 
return for security guarantees for Nagorny Karabakh. On 14 June, the 
Armenian leader traveled to Stepanakert to try to persuade the Kara­
bakh Armenians to accept the plan. There were heated discussions, and 
the local parliament accepted the plan only after its speaker, Georgy 
Petrosian, resigned. However, the Karabakhis asked for a month’s 
delay for the plan to be implemented. They had incentives to play for 
time because they could see that Azerbaijan was falling victim to civil 
strife. 
AN AZERBAIJANI  COLLAPSE 
Abulfaz Elchibey’s presidency collapsed with astonishing speed. On 4 
June 1993, he sent in government troops to try to disarm the garrison of 
the dissident army commander Suret Husseinov. When that operation 
failed, the governing regime did almost nothing to defend itself. Within 
two weeks, as Husseinov was moving his men toward Baku, Elchibey 
had surrendered power and fled the capital. 

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Colonel Isa Sadyqov was one of those sent to disarm Husseinov. He 
says that when he arrived in Ganje on 4 June, Husseinov had already 
been tipped off that troops were being sent against him. The rebel com­
mander had collected a group of women and children in front of his 
headquarters to serve as a “human shield” against the threat of armed 
attack. When Sadyqov and a colleague went to see Husseinov in his of­
fice, they were set upon, beaten up, and thrown into a basement. They 
barely escaped with their lives. 
Husseinov acted with a supreme self-confidence that suggested he 
was already looking forward to taking power. The government delega­
tions that arrived to negotiate with him behaved more like supplicants 
than superiors. Thomas Goltz, who traveled to Ganje, saw the reason 
for Husseinov’s arrogance in the courtyard of the base: he had inherited 
all the weapons of the 104th Airborne Division, which had pulled out of 
Ganje only ten days before. Facing no resistance from a confused gov­
ernment Husseinov began a “march” on Baku.
35 
The desperate Popular Front government then invited Heidar Aliev 
to come from Nakhichevan to Baku to its aid, the equivalent, as Goltz 
puts it, of “inviting a crocodile into the goat-pen.” A rapid train of 
events was set in motion, which saw Elchibey lose power and Aliev 
become president in his stead. First, on 15 June, Aliev succeeded Isa 
Gambar as speaker of parliament. Three days later, with Husseinov’s 
men still advancing on Baku, Elchibey fled to his native region of 
Nakhichevan. On 24 June, Aliev was voted extraordinary presidential 
powers by parliament in a motion sponsored by the eternal opposition 
figure Etibar Mamedov. On 30 June, Aliev appointed Husseinov—a 
rebel no longer—Azerbaijan’s new prime minister. He also canceled a 
series of oil contracts that Elchibey had signed earlier in the month with 
Western oil companies. Less than two months later, on 28 August, Aliev 
used the device of a nationwide referendum to allow the Azerbaijani 
public to vote no confidence in Elchibey. That left the way clear for him 
to be elected president in elections on 3 October. 
The transition was rapid and brutal. Most onlookers assumed that 
Aliev had been working in concert with Husseinov to overthrow the 
Popular Front administration and take power. However, subsequent 
evidence suggested that Husseinov and Aliev may actually have been 
thrown together by events. Another revolt in a different part of the 
country suggests another scenario was being plotted. Shortly after Hus­
seinov’s uprising, the military commander Aliakram Humbatov staged 

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another rebellion in the Lenkoran region and proclaimed a new sepa­
ratist “Talysh-Mugham Republic” in the South of Azerbaijan. Hum­
batov received the support of former defense minister Rahim Gaziev 
and swore loyalty to former president Ayaz Mutalibov. This revolt, 
which collapsed in August with almost no bloodshed, appeared to be