Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh Fear Losing Their Hard-Won Gains

The fighting is over, and the women of the carpet factory have returned to their looms. Hunched over the bright threads with combs, scissors and shuttles, they are once again weaving the traditional rugs of the Caucasus Mountains.

Still, half the looms in the cold hall stand idle, and many of the low stools drawn up to them are empty.

Ethnic Armenians are still here, grieving for the thousands killed in a decade of ethnic conflict. They are the victors, having won a long armed struggle against their former Azerbaijani neighbors and taken back control of their land. But the minority Azerbaijanis who once lived in Nagorno-Karabakh--geographically inside Azerbaijan since early Soviet map makers redrew the area’s borders--are gone.

For the ethnic Armenian women who remain, any affectionate memories they might have had of life with the Azerbaijanis appear to have been submerged by the wartime horrors that followed, and the triumph of military victory.

“Sure, there used to be Azerbaijani women working here,” said Zhenya Sevyan, who has worked for 30 years in the factory in the Karabakh capital. She pursed her lips.

Her soft-spoken, smiling niece, Hasmik Sevyan, explained in more detail their feelings about the Azerbaijanis, now refugees: “We’ve already finished with the Azerbaijanis. We’ve shown them. We’ve got nothing more to say to them.”

Karabakh Armenian peace negotiators are just as defiantly tough--and are a source of increasing irritation to international mediators who have been trying to push forward a sluggish peace process for five years.

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Although the West has long been sympathetic to the Armenian people’s centuries of suffering, a new factor is emerging that could tip the diplomatic balance in Azerbaijan’s favor--huge quantities of oil being exploited off the Azerbaijani coast by American and other Western companies.

The international community is eager for the small wars that plagued this region from the late l980s into the ‘90s to end so that the Azerbaijani oil, worth billions of dollars, can be transported through the Caucasus Mountains to the West.

The Karabakh Armenians, flushed with a victory that came against all the odds, are worried that the West is now pressuring them into giving up what they have won because it’s listening too much to Azerbaijan. Deadlock has followed, and Karabakh President Arkady Gukasyan blames the peacemakers.

“Attempts have been made to cast the blame for this on Nagorno-Karabakh, but I think this is a far from objective approach. I think that the mediators here are more guilty than Nagorno-Karabakh, which was obliged to reject a proposal that did not answer to its interests,” he said.

“If the whole world turns against Karabakh, of course we’ll lose. If the American oil lobby and the Russian oil lobby and so on unite against Karabakh, we’ll have a hard time. . . . But the oil lobby that’s representing Azerbaijan’s interests today should start thinking about how it backs Azerbaijan. If it blindly supports Azerbaijani government positions . . . it is working against its own interests because that will only lead to eternal instability here.”

The peace talks are supposed to settle the future not only of mountainous Karabakh but also of the large swath of Azerbaijani land--flat plains territory--to the south that victorious Karabakh Armenian troops seized in 1993.

The mediators want the Karabakh Armenians to return this Azerbaijani land--known outside Karabakh as the “occupied territories” but here as the “liberated territories”--before a peace settlement is negotiated.

But the Karabakh Armenians say no; instead of this “step-by-step” deal, they want what they call a “package settlement,” with their land given international political recognition as a separate state. Karabakh Armenians want to be separate from Azerbaijan, and separate from--but very close to--their cousins in neighboring Armenia.

Karabakh is a very emotional issue for all Armenians, local or not. The Armenians are an ancient people whose historic kingdom on the fringes of Turkish, Persian and Russian empires has been repeatedly divided and redivided, whittled away, smashed and reconstituted over the centuries. Since the 1915 genocide of Armenians living under Ottoman Turkish rule, anger has been focused on Turks and their Turkic-speaking cousins within the former Soviet Union, the Azerbaijanis.

The modern fighting in Karabakh arose out of a “divide-and-rule” tactic playing on this ethnic hostility, in which Soviet maps were redrawn under dictator Josef Stalin to put the Armenians of Karabakh under Azerbaijani rule--an arrangement that eventually exploded into racial hate, pogroms, “ethnic cleansing” and war.

In February, Armenia’s unpopular president, Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan, resigned amid nationwide uproar after making an ill-timed suggestion that Karabakh should go along with the international proposal. No candidate won a majority in Monday’s election for his replacement, so a runoff will be held March 30.

Whoever becomes the next president of Armenia will probably be more cautious than Ter-Petrosyan about flouting Karabakh Armenians’ wishes. One of the two headed for the runoff, Robert Kocharyan, is likely to do still more to help the Karabakh cause: He is a former president of the territory.

But mediators are still hoping that the rejected step-by-step deal can be revived, although diplomats hold out little hope of a breakthrough any time soon.

“We believe it would be too big a bite to solve all these questions at once,” said one Western diplomatic source close to the talks. “Negotiations might take many years, and in the five years so far, there’s been no real progress except a cease-fire, and quite a frayed cease-fire.”

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So the proud, watchful people of Karabakh--an Azeri word meaning “black garden,” which most Karabakh Armenians now shun in favor of their own name for the territory, Artsakh--are quietly rebuilding towns and villages, and waiting to see what happens next.

Today, Stepanakert looks spruced up, pretty and clean, if not yet prosperous. Although only a few factories are functioning, shops, cafes and restaurants are open. There is electricity. And its pale yellow stone or stucco houses are freshly plastered and painted. The few men in military fatigues who stroll the streets, rubbing shoulders with confident-looking dark-haired youths in leather coats, do not carry guns.

This is a far cry from the desperate days of early 1992, when the capital was besieged by Azerbaijanis from the hilltop town of Shusha. Their relentless bombardment of Stepanakert turned it into a nightmare of shattered glass and masonry, deafening explosions, terrified families clustering in cellars and angry refugees pouring in from the villages.

Now Shusha--whose Azerbaijani inhabitants fled when Armenian forces seized the town and stopped the bombardment later in 1992--is all but deserted, a mournful reminder of the pity of war. Its burned houses stand empty, and the minaret of the mosque has been lopped off.

In the chilly quiet of the carpet factory, Hasmik Sevyan listed her hopes for the future. Although it is not the political aim of Karabakh’s leaders to unite formally with Armenia, Sevyan voiced a common dream when she said she wants the Armenians of Karabakh to live in peace with their cousins inside Armenia proper, with whom they already share a single economy and a strong sense of kinship and history.

“We are already united with Armenia now. Artsakh is part of Armenia,” she said firmly.

Her most fervent hope? That the fighting is over forever:

“What I want for all of us is no more war. I want our children not to have to see that again. And I want them to grow up here, not in Russia or America or even Yerevan [the Armenian capital]. I want them to stay here, in the land we’ve defended.”