Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Last of the Mohicans.” 
Force of character is needed to survive the demeaning process of 
losing your home. In Camp S-3 outside the town of Saatly, I found one 
man who possesses it. I was looking for someone who would give me 
something different from the stock answers and recycled opinions I 
heard from others. Gabil, a teacher of Azeri language and literature, had 
formed his own opinions. Tall, with thick coal-black eyebrows and an 
unshaven chin, he was too large for the two-room hut made of cane and 
pebbles he now inhabited with his wife. 
Gabil had insulated the walls of the hut on the inside with a web of 
old newspapers, blankets, and flour sacks. The space was taken up by a 
kerosene stove, a carpet, a television set with a wreath of artificial roses 
on it, and a shelf of books. Gabil’s wife, Agiyat, delighted to have a 
guest, insisted on cooking us an omelet and brought a plate of dried 
fruit. The couple came from the village of Yukhari Abdurahmanly in the 
Fizuli region in the foothills south of Nagorny Karabakh. Gabil said that 
the view from their two-story house, sitting on a hill, stretched for 
twenty kilometers. “Here you feel you like you live in a well or a pit. 
You can’t see anything around you.” He missed his orchard, which had 
had pomegranates, quince, walnuts, cherries, apples, and mulberries. 
“When my eldest son got married, he shot a film with the house and 
garden in it,” Gabil said. “My family has seen the film three or four 

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times. But I can’t watch it because with my own hands I built that house 
and grew that garden.” 
Gabil’s life had been blighted by two wars. In the “Great Patriotic 
War” of 1941–1945, his father had been sent to the front in Crimea, was 
reported missing in action, and never came back. That left his mother to 
bring up four sons on her own and a life of crushing poverty. There had 
never been enough bread, and they had stolen wheat from the fields. 
They did not have shoes and went barefoot to school. He remembered 
how people wore clothes made out of bandages. “It was even worse 
then,” Gabil said. 
In the postwar years, Gabil and his brothers all studied hard and 
got good jobs. He qualified as a teacher and was on the verge of retire­
ment when the war over Nagorny Karabakh began. Everything they 
had worked for went very quickly. In mid-August 1993, during the 
chaotic period when Azerbaijan’s second president, Abulfaz Elchibey, 
had been ousted but Heidar Aliev had not yet taken over as president, 
Armenian soldiers stormed into the Fizuli region in a lightning offen­
sive. The Azerbaijani army simply abandoned Yukhari Abdurahmanly, 
and many of the villagers did not have time to flee. The invading Ar­
menians killed twelve innocent villagers in cold blood, Gabil said, and 
then burned the village. “A month later one of our villagers came back 
in a prisoner exchange,” he went on. “He said that the whole village 
had been burned. Only three buildings were left.” 
I wondered about the future. “I am 66. How can I not be sad, when 
I don’t know what the future will be?” he declared in his deep gruff 
voice, more with stoicism than bitterness. But he was adamant that he 
did not feel hatred for the Armenians—merely the deepest possible re­
gret. As a teacher, he had had many Armenian colleagues. “We were 
great friends with the Armenians for many years,” he explained. He 
had gone back and forth to Nagorny Karabakh and had friends in Ste­
panakert, then, reflectively, “It’s a shame, such a great shame. I feel 
sorry—for them and for us.” 
Every shift of a kilometer on the map of the Nagorny Karabakh war al­
tered people’s lives forever. In the late summer of 1993, the Armenians 
captured the Fizuli region. In January 1994, the Azerbaijanis launched a 
counterattack and recaptured two-thirds of the region. Unfortunately 
for Gabil, their offensive ran out of steam a few miles short of his village 
and his home remained just on the Armenian side of the front line. 

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A few days after meeting Gabil, I traveled to the recaptured parts of 
Fizuli. They are a tiny example of the vast problem that faces Azerbai­
jan if it ever recovers all of the “occupied territories.” In three months of 
occupation, the Armenians had laid waste to the whole area. With 
lonely ruins scattered over a flat plain, it still looked like a World War I 
battlefield. Here and there, dotted across the landscape, were incongru­
ous splashes of Mediterranean color; reconstructed houses had been 
painted pink, like Italian villas. Using money from the World Bank and 
the United Nations, the Azerbaijanis had done reconstruction work, but 
it looked as though the work of rehabilitating the area had only just 
begun. 
The railway junction at Horadiz was a wreck. An idle good train 
had nowhere to go along the railway tracks that used to run east to 
Nakhichevan and Armenia. The local Azerbaijani administration had 
set up its officers in a former Irrigation Department building. “Every-
thing was a problem,” said Magiram Nazarov, one of the officials who 
came back here in 1994. “Everything had been burned. There were no 
doors, no roofs. There was no food.” He admitted that people had 
flooded back here too soon. There was no work to come back to and sev­
eral returnees had been blown up by mines—so most of them were 
forced to go back to camps again. “It was a lesson of life,” Nazarov said. 
“If more territory is liberated, we will try to stop the population [from] 
going back until there are proper conditions.” 
In Baku, I was told that altogether around fifteen hundred houses 
had been rebuilt and about six million dollars had been spent here since 
1996—and also that the corruption was such that a lot of the money had 
bypassed Fizuli altogether. Yet this was only a fraction of the enormous 
area of seven thousand square kilometers that the Armenians occupy. It 
was a bad omen for Gabil and his fellow refugees. Even if they get their 
homes back in a future peace settlement, it will be far from being the 
end of the story. 
A couple of miles from the front line an elderly couple sat in front 
of their patched-up house, surrounded by more of the debris of inter-
national aid. Yellow and white sacks that had held rice and flour from 
Dubai, Thailand, and the United States covered the walls of their re­
cently repaired house. The garden was a cacophony of dogs, turkeys, 
and hens. 
Kurban and Sayat Abilov had lived for two years in the camps of 
Saatly before coming back here. They said all of their eight children 

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were now in Baku. These two had almost nothing to live on—but they 
were much better conversation than most of the people in the camps. 
The wife jumped up to shoo a bullock away from one of the trees and 
prod a chicken off the porch; the husband joked and talked expansively. 
It seemed at least that the couple had one precious resource, which they 
shared with the children of the Children’s Republic at Sabirabad: a 
sense of their own future. For hundreds of thousands of homeless Azer­
baijanis, it is more a matter of what the gods decide for them. 

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