Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Stepanakert 
A State Apart 
T H E   S M A L L  A U S T E R E  
room was lined with wooden benches and il­
luminated by a bank of strip lights. But for the floor-to-ceiling metal 
cage on the left side, it could have been a school classroom. Inside, two 
rows of young men sat together under guard; seated at a short distance 
from them was Samvel Babayan, a small man with a wispy moustache 
and an inscrutable expression. The former commander of the Karabakh 
Armenian armed forces was on trial for attempted murder and high 
treason. 
Babayan had a swift fall from power. For five years after the 1994 
cease-fire agreement with Azerbaijan, still not yet thirty years old, he 
was acclaimed as the all-Armenian hero. Combining the posts of minis­
ter of defense and commander of the army in the self-proclaimed 
statelet of Nagorny Karabakh, Babayan had been the de facto overlord 
and master of the territory. Then at the end of 1999, a power struggle 
with the rest of the leadership broke into the open and he was sacked 
from his posts. Three months later, in March 2000, the region’s elected 
leader, Arkady Gukasian, was riding home late one night through Ste­
panakert when his Mercedes sustained a fusillade of bullets fired by 
two gunmen. Gukasian was hit in the legs, and his bodyguard and 
driver were wounded. Babayan and his associates were arrested and ac­
cused of plotting to assassinate Gukasian and seize power. 
Now, in October 2000, seats were hard to come by in Stepanakert’s 
courtroom for the daily drama of the trial. Three of the former com­
mander’s fellow accused had rejected their former boss and pleaded 
guilty, but he himself denied all the charges against him. His lawyer, 
Zhudeks Shagarian, said that an early confession had been beaten out 
of him. 
The trial was a small-town affair that was forcing open a clammed-
up and secretive society. The lawyers, defendants, and witnesses all 
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knew one another. The prosecutor asked one witness, a doctor, to define 
her exact relationship to the main defendant. “Yes, I am Babayan’s sec­
ond cousin,” she conceded. She was then asked for her address. “Who 
gave you the apartment?” the prosecutor asked, seeking to establish 
whether it was a gift from Babayan. Distributing apartments had been 
one of his ways of securing loyalty. 
Outside the courtroom other facts about Babayan were emerging 
into the daylight. The list of assets held by him and his family and 
confiscated when he was arrested included eight foreign cars, among 
them a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Landrover; two farms; two houses; five 
apartments; around forty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and sixty 
thousand dollars’ worth of cash.
1 
By world standards, that may not 
have been excessive; in Nagorny Karabakh, that made him unimagin­
ably wealthy. 
Babayan and his family had made money out of both war and 
peace. In wartime, the wealth came from the “occupied territories,” 
when everything they contained was stripped, taken away, and sold, 
generally to Iran. The marauders missed nothing, whether it was scrap 
metal, factory equipment, copper wire, or roof beams. An Armenian 
friend described to me how he went to the ravaged city of Aghdam one 
June day after the war and saw the Felliniesque sight of men filling a 
line of flattop Iranian trucks to the brim with rose petals. The petals 
came from the thousands of rosebushes scrambling over the ruins of the 
deserted town, and the Iranians bought them to make jam. 
In peacetime, Babayan and his family exploited the economic isola­
tion of Nagorny Karabakh. He founded a company called Jupiter, reg­
istered in his wife’s name, which earned vast sums by acquiring the mo­
nopoly on cigarette and fuel imports to the enclave. Economic power 
was only half of it. “You couldn’t open a kiosk or be appointed as a 
schoolteacher without Babayan’s say-so,” said one disgruntled local. 
All political rivals were neutralized. A feud between Babayan and one 
military commander named “Vacho” ended in an armed showdown 
and Vacho’s fleeing Karabakh. Anyone who got in Babayan’s way 
risked ending up in Shusha jail and being ordered to pay a large bribe 
to secure his or her release. One father was asked to pay a much higher 
price: the delivery of either of his teenage daughters to Babayan. He 
told his daughters to stay at home while he frantically raised a ransom 
of five thousand dollars. 

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243 
This part of the Babayan story was the most disgusting and also the 
hardest to report on because no Stepanakert girl would go on the record 
about Babayan’s rapist propensities. But several people told me how 
young women were afraid to go out in the evenings because Babayan 
and his friends would crawl the streets in their Mercedes at five miles 
an hour, in the manner of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenty Beria, looking for 
female prey. Some parents sent their daughters to Yerevan to escape his 
rapacity; other young women bore children who were nicknamed “lit­
tle Samo.” 
A repellent man certainly—but was Babayan plotting to seize pow­
er in March 2000? Some said that if Babayan, a proven military profes­
sional, had organized the assassination attempt on Gukasian, it would 
not have failed. The Bulgarian journalist Cvetana Paskaleva, a keen 
Babayan supporter, said that when she visited him just before his arrest, 
he was entirely focused on rebuilding his career peacefully, as a politi­
cian. Most of Stepanakert, however, seemed to believe him guilty. “If 
not him, then who?” people said. The veteran activist Zhanna Galstian 
declared that the trial was the logical culmination of the commander’s 
ambitions: “Samvel Babayan took away our initiative, he made people 
slaves. If this trial wasn’t happening, it would all have been in vain.” 
The Babayan phenomenon was the most lurid example of a wider 
postwar phenomenon. As in Azerbaijan, many ordinary Karabakh Ar­
menians felt betrayed by their leaders. There was cruel disappoint­
ment for those who had fought out of genuine conviction or lost sons 
and husbands. Seta Melkonian, the widow of the Armenian volunteer 
warrior Monte Melkonian, told me that she found it disheartening 
nowadays to go back to his old region of Martuni where he had been 
commander: 
I know a family that lost their three boys, three young men. This was 
a refugee family from Baku. They came to Martuni, and one day they 
lost their three sons. One was married with two kids, one diabetic. One 
was engaged. The other one wasn’t married. And every time I see that 
mother, I feel bad. What do you tell that kind of a mother? These are 
the people that I’m in contact with, and there are a lot I don’t know. 
They feel “Was it worth to give all the sacrifice that they gave for this?” 
. . . I know this other lady, a cleaning lady from the [army] headquar­
ters. From her face, you could see how she feels. She lost her house; a 

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Grad hit her house. She lost her two sons. She lost her son-in-law. 
What do you tell that woman? Six grandkids—and a guy just passes 
by with a hundred-thousand-dollar car!
2 
The costs have been different for each side in the Armenia-Azerbai­
jan war. For Azerbaijan, there was the immense trauma of losing land 
and of the refugees; yet defeat did have one healthy side effect of cut­
ting the ambitions of the country’s warlords out from under them. 
Would-be Bonapartes like Suret Husseinov and Rahim Gaziev met their 
political and military graveyards in Karabakh. 
The Karabakh Armenians emerged into the cease-fire of May 1994 
victorious, yet victory allowed the Armenian military commanders 
to control the peace. In Armenia, the veterans’ group Yerkrapah—its 
leader was Vazgen Sarkisian—became the most powerful organization 
in the country. In Karabakh, everyone remained subordinate to the 
whim of the military leaders. 
Postwar Armenian Karabakh faced a fundamental problem: What 
kind of future was there for an economically isolated statelet, unrecog­
nized by the outside world, while the dispute with Azerbaijan was un­
resolved? What was the price of lasting peace? When I met Babayan for 
the first and only time, a few weeks after he had been sacked as army 
commander and a few weeks before he was arrested, he showed he had 
started thinking about these issues. Physically, the commander looked 
more like Marcel Proust than a fearsome warlord. He was small, dap­
per, and neat, and had a shiny black moustache. Yet I was also struck by 
his uncanny resemblance—in short stature, soft voice, and the almost 
identical name and age—to another famous Caucasian loose cannon, 
the Chechen warrior leader Shamil Basayev. As with Basayev, the hard 
black eyes gave a clue to the breaker of human lives underneath. 
Babayan talked about war and peace in the same breath. He mused 
that what he called a “fourth round” of the war might finally bring 
Azerbaijan to its knees. “If there is this fourth round, it will be decisive 
and then we won’t have to stop the war and sit down at the negotiating 
table. If we stop again, as we did in 1994, then we will forget again that 
this problem existed.”
3 
Yet he also wanted to cut a deal with Azerbaijan. Perhaps as a result 
of several years in charge of Nagorny Karabakh’s feeble and isolated 
economy, Babayan recognized that economic development could come 
only through trade with the eastern neighbor. “We are very interested 

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245 
in the Azerbaijani market.” He added that as a man who had won ter­
ritory on the battlefield, he was the best man to give it up at the negoti­
ating table. Then, in an offhand manner but evidently wanting to gauge 
my reaction, he threw out one sensational tidbit. “Ilham Aliev keeps 
wanting to meet me in Paris,” he said, referring to the son and heir of 
the Azerbaijani president. “So far I haven’t said yes.” 
Babayan was never able to keep his rendezvous with Ilham Aliev— 
if indeed it was a real proposal, not just a fantasy. He was arrested three 
weeks later, and in February 2001 he was sentenced to fourteen years in 
jail for organizing the assassination plot against Gukasian. 
“We kept this myth [of Babayan] for the outside world. Unfortunately 
it didn’t work.” Nagorny Karabakh’s elected “president” Arkady Gu­
kasian was propped up on a divan in his residence. More than six 
months after the attack, one of his feet was still bare and bound with 
bandages. Gukasian is a former journalist, but with his round balding 
head, neat moustache, and cheerful countenance he looks more like a 
bank manager. In 1997, he took over as Nagorny Karabakh’s elected 
leader when Robert Kocharian moved to Yerevan to become prime min­
ister of Armenia. I wanted his explanation for why he had promoted the 
cult of Samvel Babayan the hero, who had then become his enemy. 
“Many people are guilty for the way he became what he is,” Gukasian 
conceded.
4 
Being the leader of an unrecognized state is an unenviable job. No 
country—not even Armenia—has recognized Nagorny Karabakh’s 
declaration of independence. That means that no one invites you to in­
ternational meetings. The United Nations does not answer your letters. 
When you visit a foreign embassy, you are received by the first secre­
tary, not the ambassador. 
The Karabakhi leaders insist that statehood is conferred by history, 
not by international resolutions. The statelet’s sleek prime minister, 
Anushavan Danielian, who came to Karabakh from another semi-inde­
pendent post-Soviet province, Crimea, demanded to know when his-
tory started and stopped. “Is there something in world legislation that 
says that seventy years ago isn’t history and ten years ago is history?” 
he asked rhetorically.
5 
In other words, why was Nagorny Karabakh’s 
status as part of Azerbaijan until 1988 more valid than its status over the 
past ten years? Gukasian argued that Babayan’s trial was an “exam” 
that proved how “Karabakh is developing as a society.” He insisted that 

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Nagorny Karabakh was making itself into a state, regardless of what the 
outside world thought. 
Shunned by the outside world, the Nagorny Karabakh Republic 
luxuriates in the form if not the content of statehood. A large crest is em-
bossed on the façade of the president’s office in former Lenin Square, 
and from the flagpole flies the Nagorny Karabakh flag, a red-blue-and-
orange Armenian tricolor with what looks like a flight of jagged white 
steps descending through it on the right side. Government desks carry 
Nagorny Karabakh inkwells and the headed notepaper of the “Na­
gorny Karabakh Republic.” “Independence Day” is celebrated each 
year with great pomp on 2 September. 
This rhetoric of self-promotion puts Nagorny Karabakh in the 
company of four other unrecognized statelets in the former Soviet 
Union. It is a strange club of five would-be states, consisting entirely of 
former Soviet autonomous regions, which in 1991 refused to accept the 
terms of the breakup of the USSR into fifteen states that formerly were 
its Union republics. All five managed a de facto breakaway from their 
metropolitan parent but then slipped into a twilit state of anarchy or 
war. In the year 2000, none of them was in a happy condition. Chech­
nya had been plunged into a second war with Moscow. Abkhazia and 
South Ossetia had politically seceded from Georgia but were desper­
ately poor and isolated, as was Transdniestria, the breakaway province 
of Moldova.
6 
If Nagorny Karabakh was the least miserable of the five breakaway 
regions, that was mainly because its declaration of independence was 
basically a smoke screen. On an everyday level, Karabakh had become 
a province of Armenia. Karabakh Armenians were entitled to carry Ar­
menian passports. Its currency was the Armenian dram. The budget 
was supported by free credits from the Armenian Finance Ministry. Yet 
internationally, Nagorny Karabakh remained as much an outlaw as 
Chechnya. None of its laws or institutions were valid outside its own 
borders, and no foreign diplomats, apart from peace negotiators, set 
foot there. That was virtually an incitement to become a rogue state. 
There were plenty of rumors, hard to verify but easy to credit, that Kara­
bakh was exploiting its status as an international black hole. Military at-
tachés speculated whether extra Russian weaponry, which exceeded its 
quota limits in the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty was being 
stored there. The Azerbaijanis asserted that the province was a transit 
route for drug smuggling. When the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan 

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247 
was on the run, there were rumors that he was heading for Karabakh. 
The rumors were not true, but logically it was one place where he could 
have sheltered from the long reach of international law. 
Whose fault is all this? The Karabakhis’, naturally, but perhaps ours 
as well. International isolation only helps create a siege mentality and 
leaves the field clear to those, especially in the Armenian Diaspora, who 
want to invest in the myth of Nagorny Karabakh rather than the reality. 
“Excuse me for saying this, Tom,” said Valery. “But I think that we are 
fools and the Azerbaijanis are fools.” 
Valery drove me around Karabakh in his coffee-brown Lada taxi. 
He was generous and stoical and went at speeds of such sedative slow­
ness that we had plenty of time to admire the beauty of the forests and 
talk over many topics. Valery had worked in Baku, had Azerbaijani 
friends, and had only the warmest memories of communal life in Soviet 
times. We had a running joke that if we just nipped across the front line, 
we could be in Baku in four hours’ time, ready for an evening out by the 
Caspian Sea. He had a favorite cassette in his car of Azerbaijani music 
that was so ancient and overused that the singer was reduced to a stran­
gled moan. 
Valery did not want to return to rule by Azerbaijan, but he would 
gladly have put the clock back and returned to Soviet days, when every-
body belonged to the larger state and rubbed along fine. As far as he 
was concerned, the present situation was a big mess that was beyond 
the scope of little people like him to see a way out of. We were on our 
way to the town of Martakert with a couple of Armenian friends. The 
person we had come to see was thirty years younger than Valery but 
shared his fatalistic lack of enmity toward the Azerbaijanis. 
At the guard post of the army base in Martakert, Ruben, a long, 
lanky young conscript, aged about nineteen, emerged and walked 
over to us. He came from Yerevan and was doing his military service 
here on the Karabakh front line. The fact that Armenian conscripts 
serve in Nagorny Karabakh underscores how completely the two terri­
tories are united. We gave Ruben a meal in a little café just outside the 
base. We had brought him some letters and money from his family in 
Armenia, as well as a large carton of cigarettes to help ease slightly the 
almost lethal boredom of guard duty. The soldiers were paid between 
one and two thousand drams (approximately two to four dollars) a 
month; they had no holidays and had almost nothing to eat. They 

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mainly used their weapons for shooting snakes or stray dogs, which 
they barbecued and ate. 
Ruben told us that at the front line there was a spot where the 
trenches on either side were only thirty or forty meters apart. When the 
officers were not around, the Armenian conscripts would contact their 
Azerbaijani counterparts. They would fire in the air or shout “Mullah!” 
or the Azerbaijanis would shout out “Vazgen!” Then, just as on the 
Western Front at Christmas 1914, they would meet in the middle, in 
no-man’s-land. What did they talk about? “We just meet, exchange cig­
arettes, and tell each other, ‘We are not enemies, we are all the same, we 
are friends.’” Valery approved. 
As we were waiting for Ruben, the conscript at the guard post, a stocky 
woman with short-cropped hair and wearing combat fatigues looked 
us up and down and said, “Hello!” in a West-Coast American accent. 
Later on we called on Ani, Martakert’s only American resident. Ani 
talked nonstop, evidently glad of some English-speaking company. She 
lived in a one-story house with simple wooden floors and a metal bed-
stead. Water came from a well and heat from a wood-burning stove. She 
said she had been burgled so many times she had lost count. 
The Armenian Diaspora has developed a passionate interest in Na­
gorny Karabakh. The more reports have reached them of corruption 
and bad government in Armenia, the more foreign Armenians have 
projected their hopes and ideals onto Karabakh. They have been in­
strumental in persuading the U.S. Congress to vote twenty million dol­
lars of aid to the province. There are schools, clinics, and water pumps 
funded by patrons in Watertown or Beirut. The tarmac road from Ar­
menia to Karabakh, complete with signs, barriers, and white lines, is by 
far the best road in the Caucasus; it cost ten million dollars, raised en­
tirely by the Diaspora-funded “Hayastan Fund.” Karabakh has also 
been the major recipient of aid and propaganda support from Christian 
Solidarity Worldwide and its president, a British peer, Baroness Cox of 
Queensbury. 
All of these friends of Karabakh have done good work pulling peo­
ple out of poverty, helping children, and tending the sick. But their no­
tions of Nagorny Karabakh as a beleaguered outpost of brave besieged 
Christians were hard to take. After all, they encouraged the Karabakhis 
to take a hard line in the dispute with Azerbaijan, without having to 
face the consequences of that. Perhaps they saw in Nagorny Karabakh 

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249 
somewhere they could begin again in Year Zero, a Turk-free zone. 
Valery and his Azerbaijani music tape and friends in Baku didn’t quite 
fit the picture. Nor did Ruben swapping cigarettes with Azerbaijani sol­
diers on the front line. 
Nor, as it turned out, did many of Ani’s neighbors in Martakert. It 
was to Ani’s credit that she was one of only about a half dozen Armen­
ian Americans who actually had the courage to follow through on their 
convictions and come to live in Karabakh. The reality had made her an 
Armenian Don Quixote. Hers was a story of a quest to bring her notions 
of Armenian solidarity to an idealized place, only for them to collide 
against the reality of a post-Soviet Armenian province with a resound­
ing crash. 
Why had Ani come to Karabakh? we asked. “I saw this as a contin­
uation of the Genocide” she replied. She had come to Martakert eight 
years before as a volunteer, invited by Monte Melkonian, a fellow stu­
dent in Berkeley. “Never seen a war, never seen a funeral, never seen a 
dead body,” she rattled out. She proudly showed us her cross, made out 
of two bullets and given to her by the family of a dead comrade. “One 
of my friends was very angry and told me to cut it off,” she said, “but I 
told her, ‘God is also a freedom fighter.’” 
Ani’s cottage was a picture gallery of her endeavors for the Armen­
ian cause. She pulled out photographs of demonstrations she had 
helped organize to get the world to recognize the Armenian Genocide. 
And there she was, going round Kenyan villages with her traveling ex­
hibition of the Genocide. She had tried, without much success, to get 
Armenians to reach out to Native Americans and other oppressed peo­
ples. “I said in New York on 24 April [Genocide Day], we should invite 
Native Americans to join the ceremony with us. Because they lost their 
ancestral homelands, so did the Armenians.” 
Ani was a feminist and the only woman who drove in Martakert. 
She tried to teach girls painting and photography, but many parents 
would not allow it. The police, the priest, and the local authorities all 
disapproved of her. She was having a serious running battle with the 
army base. She worked there as a private individual after having been 
dismissed from the army and was engaged in a sexual harassment court 
case against one commander. According to Ani, there were a lot of prob­
lems with rape and attempted rape. The other running battle was to 
stop the aid from abroad from being stolen. Much of the aid received 
from the Diaspora was being siphoned off or going to the families of 

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those who handled it. “I am helping hand out aid by hand,” Ani said. 
“Americans send me clothes and shoes and they know I have no rela­
tives here.” 
I wondered if Ani would stick it out in Martakert, trying to realize 
her dream of Nagorny Karabakh, which only persisted in defying her 
and living by its own rules. I guessed she would probably give up even­
tually and head home. “If they don’t like you, decide you’re not on their 
side, they close doors and they want to get rid of you,” she said wearily. 
“I can live here all my life and I still won’t be accepted.” This strange 
place, by turns attractive and unwelcoming, has embarked on a strange 
future all its own. 

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