TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041392/0413003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 211 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 40

FORMER SOVIET UNION

Carnage in Karabakh


With the Russians gone, Azeris and Armenians carry on their
ancient blood feud

By JAMES CARNEY/STEPANAKERT


    Rosa Babayan was in her kitchen fixing tea and slicing
bread for breakfast when the first artillery shell of the
morning slammed into her concrete apartment building. As she
rushed down to the cellar with her family, another shell burst
nearby, smashing the windows in the stairwell and sending a
shard of glass into her forehead. Ten minutes later, she emerged
to survey the damage, daubing the blood from just above her
hairline. The corner bedroom of her fourth-floor apartment and
all the rooms below it were a heap of rubble and twisted steel.

    Since that February morning when a Soviet-made GRAD
missile destroyed part of her home, Babayan, 53, and her family
have lived in the cellar, sleeping on a row of cots alongside
neighbors. They are hardly alone. Babayan lives in Stepanakert,
the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave fully
within the borders of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
Populated almost entirely by Armenians, Karabakh has seen more
than 1,500 people die since 1988, when Armenians and Azeris,
each side claiming the enclave as its own, began their
skirmishing with hunting rifles. They have now graduated to
modern weapons, including tanks, missiles and heavy artillery,
turning their ethnic conflict into the bloodiest and most
intractable of the many such conflicts bequeathed by the Soviet
Union to the new Commonwealth of Independent States.

    Scarcely a single building has escaped damage in
Stepanakert, the target of almost daily shelling all winter from
a mountaintop stronghold held by the Azeris at Shusha, just four
miles away. The city has been without running water, electricity
or telephones for three months; other regions of Karabakh have
been without these basic services for much longer. A near total
absence of fuel -- a product of Azerbaijan's economic blockade
of the enclave -- has left Karabakh's factories silent, its
workers unemployed and without pay. Schools that have not been
leveled are closed. The basement of the partially destroyed
parliament building serves as the city's maternity ward, where
nurses tend newborn babies by candlelight. A member of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, which opened a station
in Stepanakert three weeks ago, said he fears the city could
soon be struck by hunger, and, as the weather warms, by
epidemics.

    Once home to 70,000 of Karabakh's 200,000 residents,
Stepanakert's population has been shrinking as some families
send their children to outlying villages. Most of the 50,000 who
remain live underground in crowded, dark basements. They emerge,
as Babayan did recently, only when there is a lull in the
shelling. Adapting to life in wartime, they walk the streets
carefully, always trying to place the wall of a building between
themselves and the likely trajectory of incoming artillery. "We
will live on," said Babayan, whose sister had died the day
before from shrapnel wounds. "We are simply not going to give
up our land."

    The war over the unspoiled mountains and fertile valleys
of Karabakh is a blood feud with roots that reach deep into the
history of the region. In 1915, during the twilight of the
Ottoman Empire, Armenians living in Turkish Armenia were
deported into the deserts of what is now Syria. At least 1
million people of Armenian descent were either killed or died
of starvation, though modern Turkey disputes that figure as
exaggerated. Azeris are ethnic cousins of the Turks, and in
Karabakh today some Armenian soldiers claim they are continuing
the historic battle. "For the Azeris, the only solution is to
rid Karabakh of all Armenians, just like the Turks in 1915,"
says Artur, one such freedom fighter in Stepanakert. "But we
won't let that happen again."

    In 1923, after Soviet power had been established in both
Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Bolsheviks granted the disputed
region of Karabakh to the Azeris. Before Mikhail Gorbachev came
to power, Armenian protests over Karabakh were sporadic and
quickly suppressed. But in 1988 the Armenian movement to free
Karabakh from Azeri rule went public, and the fighting began.

    Until the Soviet Union's collapse, the Kremlin tended to
favor the Azeris in the conflict, largely because Azerbaijan was
the last bastion of communist orthodoxy in the Caucasus. Soviet
army and Interior Ministry troops alternately tried to keep the
peace or assisted the Azeris in military operations. Though the
Azeri government in Baku accuses Russia of helping Armenia, it
is the Azeri fighters in the region who are far better equipped
with Soviet military weaponry than their opponents.

    While Gorbachev was President, the international community
treated the Karabakh conflict as an internal affair of the
Soviet Union. But as the fighting increased this year and former
Soviet troops pulled out of the enclave, the United Nations, the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (C.S.C.E.), and
Iran, which shares borders with both Armenia and Azerbaijan and
is trying to expand its role in the region, all launched
efforts to resolve the conflict. The first cease-fire brokered
by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati collapsed within
a few hours. The second one lasted for several days, with both
sides reporting relatively minor violations. That was long
enough for U.N. special envoy Cyrus Vance to visit Stepanakert
on a fact-finding mission late last month and to declare his
hope that third-party mediation could help bring peace.

    But early last week artillery shells cascaded in violent
waves upon Stepanakert. From mid-morning until after nightfall,
the city rattled to the thunderous explosions of 157 GRAD
missiles, highly destructive artillery-launched shells. Karabakh
leaders said more than 500 Azeri troops had moved down the
mountain from Shusha to attack Stepanakert's outskirts. At a
makeshift hospital on the first floor of the city's former
Communist Party headquarters, doctors operated throughout the
shelling as jeeps and ambulances arrived carrying the wounded.
In the building's foyer, an old woman stared in grief at the
body of her dead son, her rhythmic cries punctuated by the deep
roar of artillery. On the sidewalk outside, a man waiting for
news of his own son's wounds turned to those near him and asked,
"Do you see the life we live?"

    The Azeri government denied that an attack had taken place
and accused the Armenians in Karabakh of breaking the
cease-fire. Even in Stepanakert, it was impossible to tell for
sure who had started the fighting that raged just a kilometer
from city limits. But the GRAD bombardment on the city was no
illusion. Nor was the stream of dead and wounded. By day's end
nine Armenian soldiers had been killed in battle, three
civilians in the shelling. More than 30 people had been wounded.
After nightfall, the Karabakh Defense Minister, Serge Sarkisian,
said the offensive had been turned back and that more than 100
Azeri troops had died in the fighting. "Perhaps we Armenians are
naive," said Karabakh Prime Minister Oleg Yesayan. "We expected
them to violate the cease-fire, but not on such a large scale."

    Despite the renewed fighting, international mediation
efforts continued. Last week, in negotiations organized by Iran
and Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to stop their
cross-border fighting. Karabakh was not discussed, but at a
recent C.S.C.E. meeting in Helsinki, tentative plans were made
for high-level talks on the future of the enclave. The two
sides, however, remain far apart. Armenia insists it is a third
party to a conflict between Karabakh and Azerbaijan and demands
that the elected leaders of the enclave's self-declared
government participate in all negotiations. Azerbaijan does not
recognize Karabakh's leaders or its demands for independence.
"Nagorno-Karabakh risks entering a new phase of all-out conflict
that could possibly draw in other states," warned Armenian
Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, referring to the competition
between Turkey and Iran for influence in the region. To avoid
that, he said, "there must be a simultaneous dispatch not only
of international observers but of peacekeeping troops."

    But not all hope for peace rests on outside mediation.
Almost every day for the past three weeks, commanders from
Askeran, an Armenian town on Karabakh's border with Azerbaijan,
and Agdam, on the Azeri side, have met along a dirt road on the
front to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Alakhverdi Bagirov, the
commander of local Azeri Popular Front forces, and Vitaly
Balasanian, his Armenian counterpart, have known each other
since childhood, long before their two towns were divided by
war. Balasanian, 33, who managed a restaurant in peacetime, runs
the headquarters of his battalion from a stone fortress built
in 1751 on a hill overlooking Askeran. At their daily
negotiations, he and Bagirov sit on rocks beside a shelter dug
out of the road and agree to keep their own separate peace, even
as others continue to fight.

    Both men blame the Russians in general, and the Soviet
army and Gorbachev in particular, for allowing and even
encouraging the transformation of the Karabakh conflict into a
violent war. "Here's perestroika for you," Bagirov scoffs, his
hand swooping out to encompass the surrounding soldiers from
both sides, every one of them armed with a Kalashnikov rifle.
"The Russians gave us weapons, and they gave the Armenians
weapons. And they are guilty."

    Now the Russians have left, and the Soviet Union has
disappeared. But the fighting in Karabakh continues, and the
death toll rises. The suffering is indiscriminate, with innocent
civilians afflicted as often as warriors. Last week, as rockets
could be heard falling once again on Stepanakert a few miles
away, a small plane landed to evacuate wounded to Yerevan, the
Armenian capital. A stretcher bearing a woman in her 50s, her
face scarred and swollen, was lifted aboard. She had lost both
her legs to a GRAD missile the night before. Her husband, pale
and exhausted, said nothing as he bent down to dab her lips with
a moist cloth. After takeoff, the plane rose level with the
white tops of the mountains that define Karabakh. The sounds of
a war in progress fell away, replaced by the soft moan of one
more of its victims.