Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

party, the ANM, which failed to win any seats at all. After the elections, 
Kocharian made Sarkisian Armenia’s prime minister, and Karen Demir­
chian became speaker of parliament. 
It seems that over the next few months, Sarkisian, who had led the 
palace coup to oust Ter-Petrosian, was gradually persuaded of the ad-
vantages of a peace deal on Karabakh. The new prime minister made a 
trip to the United States, during which he was told that financial sup-
port from the Diaspora was decreasing and could not be relied on to 
sustain Armenia. On 11 October, Aliev and Kocharian met for two hours 
on the border between Nakhichevan and Armenia—their fifth meeting 
in six months. The Azerbaijanis barbecued a sheep and the mood was 
friendly. There were hopes that some kind of framework declaration on 

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Nagorny Karabakh could be made at the coming OSCE summit in Is­
tanbul in November. 
. . . AND MASSACRES 
On 27 October 1999, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott vis­
ited Yerevan en route to Istanbul. He held talks with Kocharian and 
Vazgen Sarkisian before heading to the airport. Sarkisian then crossed 
to the Armenian parliament to answer government questions. Shortly 
after 5:00 p.m., as the session was winding up, a man wearing a long 
raincoat and carrying a machine gun burst into the chamber through 
one of the side doors. He immediately opened fire on the front row of 
seats, where Vazgen Sarkisian was sitting. Bullets flew across the cham­
ber and people threw themselves to the floor. Another assailant, the 
leader of the gang, entered and fired at the podium, where speaker 
Karen Demirchian lay. Three more of the gang followed their comrades. 
Within a few minutes eight men, including Sarkisian and Demirchian, 
were dead and eight others were wounded. 
The leader of the gang, a former journalist named Nairi Hunanian, 
announced that he was taking power from the “blood-suckers” who 
were ruling Armenia. The assailants barricaded themselves in the 
chamber; they seemed, witnesses said, to be waiting for something to 
happen. Troops surrounded the parliament building and President 
Kocharian arrived. Ever the hands-on leader and contrary to advice, 
Kocharian negotiated personally with the attackers. By morning, they 
appeared to be satisfied with an offer to speak on television and to 
be guaranteed a fair trial. Around 10:30 a.m. the five men were driven 
to jail.
15 
The shootings devastated the Armenian political landscape, de­
priving the country of its two biggest political heavyweights. The im­
mediate cause of the attack was the inadequate security in the Armen­
ian parliament. Its deeper causes were highly controversial. Nairi Hu­
nanian was a prominent extremist who had been expelled from the 
Dashnaktsutiun Party in 1992. He was known to have a grudge against 
Vazgen Sarkisian—although it later transpired that his brother Karen 
may have killed Sarkisian against Nairi’s orders. Most observers as­
sumed that the gang was not acting on its own but as a weapon in the 

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hands of others. Yet it was far from clear who might have planned the 
killings. 
One line of speculation was that the attackers had been instructed 
to prevent an imminent breakthrough on Nagorny Karabakh by getting 
rid of Sarkisian, who was now prepared to support a peace deal. The 
timing of the killings, just after Strobe Talbott had met Sarkisian, was 
certainly very striking. Talbott was later quoted as saying that the two 
sides were “very, very close” to agreement and called the massacre “a 
human, political, and geopolitical catastrophe.”
16 
Yet several other clues 
suggest that the timing was a coincidence and that the killings probably 
had a domestic political motive: throughout the all-night vigil in par­
liament, the Hunanian brothers did not mention Karabakh; if someone 
had planned to derail the Karabakh peace process, then Sarkisian was 
not the obvious first target; it was not yet manifest that he had actually 
signed on to a peace agreement; finally, Sarkisian was a close ally of the 
Russian security establishment, the most likely suspect for wanting to 
sabotage a United States–led peace deal. 
KEY WEST AND AFTER 
In 1999, the peace process was put on hold while Armenia sorted out its 
domestic politics. Kocharian faced the anger of the Yerkrapah move­
ment; its accusation was that he had failed to cede the power it had de­
manded of him as recompense for the loss of Vazgen Sarkisian. It was 
more than a year before Kocharian had reestablished his authority. The 
Aliev-Kocharian dialogue resumed in earnest at the end of 2000. By 
then, the idea of a wholesale territorial exchange had disappeared from 
the agenda, chiefly because it was deemed unsellable to the public in 
Armenia. In May 2000, Kocharian said of the plan: “It is not realizable 
today for reasons that are entirely well known.”
17 
Russia’s position had also changed. The new Russian president, 
Vladimir Putin, initiated a more coordinated policy for the Caucasus. 
While launching a new war in Chechnya and toughening his stance on 
Georgia, Putin continued the thaw in relations with Azerbaijan. On an 
official visit to Baku in January 2001, Putin made a symbolic gesture of 
support for Aliev by presenting him with his 1949 graduation certificate 
from the KGB academy in Leningrad. It was the first-ever public con­
firmation that Aliev had even studied in Leningrad. 

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In 2001 for the first time, the three countries in the Minsk Group, 
France, Russia, and the United States, appeared to be working in close 
harmony. The peace process moved up a gear. Aliev and Kocharian had 
two successful meetings in Paris, chaired by President Jacques Chirac. 
In what looked like a coordinated move, newspapers in both Armenia 
and Azerbaijan printed leaked copies of the three Minsk Group peace 
plans of 1997 and 1998. The leaks were intended to test public opinion 
on Karabakh and pave the way for a fourth, entirely different, plan. The 
reaction to the three old plans, especially in Azerbaijan, was over­
whelmingly hostile. Almost no one in Baku spoke up in public in sup-
port of compromise. 
In April 2001, the Armenia-Azerbaijani conflict briefly became a 
world issue once again, when the U.S. State Department organized five 
days, in Key West, Florida, of the most high-profile and intensive nego­
tiations ever on the dispute. The new format combined the confidential 
dialogue of the two presidents with the specialist advice of the Minsk 
Group negotiators. After the meeting, one of the mediators said they 
had reached agreement on “80 or 90 percent” of issues. 
A follow-up meeting was planned for Switzerland in June, and 
there was even talk of a peace agreement’s being signed by the end of 
2001. The two presidents were given time to broaden their consultations 
at home. In Armenia, the response was low key but hardly encouraging. 
The Armenian parliament repeated that Karabakh’s status was non-
negotiable and rejected compromise. 
But it was in Azerbaijan that the deal really came unstuck as those 
to whom Aliev talked firmly opposed some of the concessions Aliev 
had considered at Key West. 
The almost-breakthrough had come, as it had to, in dramatic fash­
ion, with Aliev offering dramatic concessions on the most sensitive 
issue of all, the status of Nagorny Karabakh. “He was basically offering 
for it to become part of Armenia,” said one official close to the talks. 
This astonishing offer of surrender of what was to many a sacred truth 
in Azerbaijan was to be met by a string of concessions from the Armen­
ian side, including a road link across Armenia from Azerbaijan to 
Nakhichevan, to be policed by international troops, and the right of re-
turn of refugees to Shusha. Why this dramatic move on the part of the 
Azerbaijani president? As one Western diplomat explained it, Aliev 
was basically a control freak: “He either wants Karabakh back properly 
or not at all.” The last thing the president wanted was a troublesome 

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Armenian-dominated province, a serpent in the Azerbaijani garden he 
had spent years tending; better not to have it at all and win concessions 
from the Armenians on other issues. 
But Aliev’s attempt to cut the knot was too bold and too cynical for 
the rest of the Azerbaijani elite. After all, this was from the same leader 
who talked every year of “celebrating Novruz next year in Khankendi,” 
of a full restoration of Karabakh to Azerbaijani control. The gap be-
tween what Aliev was saying in private and saying in public was too 
wide, and even his limitless guile could not bridge it. Of course, Aliev 
would never admit that that was what he was thinking—nothing was 
ever written down on paper. 
The trap snapped shut again. When the international mediators vis­
ited the region and crossed the Nagorny Karabakh front line on 19 May 
2001, the barrier it symbolized seemed as forbidding and unbreachable 
as ever. 

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