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Introduction: Crossing the Line
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Introduction Crossing the Line THE FRONT LINE: 19 MAY 2001 No border is more closed than this one. A few miles after the Azerbaijani city of Terter, the road stopped in a dusty field. Soldiers at a guard post blocked the way. Sheets of camouflage and dried grass covered the barbed wire. From here Colonel Elkhan Aliev of the Azerbaijani army would escort us into no-man’s-land. We were a party of Western and Russian diplomats and journalists. The mediators were hoping to build on progress made the month before at peace talks in Florida between the presidents of the two small post-Soviet Caucasian republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. By crossing the front line between the positions of the Azerbaijanis and of the Armenians of Nagorny Karabakh, who occupied the land on the opposite sides, the party of diplomats and journalists wanted to give the peace process a public boost. But by the time we reached the front line, a peace deal was slipping off the agenda again. No one had crossed here since May 1994, when the cease-fire was signed that confirmed the Armenians’ military victory in two and a half years’ of full-blown warfare. From that point, the line where the fighting stopped began to turn into a two-hundred-mile barrier of sandbags and barbed wire dividing the southern Caucasus in two. Colonel Husseinov, dressed in neat camouflage fatigues, was inscrutable behind his dark glasses. There had been a shooting incident across the line that morning, he said, but no one had been hurt. Some of the party put on flak jackets. Nikolai Gribkov, the Russian negotiator, was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and someone teased him that if there was an Armenian Mets fan on the other side of the line, he might get a bullet through the head. 1 The colonel led us around the wall of sandbags to a narrow strip of country road, which his men had de-mined that morning. We must have looked incongruous as we walked into no-man’s-land to the chirrup of birdsong: some of us were carrying briefcases, others were trundling suitcases on wheels along the tired asphalt. On the edges of the road, the white and purple thistles in the dead zone were already neckhigh . After five minutes, we reached the “enemy”: a group of Armenian soldiers waiting for us on the road. They were wearing almost the same khaki camouflage uniforms as Husseinov and his men, only their caps were square and the Azerbaijanis’ were round, and the Armenians wore arm patches inscribed with the letters “NKR,” designating the unrecognized “Nagorny Karabakh Republic.” With them was a group of European cease-fire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They handed round a light lunch of bottles of Armenian beer and caviar sandwiches—a diplomatically devised culinary combination from the two enemy countries. Vitaly Balasanian, the Armenian commander, was a tall man with graying sideburns. He exchanged a curt handshake with Husseinov and they did not meet each other’s eyes. Had they ever met before we asked. “Maybe,” replied Husseinov, implying that they might have done so on the battlefield. The two commanders do not even have telephone contact, although it would reduce casualties from snipers (about thirty men a year still die in cross-border shooting incidents). Would they consider setting up a phone link? Balasanian said it would be useful, but Husseinov said that was not his responsibility. Earlier , he had called the Karabakh Armenian forces “Armenian bandit formations.” Balasanian led us down the other half of the country road to the Armenian lines. In front of us were the blue wooded hills of Karabakh. It was a shock. Because of the inviolable cease-fire line, the only way into Nagorny Karabakh nowadays is via Armenia from the west. In my journeys back and forth between the two sides over the course of fourteen months in 2000–2001, I had been forced to travel hundreds of miles around, going by road through Georgia or flying via Moscow. Now, moving between one side and the other within a few minutes, I was hit by both the strangeness and the logic of it: the two areas on the map did join up after all. ■ 2 INTRODUCTION: CROSSING THE LINE [3.235.246.51] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:58 GMT) This snatched handshake in no-man’s-land was the only...