Garden of Discord

Review: Black Garden, Thomas de Waal's balanced journalistic account of the 'slow suicide pact' between Armenians and Azeris in the disputed Karabakh region. by Richard Allen Greene 30 May 2003 Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, by Thomas de Waal. New York University Press, 2003. 283 pages.


Among the most remarkable things about the fall of the Soviet Union was how peaceful it was: A multi-ethnic empire straddling 12 time zones and dozens of languages, which held itself together for three generations by intimidating its citizens into compliance, collapsed in a matter of months almost without a shot being fired.

Almost, but not quite.

While the Baltics, for example, melted peacefully away from the U.S.S.R. after a few violent demonstrations, war raged in the Caucasus, leaving tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

British journalist Thomas de Waal aims to put one of the most intractable of those Caucasus conflicts back into the public eye with his new book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. The co-author of an earlier book on a better-known conflict in the region--Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, co-written with Carlotta Gall--De Waal is an excellent guide to a war that, he argues, was central to bringing down the Soviet Union.

ECONOMY PITTED AGAINST HISTORY

It was fought over the tiny region of Nagorny Karabakh, population roughly 160,000 in 1988. (The area is generally known to the outside world as Nagorno-Karabakh, but De Waal uses the more grammatically correct Nagorny, the Russian word for mountainous. The second part of the region's name is derived from the Turkish for "black" and the Persian for "garden.")

De Waal elegantly describes the war as having pitted economy and geography against history and ethnicity. Nagorny Karabakh is surrounded on all sides by Azerbaijan and traditionally had strong economic links with the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking nation to the east. But for generations it has been populated mainly by ethnic Armenians.

In the 1920s, the Soviets made it an autonomous republic and assigned it to Azerbaijan. Several times in the 20th century, ethnic Armenian leaders in its capital, Stepanakert, appealed to Moscow to transfer it to Yerevan's control, and in February 1988, Karabakh's Supreme Soviet issued a dry and legalistic resolution formally requesting that it become part of Armenia.

All hell broke loose.

Within a week, Azeris were rampaging through the streets of the industrial city of Sumgait near Baku, leaving at least two dozen ethnic Armenians--and half a dozen ethnic Azeris--dead. Armenia expelled hundreds of thousands of Azeris. Moscow flailed helplessly, failing to restore order. The dispute escalated into six years of war that Armenia won, all the while denying it was actually a party to the conflict. Armenian forces expelled ethnic Azeris from Karabakh and all or part of seven surrounding districts. Nagorny Karabakh declared an independence that no country, even Armenia, has recognized, while becoming a de facto part of Armenia. Since 1994 a state of "no peace, no war" has prevailed, with intransigence on both sides and a lack of international interest or coordination allowing a cease-fire to ossify into what seems likely to become a permanent state of affairs.

Much of the existing literature on the conflict is intensely partisan, a fact that De Waal acknowledges with an introductory plea that those on both sides judge his book as a whole, rather than quoting selectively to praise or to damn.

De Waal succeeds impressively in his effort to chronicle the conflict dispassionately. Relying on more than 100 personal interviews with parties on all sides and at all levels of the conflict, plus written records and some video, he paints a carefully nuanced portrait where there has been almost no impartial scholarship before. He is especially scrupulous about numbers, calculating for example that 13.62 percent of Azerbaijan--not the 20 percent Baku claims--is occupied, and that refugee numbers are also somewhat lower than commonly stated.

Structuring his book like a contemporary novel, he circles around key issues, places and events, diving in and out of the story rather than allowing himself to be trapped in a chronological or he-said, she-said narrative.

MODERN HATREDS

He opens the tale with the February 1988 Stepanakert declaration, although advocates on both sides prefer to start earlier: with the 1920s Soviet borders, the 1905 inter-ethnic riots, the 1820s Russian-Persian wars, the 1750s khanate of Karabakh, the prehistoric Caucasian Albanian peoples.

His understated chapter "Hurekavank: The Unpredictable Past" explains why he resists starting before 1988: Each side's scholars have mined history to assert the other has no claim to the land. De Waal is rightly suspicious of such "scholarship." In a simply but powerfully argued conclusion, he is also dismissive of the idea that the conflict sprang from "ancient ethnic hatreds," the generic bogeyman blamed simplistically for so many recent wars. Armenians and Azeris have historically fought no more than any other ethnic groups in the region, he observes.

Neither was the conflict created by politicians from the top down, nor did it spring from economic inequities, he argues.

"Uncomfortable as it is for many Western observers to acknowledge," De Waal writes, "the Nagorny Karabakh conflict makes sense only if we acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis were driven to act by passionately held ideas about history, identity and rights"--in other words, by plain, old-fashioned nationalism, which reached the region early in the 20th century, he argues convincingly. He shows how the conflict quickly escalated due to mob psychology and sheer momentum, and how Moscow, totally unprepared for such events, was powerless to intercede.

He downplays the importance of Russian military support for either side, at least as a matter of policy set in Moscow, in determining the outcome of the war. (In fact there was official and unofficial Russian support for each side at various times, and at least one occasion where Russian mercenaries apparently fought each other.) Instead he illustrates the stark differences between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s: While Armenia was a homogenous nation with a clear goal, diaspora support, and a smooth transition of power from communist to nationalist leadership, Azerbaijan was reactive, multi-ethnic, and wracked by years of domestic political infighting until Heidar Aliev consolidated power in the mid-1990s. (Aliev is one of very few living major figures in the conflict that De Waal did not manage to interview for this book.)

The book has both the strengths and flaws of journalism; De Waal has an excellent eye for a telling anecdote, but also tends to saddle protagonists with shorthand descriptions that oversimplify as much as they illuminate. When he remarks of Nagorny Karabakh's elected "president" Arkady Gukasian that he "is a former journalist, but with his round balding head, neat moustache, and cheerful countenance he looks more like a bank manager," the reader may wonder what journalists are supposed to look like--or bank managers for that matter.

He shortchanges elements of the story, particularly Azerbaijan's huge refugee population, which gets a brief seven-page chapter.

And he fails to explore one of the most intriguing questions of the war: Why was its death toll so comparatively low and its refugee population so incredibly large? He hints at possible answers, such as the lack of professional armies for much of the war or the fact that so many combatants knew each other, but never articulates a clear thesis on the subject. But what De Waal does cover, he covers extremely well. This book will undoubtedly infuriate partisans on both sides of the conflict. But for anyone who wants a thorough, sympathetic, readable, and fair account, it provides an essential introduction to a war that has left two countries in what De Waal aptly calls "a kind of slow suicide pact."