Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War


Party official in Shusha at the time, told me that he refused the demand



Download 1,42 Mb.
Pdf ko'rish
bet14/81
Sana23.09.2021
Hajmi1,42 Mb.
#182836
1   ...   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   ...   81
Bog'liq
Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War ( PDFDrive )


Party official in Shusha at the time, told me that he refused the demand 
to head a special commission to oversee the demolition operation. Now 
an old man in Yerevan, his voice still trembled as he spoke about the 
razing of the old Armenian quarter. “Those ruins were still standing,” 
Shugarian said. “All the houses could have been restored, all that was 
needed were the wooden sections and doors. For years I had scrambled 
all over those ruins. I saw wells, bones. In my heart I felt hatred toward 
the people who had set fire to the town.”

The main cause of war, it has been said, is war, and perhaps that 
should include the memory of war one or two generations back. In 
Karabakh, the sense of historical grievance was sharpest among the 
Armenian townsfolk, many of whom remembered the old pre-1920 
Shusha. The actress Zhanna Galstian, one of the founders of the Ar­
menian nationalist movement in Karabakh, told me that as a child the 
conversations she overheard at home about the prerevolutionary pe­
riod made a deep impression on her. Her grandmother’s family had 
been deported from a village named Alguli and fled to Khankendi, the 
village that later became Stepanakert. Alguli was then completely set­
tled by Azerbaijanis: 
We had just one small bed and Grandmother and I slept on this bed. 
And every night, my grandmother’s relatives from Alguli came, these 
beaten, deported people, who had gone on foot to Khankendi and set­
tled here. Those old people were still alive then, and I was small, and 
they talked about it all in whispers. It wasn’t allowed, it was the years 
of Stalinism. You know what a child’s brain is like, it records every-
thing like a tape recorder.



S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
53 
In a dingy windowless office in a back street of Baku, I met another 
Shusha patriot. Zahid Abasov, a chubby man, is now the official in 
charge of culture of the Shusha administration in exile in Azerbaijan, a 
more or less meaningless position, which gives him plenty of time to re­
flect on what might have been. In the 1980s, he ran the local young 
Communist or Komsomol organization in Shusha. Working in a pre-
dominantly Armenian province, he worked mostly with Armenians, 
and remembered them all well. When I mentioned the Khachaturians, 
he exclaimed, “What a pleasant couple!” “How she’s aged,” he com­
mented of Larisa Khachaturian as he studied a photograph of her in her 
garden. Of Zhanna Galstian, he remarked ironically, “Zhanna once 
gave me a crystal vase as a present. I left it behind in Shusha. She’s very 
welcome to it, if she wants it.”

Then Abasov pulled from his desk drawer a stack of old black-and-
white photographs. One of them, bleached with sunlight, showed six 
smiling tanned young men sitting at a café table on a terrace. The third 
man along, grinning broadly, in wide sunglasses, was Abasov. If the 
man on the right of the picture, in a white short-sleeved shirt, his watch 
glinting in the sun, looked familiar, that was because he is now presi­
dent of Armenia. It was a younger Robert Kocharian. The group of 
friends from Nagorny Karabakh had gone on vacation to the Gurzuf 
sanatorium in Yalta in the Crimea in the summer of 1986. 
Fate decreed that while Abasov lost pretty much everything and 
was driven into exile, several of his old Komsomol friends have be-
come the leaders of independent Armenia. Abasov’s closest colleagues 
were the first secretary of the Stepanakert Komsomol, Serzh Sarkisian, 
now minister of defense in Armenia; his deputy Robert Kocharian, 
the Armenian president; and Nelli Movsesian, Armenia’s minister of 
education. 
Abasov used to come down from Shusha to work every day in 
Stepanakert and, rather than have him head back up the mountain, his 
colleagues took turns inviting him home to lunch. When had he first no­
ticed Armenian nationalist feelings, I asked. “Toward the end I started 
to feel something with Serzhik [Sarkisian],” Abasov responded. “He be-
came rather quiet. But with Robik [Kocharian], right up to the end I felt 
nothing.” Even, it seemed, during soccer matches, the moment when 
nationalist feelings traditionally rose to the surface: “There were work­
ers in the Regional Committee who supported the Ararat soccer team, 
but Robik didn’t even do that.” Abasov added that he kept up with his 


54 
S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
friends even after 1988, but political conflict made their meetings fleet­
ing and furtive, as national cause made friendship with the other com­
munity undesirable. Abasov hunched over his desk, more gloomy now. 
He still didn’t want to believe what had happened. “How much longer 
can this go on?” he asked me, as if the conflict were only a terrible mis­
understanding that could be set right by a few friendly conversations. 
In Yerevan, the Armenian minister of defense Serzh Sarkisian 
laughed when I passed on the greetings of his former friend and col­
league. Yes, he remembered him well, Sarkisian said, and he was a good 
man. Sarkisian told me that he himself spoke good Azeri and had a lot 
of Azerbaijani friends—but pointed out that he had also studied in Ar­
menia, a side of him that Abasov had evidently never seen. The Ar­
menian cause mattered more than personal friendships, Sarkisian 
seemed to be saying. “The problem was inherent in the Soviet system. 
But as for Zahid or Rohangiz, the first secretary of the Shusha Komso­
mol, she was a pleasant normal woman.”

The further I went to the top looking for answers, for the personal 
roots of all the killing, the more frustrated I became. No one felt that 
they personally were to blame. In an interview, Robert Kocharian of­
fered only general thoughts on personal friendship and ethnic conflict. 
“Of course I do have [Azerbaijani] friends. The situation, the path of life 
meant that I did not have a wide circle of friends. But I do remember 
those friends that I did have, I have no complaints about them, we had 
normal friendly relations. But usually when ethnic conflicts begin, it al­
ways retreats into the background.”

The president of Armenia had 
been one of the leaders of the Karabakh Armenian national movement 
“Krunk” from the very beginning, in 1988. In 1992, he had taken part in 
the operation to capture Shusha. Yet he talked almost as if he had 
played no role in starting the conflict, as if it had come out of the blue. 
Again the language was passive, as though simply “ethnic conflicts 
begin,” like natural phenomena. The president had no explanation. 




Download 1,42 Mb.

Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
1   ...   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   ...   81




Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©www.hozir.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling

kiriting | ro'yxatdan o'tish
    Bosh sahifa
юртда тантана
Боғда битган
Бугун юртда
Эшитганлар жилманглар
Эшитмадим деманглар
битган бодомлар
Yangiariq tumani
qitish marakazi
Raqamli texnologiyalar
ilishida muhokamadan
tasdiqqa tavsiya
tavsiya etilgan
iqtisodiyot kafedrasi
steiermarkischen landesregierung
asarlaringizni yuboring
o'zingizning asarlaringizni
Iltimos faqat
faqat o'zingizning
steierm rkischen
landesregierung fachabteilung
rkischen landesregierung
hamshira loyihasi
loyihasi mavsum
faolyatining oqibatlari
asosiy adabiyotlar
fakulteti ahborot
ahborot havfsizligi
havfsizligi kafedrasi
fanidan bo’yicha
fakulteti iqtisodiyot
boshqaruv fakulteti
chiqarishda boshqaruv
ishlab chiqarishda
iqtisodiyot fakultet
multiservis tarmoqlari
fanidan asosiy
Uzbek fanidan
mavzulari potok
asosidagi multiservis
'aliyyil a'ziym
billahil 'aliyyil
illaa billahil
quvvata illaa
falah' deganida
Kompyuter savodxonligi
bo’yicha mustaqil
'alal falah'
Hayya 'alal
'alas soloh
Hayya 'alas
mavsum boyicha


yuklab olish