MAP A REMINDER OF COMPLEX HISTORY OF CAUCASUS
Scott Taylor, staylor@herald.ca

The Chronicle Herald
3425.html
Dec 1 2008
Canada

The final destination on my recent seven-country tour of the volatile
Caucasus was Baku, Azerbaijan. One of my commitments during this short
visit was to give a lecture at the Azeri Ministry of Foreign Affairs
University. About four dozen former ambassadors, faculty members and
students attended my presentation.

While it is admittedly a challenge to try to define the complex
political, strategic situation in the Caucasus to North American
readers, it is much dodgier when you attempt the same thing with an
audience of active participants from the region. Given the level of
tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh, almost every word you could utter has the potential
to be contentious.

In 1991, when Azerbaijan declared independence from the collapsing
Soviet Union, the ethnic Armenian majority in the province of
Nagorno-Karabakh held its own referendum, in which it unilaterally
declared the region to be independent from Azerbaijan.

While inter-ethnic violence had already begun to increase in this
region at an alarming rate during the late 1980s, the declared
secession of Nagorno-Karabakh sparked an all-out war between the Azeris
and Armenians. To support the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh,
troops from the neighbouring Republic of Armenia first forced a
land corridor into the disputed province. Then, over the course of
two bloody years of combat, the Armenians captured and ethnically
cleansed seven additional Azeri provinces around Nagorno-Karabakh to
create what they call a security zone.

At the beginning of my lecture, I mentioned my travels to
Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital city, Stepanakert. As soon as I said
the word, a low grumble came from my audience, hands shot up and a
bright, young Azeri student rose to admonish me. "You mean the city
of Henkendi?" he asked.

I had to admit that I had never heard of that name; from highway signs
to maps to written accounts of the war, I had only ever seen the name
Stepanakert. "Henkendi was the old Azeri-Turkic name of the capital,
but the Soviets changed it to Stepanakert in the 1920s," I was advised.

On Azeri maps published since independence from the Soviet Union,
all place names have been replaced with the former Turkic ones. This
renaming process was also conducted by the Armenians, and, as it had
been very difficult to find accurate maps of the region in Canada,
I had acquired one in Yerevan.

This particular map had been produced in 2002 by the Armenians, and
it included a separate handy chart that listed all the former place
names juxtaposed with the current ones. Despite the catalogue of name
changes, I was still unable to correspond some of my research to a
location on the map.

Outside Baku, at a refugee camp, I had interviewed 28 Azeri survivors
of the Feb. 26, 1992, massacre in the town of Khojaly. On that fateful
night a combat force of Armenians had routed the Azeri militia and
completely cleansed the Azeri enclave of all inhabitants. In the
process, 613 Azeris were killed — mostly civilians — including 83
small children. Thousands more were injured or missing.

At the time, Human Rights Watch reported this to be "the largest
massacre to date in the conflict," and Azerbaijan subsequently declared
Feb. 26 a national day of mourning. After my lecture, I asked one of
the Azeri students to find Khojaly on my Armenian-produced map. After a
protracted, head-scratching silence, he looked up bewildered and said:
"It’s not there. They’ve simply erased it from existence."

There are always at least two sides to the history of every conflict,
but in the Caucasus that divide seems wider and deeper than most.