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16. Stepanakert: A State Apart
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16 Stepanakert A State Apart THE SMALL AUSTERE room was lined with wooden benches and illuminated by a bank of strip lights. But for the floor-to-ceiling metal cage on the left side, it could have been a school classroom. Inside, two rows of young men sat together under guard; seated at a short distance from them was Samvel Babayan, a small man with a wispy moustache and an inscrutable expression. The former commander of the Karabakh Armenian armed forces was on trial for attempted murder and high treason. Babayan had a swift fall from power. For five years after the 1994 cease-fire agreement with Azerbaijan, still not yet thirty years old, he was acclaimed as the all-Armenian hero. Combining the posts of minister of defense and commander of the army in the self-proclaimed statelet of Nagorny Karabakh, Babayan had been the de facto overlord and master of the territory. Then at the end of 1999, a power struggle with the rest of the leadership broke into the open and he was sacked from his posts. Three months later, in March 2000, the region’s elected leader, Arkady Gukasian, was riding home late one night through Stepanakert when his Mercedes sustained a fusillade of bullets fired by two gunmen. Gukasian was hit in the legs, and his bodyguard and driver were wounded. Babayan and his associates were arrested and accused of plotting to assassinate Gukasian and seize power. Now, in October 2000, seats were hard to come by in Stepanakert’s courtroom for the daily drama of the trial. Three of the former commander ’s fellow accused had rejected their former boss and pleaded guilty, but he himself denied all the charges against him. His lawyer, Zhudeks Shagarian, said that an early confession had been beaten out of him. The trial was a small-town affair that was forcing open a clammedup and secretive society. The lawyers, defendants, and witnesses all 241 knew one another. The prosecutor asked one witness, a doctor, to define her exact relationship to the main defendant. “Yes, I am Babayan’s second cousin,” she conceded. She was then asked for her address. “Who gave you the apartment?” the prosecutor asked, seeking to establish whether it was a gift from Babayan. Distributing apartments had been one of his ways of securing loyalty. Outside the courtroom other facts about Babayan were emerging into the daylight. The list of assets held by him and his family and confiscated when he was arrested included eight foreign cars, among them a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Landrover; two farms; two houses; five apartments; around forty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and sixty thousand dollars’ worth of cash.1 By world standards, that may not have been excessive; in Nagorny Karabakh, that made him unimaginably wealthy. Babayan and his family had made money out of both war and peace. In wartime, the wealth came from the “occupied territories,” when everything they contained was stripped, taken away, and sold, generally to Iran. The marauders missed nothing, whether it was scrap metal, factory equipment, copper wire, or roof beams. An Armenian friend described to me how he went to the ravaged city of Aghdam one June day after the war and saw the Felliniesque sight of men filling a line of flattop Iranian trucks to the brim with rose petals. The petals came from the thousands of rosebushes scrambling over the ruins of the deserted town, and the Iranians bought them to make jam. In peacetime, Babayan and his family exploited the economic isolation of Nagorny Karabakh. He founded a company called Jupiter, registered in his wife’s name, which earned vast sums by acquiring the monopoly on cigarette and fuel imports to the enclave. Economic power was only half of it. “You couldn’t open a kiosk or be appointed as a schoolteacher without Babayan’s say-so,” said one disgruntled local. All political rivals were neutralized. A feud between Babayan and one military commander named “Vacho” ended in an armed showdown and Vacho’s fleeing Karabakh. Anyone who got in Babayan’s way risked ending up in Shusha jail and being ordered to pay a large bribe to secure his or her release. One father was asked to pay a much higher price: the delivery of either of his teenage daughters to Babayan. He told his daughters to stay at home while he frantically raised a ransom of five thousand dollars. 242 STEPANAKERT: A STATE APART [3...