Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

party began to crumble around Ter-Petrosian. His foreign minister was 
forced to resign. Facing a “palace coup” from his closest ministers, Ter-
Petrosian decided to bow to the inevitable. On 3 February 1998, he an­
nounced his resignation. 
Ter-Petrosian was the third president to lose office, wholly or partly 
as a result of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, following in the steps of 
Azerbaijan’s Ayaz Mutalibov and Abulfaz Elchibey. In his case, his pop­
ular legitimacy had already been undermined, perhaps fatally, by his 
falsification of the 1996 presidential election results. He appeared dis­
tant and had lost the popular authority needed to mobilize Armenian 
popular opinion behind a peace plan. Most important, Ter-Petrosian 
had underestimated the determination and strength of feeling of the 
“Karabakh Party” inside his administration, which now had a leader in 
Robert Kocharian, the man he himself had brought to Yerevan. A gulf in 
attitudes had opened between the president, a Yerevan intellectual, 

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whose political career had been devoted to Armenia’s independence 
and economic development, and those who had physically fought a 
war for Nagorny Karabakh. Serzh Sarkisian puts the position of his re­
jectionist camp in stark terms: 
Do you think we weren’t fed up with war? That we didn’t want to 
live and develop peacefully? . . . But we couldn’t in actual fact make 
these compromises. I understand that Levon was in charge of all this. 
I understand that he was president. But we had directly led these lads 
into battle. I lost almost all my friends. Almost all. I lost my nephew. 
He came with his father at the age of eighteen to help me.
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A COLD PEACE 
In 1998, following Ter-Petrosian’s downfall, a new chilly phase of cold 
peace settled between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lack of dialogue 
reflected an increased polarity between Russia and the West. Azerbai­
jan had strengthened its ties with the United States and signed a mili­
tary cooperation treaty with Turkey, while the Russian-Armenian al­
liance remained strong. The Russian military maintained a strong pres­
ence in Armenia, and there seemed to be little incentive for the parties 
to want a peace settlement in Karabakh. In 1995, the Armenians had 
agreed to keep the Russian base at Gyumri for a further twenty-five 
years. This was followed by the comprehensive “Treaty on Friend-
ship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance” in 1997 between the two 
countries. 
Yet Russia’s outlook was also changing, and the Russian military no 
longer had a monopoly on policy related to the Caucasus. Yeltsin began 
his chaotic second term as president in the summer of 1996 by sacking 
his longtime defense minister, Pavel Grachev, putting an end to the ca­
reer of the Russian military’s chief interventionist in the Caucasus. A 
month later, the new Russian defense minister, Yevgeny Primakov, 
relieved Russia’s longtime envoy for Karabakh, Vladimir Kazimirov, 
of his job and sent him to be Moscow’s ambassador to Costa Rica. 
Primakov took a greater interest in the Caucasus than his predecessor, 
Andrei Kozyrev. He clearly hoped to counter Western influence in the 
region, but by diplomatic rather than military means. A third group of 
Russian actors, oil companies such as Lukoil, were developing their 

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own agenda, which was to get as big a stake as possible in Caspian Sea 
oil projects. 
On 30 March 1998, Robert Kocharian completed the takeover of the 
“Karabakh Party” and was elected president of Armenia. His accession 
to power was bumpier than anticipated. He won a runoff vote against 
an unexpectedly strong candidate, the former first secretary of the 
Communist Party, Karen Demirchian. Demirchian had kept a low pro-
file for ten years since having been sacked in 1988 and when he re-
emerged to run for president, Armenians recalled his years in office in 
the 1970s with fondness. On the campaign trail the former Party boss 
showed a talent for saying very little with great charm worthy of 
Ronald Reagan. It was also indicative that he barely mentioned Na­
gorny Karabakh and concentrated on domestic issues. Nonetheless, 
Kocharian’s advantages—his incumbency, continuing popularity, the 
support of the state media, as well as alleged voting fraud—ensured his 
victory. 
Kocharian had been elected with the support of the nationalist 
Dashnak Party, which he had unbanned. Its influence was palpable in a 
new tougher tone in the public language on Karabakh. In June 1998, the 
new foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, accused Azerbaijan of intransi­
gence and stated that if nothing changed in the next few years, Arme­
nia might take steps to annex Nagorny Karabakh. Facing strong con­
demnation abroad, Oskanian retreated and said that his words had 
been misunderstood. 
In Azerbaijan, Aliev had now achieved strong—his opponents 
would say deadening—stability. He felt sufficiently secure to tolerate 
the return of the deposed president, Abulfaz Elchibey, from internal 
exile to Baku at the end of 1997. Elchibey failed to rally a broad-based 
opposition around himself and died of cancer in August 2000. 
In October 1998, Aliev was reelected president with a predictably 
vast majority, defeating the veteran nationalist Etibar Mamedov. Aliev’s 
second term was quieter than the first, but gradually his firm grip on 
power appeared to loosen. One reason was economic. In 1999, predic­
tions for the promised oil boom were being scaled back. The oil price 
fell, and prospectors were disappointed with their drilling in the Cas­
pian. Several foreign companies and consortia pulled out of Azerbaijan, 
many citing systematic corruption as a major problem. No palpable 
benefits of the oil economy appeared to have fed through to the wider 
population. The United Nations Development Program reported that 

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“the country’s progress in translating economic growth into human de­
velopment has been very limited” and that the non-oil sectors of the 
economy were stagnating.
13 
In January 1999, the seventy-five-year-old Aliev abruptly flew to 
Ankara for a health checkup and three months later underwent heart 
bypass surgery in Cleveland, Ohio. This reminder of the president’s 
mortality reminded everyone that he did not have an impressive heir 
apparent. One previous candidate, the former parliamentary speaker 
Rasul Guliev, had gone into exile in the United States in 1996 and joined 
the list of Aliev’s enemies. The most obvious heir, the president’s son 
Ilham Aliev, who was deputy head of the state oil company SOCAR, 
lacked gravitas and political experience. 
NEW MEDIATION . . . 
In April 1999, both Aliev and Kocharian attended the summit in Wash­
ington marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of NATO. With 
the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, they had an informal 
meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her office. 
Albright left Kocharian and Aliev together to talk one-on-one. Thus, al­
most by accident, a new kind of dialogue began. The two men had vir­
tually not seen each other since their secret wartime discussions in 
Moscow in 1993. They found there was a common base of understand­
ing between them. Both were hard, lonely leaders who were more com­
fortable with the format of confidential top-level talks. As a former 
Komsomol official from Stepanakert, Kocharian had an almost filial re­
spect for Aliev, who was more than thirty years older. Over the next two 
years they met fifteen times or so. 
The fact that Kocharian came from Karabakh reduced the problem 
of Nagorny Karabakh’s representation in the talks: in practice, he rep­
resented the Karabakh Armenians as well. It was clear that for Kochar­
ian, Karabakh’s de facto independence was paramount. This was one 
reason that at one of their early meetings the two men appear to have 
revived what had been called the “Goble Plan.” The project was 
named after a former U.S. State Department specialist on the Cauca­
sus, Paul Goble, who had written a briefing paper in 1992 in which 
he proposed the idea of a territorial exchange to resolve the Karabakh 
dispute. Basically, in return for Armenia’s being given the “Lachin 

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corridor” linking it to Nagorny Karabakh, Azerbaijan would receive a 
land corridor across Armenia’s southern Meghri region connecting it 
with Nakhichevan.
14 
The idea had the virtue of simplicity and would also give Aliev a 
substantial prize to brandish before the Azerbaijani public when he an­
nounced other painful and unpopular concessions. Yet it did not escape 
notice that a plan that suited both Nakhichevan and Karabakh was 
being discussed by men who were natives of the two regions involved. 
Many in the Azerbaijani elite rejected the plan on offer in 1999 as mean­
ing a surrender of Karabakh. In October 1999, three of Aliev’s top aides 
all resigned, apparently over this issue, depriving him of his most ex­
perienced advisers. They were his long-term foreign affairs aide, Vafa 
Guluzade; the head of his secretariat, Eldar Namazov; and his foreign 
minister, Tofik Zulfugarov. 
In Armenia, the “Goble Plan” was even more controversial because 
giving up Meghri would mean the loss of Armenia’s southern border 
with its friendliest neighbor, Iran. Kocharian, a Karabakhi, would be 
vulnerable to the charge that he was selling land of the Republic of Ar­
menia to secure the future of Nagorny Karabakh. That was why, to have 
any hope of selling the plan, Kocharian badly needed the support of De­
fense Minister Vazgen Sarkisian, who in the summer of 1999 had be-
come the most powerful man in Armenia. 
In May 1999, Vazgen Sarkisian’s Republican Party, based on the 
Yerkrapah movement, won a resounding victory in Armenia’s parlia­
mentary elections. It had formed a strong alliance with Karen Demir­
chian’s People’s Party, and together they supplanted the former ruling