Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

ductio ad absurdum, and any compromise was now impossible. 
VOLUNTEER ARMIES 
The collapse of the Soviet Union left Armenia and Azerbaijan inde­
pendent states at war with each other but with no armies. Despite Ar­
menia’s denials that it was a party to the conflict, the facts on the ground 
showed that the so-called Nagorny Karabakh war was also a conflict 
between the new states of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Ordinary Armeni­
ans experienced this as a fact. Their economy had almost collapsed with 
the closure of the border with Azerbaijan, which now turned into a 
fighting zone. Hardest to ignore was the fact that Armenian citizens 
were dying in the conflict in Karabakh. 
Armenia was better prepared for war. A core of Soviet army officers 
had set about creating an Armenian army. Some were Russians, who 

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had served in Armenia, like Lieutenant General Anatoly Zenevich, who 
began to work with the Karabakh Armenians in 1992. Others were Ar­
menian officers who had demobilized from the Soviet army, such as the 
deputy head of the Soviet General Staff, Norad Ter-Grigoriants, who be-
came chief of Armenia’s new General Staff. 
These men were less important than the fedayin fighters, who were 
already hardened from fighting in the hills. Independence brought a 
new flood of Armenian volunteers for what was still an emotive and 
popular cause. Samvel Danielian was one of a group of Dashnak stu­
dents at Yerevan University who volunteered for the front. “The state 
gave out nothing as such,” he recalls. “Every man found himself clothes 
and weapons and camouflage and boots. There were sometimes cases 
when the Dashnaks came and handed out things.”
4 
The situation was chaotic. Weapons were being handed out to men 
who had displayed nothing more than a willingness to go and kill. The 
Karabakh Armenian leader Serzh Sarkisian admits: “At first lads of a 
rather criminal type were attracted to weapons, to fighting. That was 
impermissible.” There was almost no coordination or training. The 
cameraman and reporter Vartan Hovanisian covered the whole first 
phase of the war: 
At the beginning, there were disparate units, created in different ways, 
either on the idea of Dashnaktsutiun or coming from a certain region. 
A village formed its own units, or two people met in a courtyard, got 
in a car and just went. One person found a weapon, another a hunting 
rifle. The weapons were absolutely extraordinary, people even made 
their own do-it-yourself weapons and blew themselves up.
5 
Azerbaijan was in a much weaker position. The fundamental issues of 
power had not been resolved and there were fears of civil war be-
tween President Mutalibov and the nationalist opposition. For many 
politicians, the war effort was less important than the domestic power 
struggle. 
President Mutalibov had created the Ministry of Defense in Octo­
ber 1991. However there were few officers available to staff it. The So­
viet army had traditionally discriminated against Muslim soldiers, so 
while there were thousands of Armenians with high rank and frontline 
training, Azerbaijanis were more likely to have served as cooks or build­
ers than professional officers. As a basis for the army, there was only the 

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OMON, which had played only a supporting role to the Soviet army in 
Nagorny Karabakh. Armenian Interior Minister Ashot Manucharian 
says: “Because we had been forced to create everything in secret, invis­
ibly, in spite of the Soviet authorities, everything that was created 
turned into an army. What the Azerbaijanis had was a police force.”
6 
As a result, Azerbaijan’s new Defense Ministry had a staff of fewer 
than one hundred and offices in the former KGB club in downtown 
Baku. Within its first six months, as Azerbaijan went through one crisis 
after another, it went through no fewer than four ministers. The second 
defense minister, Tajedin Mekhtiev, a Soviet career officer, who lasted 
two months, describes the ministry he took over in December 1991: 
There was not a single piece of military equipment. . . . There was no 
communications equipment at all. Now we have mobile phones. Then 
there was absolutely nothing. It was impossible to conduct a conver­
sation with anyone. Everything was listened to. At that time all the 
government lines went through the GRU [Russian military intelli­
gence] and they listened to all our conversations. And there were no 
other lines. There were no barracks, no training grounds, no weapons, 
no equipment.
7 
Mekhtiev, a large man with a military bearing and ruddy face, says that 
for the entire nine weeks that he was minister the Popular Front demon­
strated outside his office calling on him to resign. His solution was sim­
ple. He told Mutalibov that they had “to shoot a hundred people, five 
hundred” in order to impose order. Mutalibov’s reluctance to carry this 
out Mekhtiev puts down to “indecisiveness.” 
The Defense Ministry had almost no control over the real fighting 
men of Azerbaijan: a plethora of armed groups, many of which were es­
sentially the personal militias of opposition leaders. The Popular Front 
leader in the southern town of Lenkoran, Aliakram Humbatov, formed 
his own brigade. So did the opposition veteran Etibar Mamedov, who 
says that by the middle of 1992, he had about two thousand men, 
mainly students, under arms. It was obvious that these men had arms 
not just to fight the Armenians but to take part in the power struggles 
for Azerbaijan itself. Mamedov says that President Mutalibov first tried 
to bring his battalions under the control of the new overarching Defense 
Council and then changed his mind: 

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There was no subordination, because the Defense Council was cre­
ated, they held one session and after that we didn’t meet. And on 27 
[1992] January, [Mutalibov] published a decree dissolving the Defense 
Council. But by then it was too late. Instead of leading this process 
himself, [Mutalibov] was afraid that these armed groups could be 
turned against him and did everything to stop them being formed.
8 
The city of Aghdam, situated in the plains below Stepanakert, was offi­
cially the Azerbaijani army’s forward post, yet in 1992 it lived by its 
own rules. Aghdam’s problems were symptomatic of the country as a 
whole. It had always had a reputation for being a haven for outlaws and 
black marketeers, and now several underworld leaders tried to control 
the war effort. Kemal Ali, a neurophysiologist, went to fight in Aghdam 
in the spring of 1992: 
When I was in Aghdam in 1992 there wasn’t a single army, there were 
six or seven separate units, fighting the Armenians. These units were 
organized by local criminals, bandits, who’d spent many years in So­
viet jails for murder, for different crimes. . . . But these units were in 
conflict with each other as well as with the Armenians. For example, 
they agreed to seize some kind of Russian weapons warehouse. They 
captured it, one man got five tanks and another didn’t get a single one. 
That’s it! They’re now enemies! So these six units could never carry out 
one attack together. One attacked and the next one said, “No I won’t, 
I don’t want to attack today.”
9 
One of the criminalized commanders was Yaqub Mamed, a man who 
had formerly made his living inscribing tombstones and who based 
his paramilitary group at the town cemetery; he was later arrested and 
charged with drawing the pay of dead soldiers whom he kept frozen 
in cold storage tanks. Another was Asif Makhamerov, who had re­
cently been released from jail, where he had served time for murder. 
He went by the sobriquet “Freud” because of his reputation as an in-
tellectual.
10 
Kemal Ali comments: “Criminals are often very big patri­
ots. War is a very good place for criminals. You can do whatever you 
want. You can stab and kill. An educated person never goes to war, 
criminals go to war. And at that time our army was commanded by 
criminals.” 

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THE ARMING OF KARABAKH 
At the end of 1991, Nagorny Karabakh was still a mosaic of Azerbai­
jani and Armenian villages. As Soviet forces pulled out, each side tried 
to redraw this complex map in its favor. The less numerous Karabakh 
Azerbaijani villages found themselves in dozens of small traps, at the 
mercy of Armenian fedayin. According to the Armenian leader Robert 
Kocharian, “When [the Soviet] forces withdrew we were left one on 
one with Azerbaijan, one on one, but organized and having as a mini-
mum three or four years of experience of underground activity.”
11 
These Armenian fighters began to intimidate Karabakh Azerbaijanis 
out of their villages. In the euphemistic explanation of the Armenian 
military commander Serzh Sarkisian, “We took the decision to try to 
reduce the line of the front.”
12 
Yet while the Azerbaijanis were in a number of traps, the Armeni­
ans found themselves in one large trap. Stepanakert, Karabakh’s main 
town and the Armenians’ capital, was extremely vulnerable. Situated 
on an open, gently sloping hillside, it was surrounded by Azerbaijani 
settlements. Fifteen miles to the east was Aghdam and the plain of 
Azerbaijan; five miles to the north were the large Azerbaijani village of 
Khojali and Karabakh’s only airport; directly above it, to the south, was 
the hilltop town of Shusha. Stepanakert’s only link to the outside world 
was by helicopter across the mountains to Armenia. 
The Armenians armed themselves by taking over most of the arse­
nal of the Soviet forces, stationed in Karabakh. “It was a very solid foun­
dation,” said Robert Kocharian. “All of the equipment stayed, we did 
not allow it to be removed.” 
Some of the weapons came from the four regiments of the Soviet In­
terior Ministry stationed in Nagorny Karabakh in 1991. On 22 Decem­
ber, armed Armenians broke into the barracks of the police regiment in 
Stepanakert, seized the ammunition store and armored vehicles, and 
forced the unit to leave Karabakh without its weapons. One Russian 
driver was killed in a shoot-out. That at least is the official version of 
events—it is possible that the raid was a cover for a business deal.
13 
The regular units of the 4th Army of Azerbaijan, manned by con-
scripts from across the Soviet Union, were in disarray. Soldiers from far-
flung republics simply left their units and traveled home. Stepanakert 
had been the base for the 366th Motorized Regiment since August 1988. 
Officers in the 366th began to help the Armenians, and men in sister 

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units in the 23rd Division in Ganje began to work with the Azerbaijanis. 
Anatoly Shabad observed what was in effect the privatization of the 
Soviet army: