Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

partly as the villages’ self-appointed protectors against the Azerbaijani 
OMON, and partly to use them as a route into Karabakh. Several dozen 
fighters had established themselves in the villages of Getashen (known 
as Chaikend by the Azerbaijanis) and its near neighbor Martunashen 
(or Karabulakh) in the Khanlar region. They were led by Tatul Krpeyan, 
a Dashnak from Armenia who had been teaching in the village school. 
On 10 April 1991, the decision was made to launch the operation 
against Getashen and Martunashen,
16 
and in the last two weeks of the 
month the three thousand villagers were gradually sealed off from the 
outside world. A cordon of troops surrounded the villages, and its tele­
phone lines and electricity supply were cut. The signal for the operation 
to start was the removal of the Interior Ministry post. Interior Ministry 
troops tended to be Russian and more likely to take the side of the Ar­
menian villagers; the army units consisted mainly, and the OMON units 
wholly, of Azerbaijanis.
17 
The Moscow-based human rights group Memorial has recon­
structed what happened. On 30 April, 4th Army soldiers and then the 
Azerbaijani OMON entered Getashen. Resistance was sporadic, but 
Krpeyan was killed and his men took several soldiers hostage. The 
OMON raided and looted houses and attacked many of the inhabitants; 
of the dozen or so killed, many were in their eighties and nineties. They 
took fifty hostages—half of whom were later exchanged for the sol­
diers and half were sent to the Ganje prison. The outnumbered fedayin 
slipped away. Within a week, the inhabitants of both villages had been 
deported, the majority ferried by helicopter to Stepanakert and from 
there to Armenia. Most had been forced to sign documents that they 

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were leaving of their own free will. After they had gone, a hitherto un­
advertised part of Operation Ring was enacted as Azerbaijani refugees, 
who had fled Armenia in 1988–1989, were brought into Getashen/ 
Chaikend and took over the recently abandoned Armenian houses as 
living quarters. 
Successful in military terms, Azerbaijan’s operation against the vil­
lagers bore a heavy political cost. The new Russian parliament, whose 
speaker was Boris Yeltsin, had formed a close alliance with the ANM 
administration in Armenia; and they saw that they had a common 
enemy in the Soviet security establishment. Russian parliamentarians 
took up the cause of the beleaguered Armenian villagers. Later on they 
were to hold their first-ever parliamentary hearings on Operation Ring. 
It was the beginning of a new Armenian-Russian political relationship. 
Another operation was planned for 6–7 May against the village of 
Voskepar on the northern section of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. 
Voskepar was inside Armenia but had been involved in skirmishes with 
Azerbaijani settlements across the border. Azerbaijan’s operation to 
“neutralize” the village shows how blurred the line between official and 
unofficial security forces had become. Outside Voskepar, a minibus car­
rying about thirty Armenian policemen was ambushed by soldiers of 
the 23rd Division; eleven were killed and the others were taken captive. 
As far as the Azerbaijanis were concerned, they were Armenian para-
military fighters; the Armenians could point out with equal justice that 
they were the uniformed policemen of a Soviet republic, killed on their 
own territory. 
Four Russian parliamentary deputies arrived on the scene and one, 
Anatoly Shabad, stayed in the village. Shabad is half Armenian, but his 
main motive for getting involved seems to have been passionate oppo­
sition to the Communist security apparatus. When full-scale war broke 
out, he distanced himself from the Karabakh Armenian movement, and 
later still become one of the leading critics of Russian military action in 
Chechnya. 
Shabad recalls scenes of anxiety and confusion in Voskepar. He says 
he did not see armed fighters, who appear to have been on the edge of 
the village and acting on their own. Through a loudspeaker, a Soviet 
army commander gave the villagers a deadline to surrender their weap­
ons. When no one reacted and the deadline had expired, an artillery 
bombardment opened up. Most of the shells were fired over or away 
from the village, but three villagers who had fled in fright were killed. 

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Shabad says that he later realized the bombardment was meant to in­
timidate the civilians into submission rather than to hit the fighters. He 
saw exactly the same tactic used by the Russian army in Chechnya in 
1995–1996: 
Armed men, who fight in wars, are not frightened by these things. 
They are only frightened when the firing is aimed at them. I under-
stood later that if there is only noise all around you and the shells are 
flying in another direction, you can simply drink cognac and not react 
at all. All these things are designed to sow panic among the civilian 
population. Women begin to weep, dogs bark, cows moo, and a situa­
tion is created.
18 
The presence of a Russian member of parliament evidently saved the 
villagers of Voskepar from becoming additional victims of Operation 
Ring. The division’s troops did not enter the village, and Shabad man-
aged subsequently to extract the surviving Armenian policemen from 
Azerbaijani custody by means of a large cash payment provided for 
him by the Armenian Interior Ministry. A week later, however, all of the 
inhabitants of seventeen smaller Armenian villages in the Hadrut and 
Shusha regions of Nagorny Karabakh were deported. Human rights ac­
tivists estimated that during the first phase of the operation, five thou-
sand Armenians were deported and between twenty and thirty were 
killed. 
AN ATTEMPT AT  COMPROMISE 
If Operation Ring had been planned as an act of intimidation against the 
Karabakh Armenians, it began to achieve results. After its first phase, 
with villagers from Getashen flooding into Stepanakert, the Karabakh 
Armenian movement showed its first serious cracks. On 19 June 1991,