Romela Sarkassyan and her son, ethnic Armenian refugees from Baku, Azerbaijan, stand by their bomb-damaged apartment building in Stepanarkert, in the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. (By Daniel Williams – The Washington Post)

Third in a series
of occasional articles

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 2, 1998; Page A29

STEPANAKERT, Azerbaijan – Romela Sarkassyan's head began to throb in 1991 when a missile hit her apartment building.

The migraines compounded the insecurity and fear that resulted from her experience in ethnic war between rebellious Armenians here in the separatist mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and the rest of Azerbaijan, a small former Soviet republic that abuts the Caspian Sea. The fighting lurched to a halt in 1994 when the Karabakhis, with help from their ethnic brethren in the neighboring country of Armenia, drove Azerbaijani forces out of the region. But there has never been a peace settlement.

Sarkassyan is an Armenian refugee from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, but if you ask her whether the war was worth it, she says yes. And she rejects the notion that Nagorno-Karabakh, which in its long history has more than once been part of Armenia, should accept something less than full independence from Azerbaijan to avoid hardship.

"We can't go back. There is no compromise. If that means people outside are unhappy with us, so be it. My headache will be their headache," she said.

Stubborn resolve, steeled by sacrifice and exposure to vast cruelties, is common in this corner of the world. The attitude complicates efforts to resolve not only this conflict among Nagorno-Karabakh, its ally Armenia and Azerbaijan, but several other nasty disputes simmering in the former Soviet Union.

Chronic instability reduces the chance that these former Soviet states will reach their economic potential soon or develop open and stable societies. Already, wars in the Caucasus, a mountainous region shared by Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, threaten the development and transport of Caspian Sea oil to Western markets.

The five former Soviet countries of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are also rife with ethnic divisions (Kazakhstan is oil-rich while Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan control large natural gas deposits). Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his recent book on geopolitics of the former Soviet Union, which broke up seven years ago, labeled the regions "the Eurasian Balkans."

Nagorno-Karabakh's name reflects the region's turbulent past. Nagorno is Russian for mountainous. Karabakh is a combination of a Turkish word for black, referring to the soil, and Persian for garden. Armenian and Karabakhi nationalists call it Artsakh, a name said to date from a fourth-century Armenian empire.

Among Armenians, Karabakhis are considered an especially determined lot. The Armenians themselves are highly resolute, a attitude that stems in part from the collective memory of the 1915 massacres at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Armenian men were summarily executed, women and children driven onto the harsh plains or into the mountains without food to die. The genocidal toll is estimated at 1.5 million. The massacres effectively eliminated the Armenian population in what is now eastern Turkey; it is now concentrated in Armenia.

Armenian leaders often equate the Azerbaijanis with the Ottoman Turks and generally use the words Turk and Azerbaijani interchangeably. As in most conflicts in the former Soviet Union, religion plays a role: the Armenians are Christian, the Azerbaijanis are Muslim. In a ruined mosque in an abandoned village near Stepanakert, someone has scrawled crosses on the prayer niche that points the way to Mecca.

"Maybe someday Muslim and Christian can live together, but not now," said Parkev, the Armenian church's archbishop of Shusha, a destroyed town above Stepanakert from which the Azerbaijanis rained artillery and missiles on the city.

"Why is it that East and West Germany can be reunited and not Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh?" he asked.

Here in Stepanakert, few young men are seen on the streets – many are at the front lines. Jobs are scarce; the main work available is shuttling goods between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Refugees are the worst off, living in unrepaired buildings with little means of livelihood. All tell tales of harrowing escapes and subsequent suffering.

Romela Sarkassyan left Baku in 1989 after gangs of Azerbaijani youths came to her door, threatened her with death and told her to leave. In 1991, she was in her fifth-floor apartment here when a bomb hit. Shrapnel pierced her husband's neck. He recovered, and the family moved to a ground-floor apartment.

Liudmila Poghasyan, a neighbor, underwent similar torment in Baku. But she had some feelings of warmth toward her co-workers, who had told her to stay and that everything would be alright. "Look at me. I'm a wreck. I had a good life in Baku. If only I could get my apartment back. If only I could travel again," she said.

Yet for Poghasyan, the costs add up to a reason to stick to maximum demands. After much sighing, she said sternly, "What was won with blood cannot be given back."

Stepanakert has patched up much of the war damage. Only the outlines of bomb blasts appear in the repaired masonry of high rises; craters in the road have been filled, electricity has been restored and tankers sell gasoline at the roadside.

Armenians and Karabakhis dismiss the possibility that the Azerbaijanis might try to regain their lost homes by force. They are convinced that the Azerbaijanis are inferior fighters who care nothing for Nagorno-Karabakh and therefore can never retake it. "They fought badly, because they know Karabakh is not theirs," said Artem Gabrielyan, a war veteran. He lost a brother and a leg in the fighting, and believes Nagorno-Karabakh must be independent.

The most prominent symbol of Nagorno-Karabakh's resolve is Robert Kocharian, who was elected president of Armenia in April. Kocharian, a wartime leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, demands that the enclave be treated as independent and be permitted to negotiate directly with Azerbaijan. He replaced Levon Ter-Petrossian, who flirted with compromise and was ousted in February.

"We were in despair with Ter-Petrossian," said Janna Grikorova, a spokeswoman at Nagorno-Karabakh's Foreign Ministry. "We think Kocharian will take a firm line."

Armenia is Nagorno-Karabakh's outlet to the world. The Karabakhis keep their sole embassy there, and foreigners must get a visa to pass from the two countries.

On occasion, ripples of ambivalence surface in Armenia, Ter-Petrossian's brief try at compromise being the most vivid example. The reason: Azerbaijan and Turkey have closed their borders to Armenia, and Armenian trade to Russia and Europe must pass along a circuitous route. First it must cross Georgia and then the Black Sea because Georgian violence blocks the land route to Russia.

In Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Levon Zurabyan, director of a salt mine, said that the sea leg increases the price of his product and makes it uncompetitive. His miners work only a week or two every month.

"We used to operate 24 hours a day and we sold to the whole Soviet Union," said Zurabyan. "Now, we produce only for Armenia and here we have to compete with cheaper salt from Iran.

"If it were up to me, I would just slice Karabakh in half and give one part to Azerbaijan and keep the other part for us."

That seems to be a minority view. Take Giumry, a northern city devastated by Armenia's 1988 earthquake. Almost nothing has been rebuilt and many survivors live in metal containers and prefabricated shacks. But residents are still unwilling to give up Nagorno-Karabakh. "I'm tired of standing in the street for hours selling vodka," said Levon Manoukyan, a former engineer. "I'm tired of living in this box. But there is a question of self-determination. Let Karabakh decide."

Because the outcome in Nagorno-Karabakh will likely influence the other disputes, a mediation group headed by the United States, France and Russia is seeking a compromise. They are only the latest in a long line of mediators. Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Italy also have tried their hands at peacemaking.

The mediation team is called the Minsk group because its lineage is traced to a 1991 peace commission set up in the Belarus capital. Recently, the group proposed an interim solution: a pullback of Karabakhi troops from buffer zones around the enclave, the dispatch of peacekeepers to the region and the return of refugees to their homes, with Nagorno-Karabakh's final status decided later. The Karabakhis rejected the plan. Azerbaijan refuses to hold direct talks with Nagorno-Karabakh's leaders, to avoid the impression that the enclave is a separate country.

Nagorno-Karabakh is nervous about international pressure. The oil bonanza in Azerbaijan nourishes a lobby in Washington that is pressing Congress to lift a ban on aid to the country, imposed because of the Azerbaijani economic blockade of Armenia.

Leaders in Nagorno-Karabakh suspect that the Clinton administration is tilting toward the Azerbaijanis, and that the interim proposal was a symptom of oil diplomacy.

Pressure will not work, they say, and unless their hopes for de facto independence are realized, the region will find no peace – a geopolitical version of Sarkassyan's "My headache will be their headache."

"Azerbaijan has oil, but only we can contribute the necessary stability to give it value," said Arkady Ghukasyan, the Karabakhi president. "Everyone here is armed. I cannot exclude a partisan war if we are surrendered to Azerbaijan. We are going to decide our own fate."

Now, the drive from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh is peaceful. But, as a regional historian once wrote, it is the peace of the deserted village.