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Conclusion Sadakhlo:The Future “THEY FIGHT, W E don’t,” said Mukhta, a trader from Azerbaijan, giving his view of war in the Caucasus and locking his Armenian colleague , Ashot, in a tight embrace. The two black-moustachioed men were standing in front of a sea of ancient box-shaped Soviet-era cars and a heaving crowd of commerce. We were in Sadakhlo, a village on the Georgian-Armenian border— close to the hinge on the map where the three Caucasian republics meet—the site of the largest wholesale market in the southern Caucasus . At the edge of the village stood a line of white and dirty-yellow buses, from Baku, Yerevan, and Nagorny Karabakh. At Sadakhlo, the Azerbaijanis sell food, clothes, and flour from Turkey and Russia and the Armenians sell Iranian products, like the improbably named Barf washing powder. The fact that fruit and vegetables ripen in Armenia later in the year helps both sides. “Soon there will be new carrots from Azerbaijan, then later they will buy ours,” explained Ashot. “In summer we sell our tomatoes,” added Mukhta. “In autumn, when ours are over, they bring in lots of theirs.” Both men said they preferred trading with each other than with the Georgians. In March 2001, the Armenian finance minister Vartan Khachaturian called for the Sadakhlo market to be closed, declaring that it was the “main point of import of contraband [to Armenia] and a center of corruption .” The minister said that three to four hundred million dollars’ worth of customs-free goods passed through the market every year, equivalent to the entire budget revenues of Armenia.1 Ordinary people would retort that Sadakhlo enables them to clothe and feed themselves, where governments have failed in that duty. Perhaps half of the population of Yerevan dresses in Turkish clothes bought at Sadakhlo. The Armenians of Nagorny Karabakh use the market to import Azerchai, their favorite brand of Azerbaijani tea from Soviet times. Another large 269 quantity of the goods traded here ends up in the shops and market stalls of Ganje and northern Azerbaijan. There is another reason why the market should be kept going: it is a vivid illustration that there is no innate hostility between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. As soon as you enter the territory of neutral Georgia, all “ethnic hatreds” die away. In the old center of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, I visited a carpet shop jointly owned by an Armenian and Azerbaijani , old friends fluent in half a dozen languages, who thought the Karabakh conflict was nonsense. Similar scenes of harmony can be found in Moscow or Tabriz. The cultural divide between the two peoples is far narrower than that between, say, Israelis and Palestinians. Certainly, Mukhta and Ashot had a hundred times more in common with each other than they did with me. Unfortunately, the closure of the borders makes the kind of friendship enjoyed by Mukhta and Ashot all too rare. Most Armenians and Azerbaijanis have no contact at all with the other country and, since 1994, this mutual alienation has been built into the status quo. Azerbaijan ’s only lever of pressure is Armenia’s isolation, and therefore most Azerbaijani officials reject overtures for dialogue and “normalization” with Armenia as an attempt to tip the situation in Armenia’s favor. The Azerbaijani foreign minister Vilayat Guliev said: “Regional cooperation cannot be a means for reaching peace. What cooperation can there be between the aggressor and the state whose territory is occupied?”2 The outlook in 2002 is bleak. The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict may not have been the worst of modern wars, but it has produced one of the worst peaces. In the post-cease-fire situation, misery blankets the region. The most miserable people are surely the half million or so Azerbaijanis expelled from the regions in and around Nagorny Karabakh in 1992–1994. Since then their situation has barely improved. But, in lesser ways, the vast majority of Armenians and Azerbaijani also suffer the results of the conflict. In Armenia, perhaps 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, on less than twenty-five dollars a month.3 Emigration rates are catastrophic and deprive Armenia of the young, able-bodied, and well-educated citizens it needs most. Nakhichevan, the isolated province of Azerbaijan, squeezed between Armenia, Iran, and Turkey, is as an emblem of everything that is wrong with this situation. Separated from the rest of Azerbaijan, it has been almost entirely cut off from the outside world since...

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