Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
July 7 2006

Fire Fight Over Karabakh

Armenians and Azerbaijanis accuse each other of deliberately starting
blazes on disputed land, while others blame the heat of a dry summer.

By Rufat Abbasov in Baku, Karine Ohanian in Stepanakert and Karine
Asatrian in Strasbourg (CRS No. 347, 6-July-06)

A series of wildfires raging on lands around Nagorny Karabakh have
sparked a new war of words in the unresolved territorial dispute
between Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

The Azerbaijani authorities accused the Armenians of deliberately
starting fires in areas to the east of Karabakh which, although they
are not part of the disputed territory itself, have been under the
de facto control of Armenian forces since the ceasefire of 1994.

No one lives in these territories, but the lands are cultivated by
Armenian farmers from Karabakh.

Azerbaijan’s environment ministry says more than 132 square kilometres
of land has been burned, causing damage estimated at around five
million US dollars. Azerbaijani environmentalists have named six
villages in the Aghdam region east of Karabakh which they say have
been razed to the ground.

The Armenian authorities in Karabakh have rejected these charges,
saying that the fires have either occurred naturally as a result of
drought conditions, or have been started by negligent local people –
or caused by gunfire from the Azerbaijani side of the ceasefire line.

Igbal Agazade, a member of the Azerbaijani parliament who visited
the ceasefire line that divides the two sides, said the fires were
"nothing other than mass arson".

He told IWPR, "This is not a whim of nature, but a continuation of
the Armenians’ policy of destroying all evidence that Karabakh is
indigenous Azerbaijani land. If that wasn’t the case, the fires would
also be happening on lands controlled by the Azerbaijanis where the
climatic conditions are identical.

"The Armenians are doing this deliberately to destroy our graveyards
and historical monuments. The historic Nargiz-Tepe monument, which
is more than 2,000 years old, has already been wiped off the face of
the earth. This is ecological terrorism."

These allegations are denied by the authorities in Nagorny Karabakh,
a republic that is unrecognised by the international community.

"At this time of year, fires in the wheatfields are nothing out of
the ordinary for Nagorny Karabakh, and they occur for very different
reasons," Vahram Baghdasarian, Karabakh’s agriculture minister,
told IWPR. "But this year, the number and extent of the fires in the
wheatfields in zones bordering Azerbaijan has increased somewhat as
a consequence of shooting from the Azerbaijani side, using tracer
bullets which can start a fire instantly."

David Mikaelian, press spokesman for the government in Stepanakert
(which the Azerbaijanis call Khankendi), added, "In this season when
the temperature rises to 40 degrees and more, it is natural that
there are fires in the fields – it does not mean they were started
deliberately. But we do have information that Azerbaijani soldiers
are responsible for arson in these areas."

Mikaelian said the local fire service had been deployed to extinguish
the fires. The emergency services department in Stepanakert said that
it had recorded 128 fires this season, and that the fire service had
been sent out to deal with all of them. Spokesman Armen Narimanian
said more than 1,000 hectares of uncultivated land and 165 hectares
of harvested land had been burned.

Masis Mailian, deputy foreign minister of the unrecognised republic,
told IWPR that it had been hard for the fire services to put out the
blazes because shots fired by the Azerbaijanis created fears for the
safety of the firemen.

The Karabakh authorities released a statement on July 3, saying that
Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk, who has acted as the main international
monitor of the ceasefire line for the last nine years, in his capacity
as representative of the chairman of the Organisation for Security
and Cooperation in Europe, had just conducted a monitoring mission in
the Aghdam area and had seen no evidence that population centres had
been burned – as alleged by the Azerbaijanis – but had seen traces
of a fire that began on the Azerbaijani side of the ceasefire line.

In complete contradiction to this, an Azerbaijani defence ministry
spokesman said the OSCE ambassador had "literally with his own eyes"
witnessed proof of deliberate arson by the Armenians.

Ambassador Kasprzyk could not be contacted by IWPR for clarification.

Matthew Bryza, United States deputy assistant Secretary of State
and chief negotiator on the Karabakh conflict, told the day.az news
agency in Azerbaijan that he was "worried" by the reports and had seen
satellite photographs on which "the boundaries of the fires… are
so distinct that it looks as though someone had thought in advance
how to start them and how far the fires should spread".

Bryza said he was reserving judgement until Ambassador Kasprzyk made
his report.

On June 27, the Azerbaijani delegation at the Council of Europe
in Strasbourg issued a statement accusing the Armenians of "mass
arson on the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, as a result of which
thousands of hectares of territory were destroyed, doing great damage
to the environment. The flames also spread onto territory under the
control of Azerbaijan. Fauna, buildings and cultural monuments on
these territories were completely destroyed".

In response, Heghine Naghdalian, a delegate from Armenia, said,
"The Azerbaijanis don’t understand that fires do not recognise
administrative boundaries.

"The Azerbaijanis speak about deliberate fires in the territories
adjoining Nagorny Karabakh without understanding that the Karabakhis
cannot set fire to those fields and woods which they use for their
own needs."

Naghdalian claimed the matter was being raised to distract attention
from an issue that Armenia has raised at the Council of Europe –
the alleged destruction of the medieval Armenian cemetery of Djugha
in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijani parliamentary deputy Malahat Hasanova gave another version
of events to IWPR, saying that the Armenians were carrying out a
"scorched earth policy" as they understood that they would soon be
abandoning these territories and wanted to leave behind dead and
burned lands.

However, not everyone is inclined to see a political subtext to the
fires. Many farmers questioned by IWPR said fires were a perennial
problem in the region.

"One carelessly-dropped cigarette, and a fire starts immediately," said
Larisa Danielian who lives in the village of Shahbulakh in Karabakh.

Leonid Soghomonian, who lives in the village of Berdashen in the
Martuni district, reported "the burning of a large amount of weeds
standing more than two metres high weeds on the border, which block
visibility between Karabakhi and Azerbaijani soldiers".

Soghomonian said that the weeds were burned by soldiers on both sides
to give them a better view of their adversaries, and that many such
fires had been started over the past few years.

"But when a fire like this starts up, it’s impossible to stop it –
the grass is very dry, and it spreads very quickly. And as our crops
are directly next to the border, many of the owners of cultivated
land have suffered badly from the fires and lost 10 or 15 hectares
of their harvest."

Rufat Abbasov is a journalist and IWPR contributor in Baku. Karine
Ohanian is a freelance journalist working in Nagorny Karabakh. Karine
Asatrian is a correspondent for A1+ television.