Tuesday July 20, 2004
Gammadin Mamedov has endured nearly twelve years of pain, living with the belief that his young conscript son, Ikhtiyar, who disappeared in 1993, is still alive. Clutching a picture of him, he says: “I have seen a Red Cross list of prisoners who are still alive, and he is on it.”
A decade after a fragile ceasefire was implemented, the uncertainty over the destiny of people like Ikhtiyar is fuelling tensions in the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Daily skirmishes have haunted the border between the two countries, on the edge of a disputed territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh.
When the open warfare that claimed 25,000 lives and uprooted 600,000 Azeris was at its peak, Ikhtiyar was 18 and serving in the relative safety of the Baku unit 126, guarding the capital city’s key sites. Yet suddenly, on February 13, he was drafted to the frontline. Six days later, his unit found itself caught up in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, at Agdara. Ikhtiyar, the unit’s radio operator, got separated from the other soldiers. “They did what they could to find him,” says Gammadin, “but they lost 13 men that day. It was messy.”
In the days after their disappearance, the parents of the 13 men searched the battled-scarred hills for their sons to no avail. “We heard nothing about him,” Gammadin says under the shady bows of a tree outside his house in the border village of Shukubayli. “But a year later one of the thirteen missing troops was released. He showed me photos of Ikhtiyar, working at a bakery in the town of Shusha [in Nagorno-Karabakh].”
The appearance of Ikhtiyar’s name on the lists of prisoners from the Azerbaijani state commission for the missing feeds Gammadin’s hopes. “The Red Cross list was last updated in February,” he says. “I am just a poor person, not a minister, and do not know if we should make war again. Our wounds from the last war are still healing. I am just a father who wants his son back.”
The fate of the so-called “NK missing” has helped keep the two countries’ knives at each other’s throats. Azerbaijan claims there are 4,959 people “missing” since the war and charges that 783 are still being held captive by Armenia. Armenia claims 600 are missing. Azerbaijan says the Armenian claims they have only held 50 or 60 prisoners at a time are nonsense, as they released 1,086 people between 1993 and 2000.
International observers say that most of these people are dead. “It’s pretty expensive and hard to conceal if an impoverished state keeps 800 people prisoner for twelve years,” says one. They accept there are a few exceptions, although details are sketchy and often mired in the secrecy that surrounds this sensitive issue. Arzu Abdullayeva, a human rights worker from the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly who specialises in the missing, says the last release was this year in January but does not provide further details.
Armenia was the de facto victor in the war, Nagorno-Karabakh – a large slice of former Azerbaijani territory – seized during two years of open warfare. Armenia, a predominantly Christian state, considers Nagorno-Karabakh within its ancient borders, first demarcated in 782BC. Yet Azerbaijan, most of whose people are Shia Muslims, says the territory was part of the old kingdom of Albania, from whose Alban people Azerbaijan claims ancestry going back 10,000 years.
Fighting first began under the Soviets in 1988 and 11,000 extra Russian troops could not stop the fighting from escalating a year after the two states got independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Over 1.4 million refugees were created by the conflict.
Azerbaijan labels the Armenian-backed government of Karabakh, whose territory is not internationally recognised, as “terrorists”. Irascible, they even threatened to take away the BBC’s right to broadcast their Azeri language service in the country because of coverage of the conflict they considered “biased”.
Inter-governmental bickering only sours Gammadin further. “This was not a real war, but one of special interests: the poor died and the rich got richer. I am ready to give my house up to buy him back, or my life. Today would have been his 30th birthday,” he says, his silent rage turning his wife Roza to tears.
Around the village, there are several families feeling the same sense of bewilderment and loss as the Mamedovs. Yet, despite such raw wounds, the new Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliev, said recently that, if negotiations failed, he would retake the disputed territory “at any cost”.
Playing to those critics who feared he would use the conflict to unite the impoverished and frustrated Azerbaijani people, he added: “Our army is capable of freeing occupied territory at any moment. Azerbaijan is in a condition of war.”
A few hundred metres down the road from Gammadin’s windowless house, built for him by the Red Cross, this war is very real. A ramshackle gaggle of conscripts mill around a dishevelled farmhouse that is about 300 metres from the front line, marked by a gaggle of white buildings in the distance, off limits to reporters.
“You could get shot at any moment,” says the lieutenant in charge of the unit. As well as the danger of snipers, there are the snakes. The grass of the hot and dusty plains has been burned away around some key buildings, the sooty, charred turf less hospitable to snakes whose venom can only be treated in the central hospital, too often an expensive drive away. The young men, many wearing only tatty flip-flops, chase the water truck with their empty tin mugs as it drives up to the base.
A week ago today, the war claimed its last publicised casualty. Azerbaijan announced that Private Elnur Aliyev, 19, died from a gunshot wound in his chest at the village of Agdam, on the border. He was the fourth soldier whose death was admitted by the ministry of defence. Three civilians have also died from fighting and 11 from the landmines that pepper the borders.
International monitors say the number of clashes along the border has this year been at its highest since the ceasefire began. While most observers say neither side is sufficiently well-equipped to want to start a proper war, there are fears the clashes may spiral out of control and a slow, open war of attrition may break out, specifically over the water and hydroelectric interests in the disputed, dry region.
But to Vugar, a conscript who has moved his metal bed out of the parched squalor of the barracks to set up a makeshift dormitory with three friends beneath the endless blue sky on a nearby, arid hill, the clashes are just something else to survive. “One of our friends was shot in the head by a sniper last month,” he says. “And then they shot a shepherd and his two sons as well. All I want to do is live.”
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