Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Sabirabad 
The Children’s Republic 
M U S I C   WA S   C O M I N G  
out of the big hall with the corrugated iron 
roof. There was the rasping gut of a stringed instrument, the beat of 
stamping feet, an accordion, and a banging drum. Inside a line of young 
girls, hand in hand and dressed in pinks and greens, glided in a line, 
urged on by a clutch of musicians sitting in the corner. The dancing 
master clapped his hands, the music stopped, and the girls laughed and 
went back to their positions. 
The hall teeming with joie de vivre was in a refugee camp outside the 
town of Sabirabad in the arid plains of central Azerbaijan. Every week-
end this courtyard becomes the headquarters of an exceptional project. 
In the next-door room to the dancing class, another group of children 
was studying a text of an operetta by the composer Uzeir Hajibekov. On 
a square of baked mud and grass outside, a game of soccer was in 
progress. Animated children, bustling between activities, came up to 
chat to me. Despite the circumstances, I found it the most inspiring and 
hopeful place I had seen in the Caucasus. 
The six or seven hundred children of Camp C-1 are willing guinea 
pigs. A few years ago a group of Azerbaijani educational psychologists 
found that several years after the war over Karabakh had ended, many 
refugee children were still frightened and disturbed. The elder ones 
still remembered the traumatic scenes, when they had been driven from 
their homes in the summer and fall of 1993. The younger ones had 
different problems; not remembering their original homes, they were 
growing up without any motivation in the listless environment of the 
camps. 
The psychologists decided they had to catch these children before 
they slipped further into depression. Azad Isazade was one of the 
founding psychologists and my guide to C-1 camp. He told me, “The 
children don’t know it’s happening of course, but the teachers are 
217 

---

218 
S A B I R A B A D :  T H E   C H I L D R E N ’ S   R E P U B L I C  
trained to observe them and identify what they need.” They had de-
vised four sets of activities—folk dancing, theatre, art, and sports—that 
were also forms of therapy. “It’s a process,” said Azad, a slight man 
with an endlessly inventive and inquiring mind. “So with music, for ex-
ample, they first of all needed to hear depressive melodies, then neutral 
ones, then cheerful ones. Or drawing. We gave them one page and 
asked them to draw the saddest day of their life—then later on lots of 
pages to draw the happiest day of their life.” 
The program has had remarkable effects on the children, as I saw. 
Yet its depressing corollary is that far more refugee children—not to 
mention their parents—in Azerbaijan are moldering without this kind 
of care or attention. 
Azerbaijan may have the largest proportions of displaced people 
per capita of any country in the world. The total numbers may be 
greater in Afghanistan or Congo, but in Azerbaijan every tenth person 
is a refugee from the conflict with Armenia. First, approximately 200,000 
Azerbaijanis fled Armenia in 1988 and 1989. Then, between 1992 and 
1994, came all the Azerbaijanis of Nagorny Karabakh and the inhabi­
tants of seven regions around Karabakh—more than half a million peo­
ple in all. Six years after the cease-fire agreement was signed, in the year 
2000, around eighty or ninety thousand of them were still in refugee 
camps. Hundreds of thousands more were living in a vast archipelago 
of sanatoria, student hostels, and makeshift accommodations. All re­
mained in a terrible limbo while the conflict was unresolved.
1 
The basic ingredients the psychologists needed to get the program 
going in the camp, a surplus of time and unused energy, were already 
there: refugee schoolteachers, musicians, and sportsmen worked for 
free and gradually took on most of the teaching. Then, in the summer of 
1999, the psychologists set up what they called The Children’s Repub­
lic, a minigovernment run entirely for and by children. The children 
elected a “parliament” with twelve MPs, which took collective deci­
sions. The Ministry of Ecology planted a garden, the Ministry of Infor­
mation put out a newspaper. Children from the two camps the psy­
chologists were working in played competitive games with one another 
and traveled to music and dance festivals, where their trainers were 
heartened to see that their children were the most self-assured and con­
fident of all the competing teams. 
Out on the soccer field, a boy in yellow track-suit trousers was 
shouting to his team. “We had him elected to parliament,” Azad ex-

---

S A B I R A B A D :  T H E   C H I L D R E N ’ S   R E P U B L I C  
219 
plained, as a way of channeling his aggression in a creative direction. 
He pointed out the sports shoes that the boys were wearing; they were 
the fruits of a policy of “tough love” that Tony Blair or Bill Clinton could 
be proud of. “We don’t buy them presents,” Azad said. “They have to 
achieve something. So the sports children get new shoes only if they 
play in the competitions.” This policy caused problems when the train­
ers were handing out the shoes. All the parents, who had become used 
to humanitarian aid handouts, came out, expecting to get free gifts, but 
those whose children had not signed up for the weekend activities were 
turned away. 
The experience had changed the lives of the trainers as well. Azad 
had been press officer in Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry during the war 
but turned back to his former profession, clinical psychology, after the 
1994 cease-fire. I wondered what had kept him coming here to Sabira­
bad, four hours’ drive from Baku, every weekend for the past few years. 
His reply, coming from a citizen of a deeply cynical society, was affect­
ing: “I feel responsible for these people. I wasn’t able to defend them.” 
More than twenty thousand people live in the camps of this region. 
They are mostly from the southern regions of Fizuli, Jebrail, and Zen­
gelan, which were conquered by the Armenians in the summer and fall 
of 1993. “It was good that it was summer,” Nagir Tadirov, an official in 
charge of the refugees told me. “Winter would have been much worse. 
There were some people who even forgot their documents. The ones 
from Jebrail and Zengelan crossed the Araxes into Iran.” 
Life in Camp C-1 is hard and tedious. The camp is in a former cot-
ton field, near the confluence of two gray, flat rivers, the Araxes and the 
Kura; it is a sea of mud in winter and baking hot in summer. We had 
come in the most benign season, early spring. It looked as though a 
great biblical exodus had been washed up here. Mud-and-straw bricks 
were drying in the sun. Improvised houses had been put together from 
whatever came to hand: straw, clay, and cellophane. Azad pointed to a 
tractor drunkenly parked on a hump of clay, facing downward. “The 
battery’s gone flat and so no one can use it,” he said. “There’s just no 
money here even for simple things like that.” 
We came to a low hut with a corrugated-iron roof, in front of which 
Zahra and her husband were sitting on a bench and invited us to join 
them. Zahra was wearing a green housedress, worn shoes, and flowery 
headscarf. They had done their best to domesticate their home. The 
door panels were made out of vegetable-oil cans labeled “final.” One 

---

220 
S A B I R A B A D :  T H E   C H I L D R E N ’ S   R E P U B L I C  
or two spindly roses were growing in the yard. Nowadays they had 
nothing to do. They were kept from starvation by aid handouts but had 
no work. Everyone received a flat-rate pension or salary of 25,000 man­
ats a month, or about five dollars. On top of that, they got humanitarian 
food aid: five kilos of flour, one kilo of seed, one of peas, and one of veg­
etable oil. 
Zahra said they had had a two-story house with a garden full of 
mulberry trees in the Zengelan region. The Armenians had come in 
October 1993. “We fled across the Araxes. We managed to take thirty 
neighbors with us.” She pointed to an open truck still parked in the far 
end of the yard. “We took only mattresses. Our forces held out for three 
days, then they fled too.” 
My arrival had caused some interest. Some of Zahra’s neighbors 
leaned over the fence to take a look and offer me their worldview. The 
Armenians had “behaved worse than the fascists,” they related, burn­
ing everything they had laid their hands on, chopping off noses and 
ears. The whole problem had started with Peter the Great and Russia’s 
imperialist designs on the Caucasus, explained one man in a gray, flat 
“aerodrome” cap (so-called because you could land an airplane on it). 
Gorbachev had been an Armenian spy, who merely picked up where 
the tsars had left off. “How do you live here now?” I asked him. “How? 
Like sheep!” he laughed bitterly. 
These people had all the time in the world to talk but very little idea 
of what fate the politicians and international peace negotiators were de­
ciding for them. They complained about satkinliq, an Azeri word mean­
ing “sell-out-ness.” It seemed that no one had defended them against 
the Armenians in 1993 and no one was really bothered about their fate 
now. “The rich men in Baku drive around in Mercedes,” said one man. 
“They don’t think about the war. All the burden of the war has fallen on 
us.” I asked Zahra, if there were anyone she trusted to improve her sit­
uation. “Only Allah,” she answered. 
The paradox is that the Azerbaijani leadership mentions the refu­
gees at almost every opportunity. President Aliev (exaggerating some-
what) constantly repeats that there are “one million refugees” in his 
country. Yet, several years on, all government measures are still short-
term; there is no state program that aims to give the refugees jobs or 
give them skills. As a result, many have turned to crime or smuggling— 
or else retreated into complete dependency on their meager handouts. 
One former Azerbaijani aid worker told me that government officials 

---

S A B I R A B A D :  T H E   C H I L D R E N ’ S   R E P U B L I C  
221 
gave him angry stares when he had suggested ways of integrating the 
refugees into the local economy. The implication is that would mean 
losing them as refugees and objects of pity: they may be more useful to 
the government as a symbol of Azerbaijan’s suffering than as people 
with real problems. 
In the meantime, the focus of the international aid community 
has moved on. “A few years ago I would get a flood of journalists,” 
Vugar Abdusalimov, press officer in Baku for the United Nations High 
Commission on Refugees, told me. “Now I am lucky when one or two 
come along. And then it always gets harder for us, when another ref­
ugee crisis happens—like in Congo or Kosovo.” In 2001, just as they 
were planning to expand the Children’s Republic to other camps, the 
Baku psychologists’ funding dried up and they began to wind down 
their program. 
“I left all my books behind,” said Gabil Akhmedov. “There are some 
things it’s impossible to find, like Fenimore Cooper. I used to love his