Letter from a Fictive Country Seeking Stability Inside War-Torn Azerbaijan by Deacon EZRAS TELLALIAN
T
he afternoon of October 27, 2020 was a beautiful, sunny, quintessentially fall day in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the road to Martuni, we posed for a photo with a team of journalists. Less than a minute later, I dropped to the ground, prone. I remember feeling the ground beneath me shake before I even realized what was happening. A bomb landed in the field less than 100 meters from us. We were alone in the middle of a valley and being attacked. Thank God no cluster munitions were dispersed, or you would not be reading this. I looked up from the ground, toward my team members— none of us were bleeding. There was no sound. I rose to take some photographs of the explosion as our cameraman captured video. I remember feeling at peace—no anger at being attacked, no ill will against those trying to kill us, no fear of dying (what would be the use?), but a sense of calmness almost to the point of numbness. Some might call it radical acceptance. After a few shots, we climbed back into the van and turned around toward the capital, Stepanakert, where we were staying. On the road, Azeris also detonated five loitering munitions (also known as suicide drones) just above us, maybe 50 meters away. In my photographs of this attack, I inadvertently captured what appears to be a Bayrakdar drone, which would have guided both attacks, indicating that they were intentional. Why were we being attacked? Well, I mentioned a capital. This capital, however, is of a country that does not exist.
Borders are one of those Socratic things. Like love, beauty, and justice, we think we know what they are, but when asked to define them, we struggle. So, what is a border? As someone born and raised in the U.S.A., borders have always seemed stable to me. I
would never have imagined finding myself amidst a border dispute so intense that my life would be in danger. My trip to Artsakh (as the Nagorno-Karabakh region is known to indigenous Armenians) during the war last October was a visceral object lesson in the complicated nature of political borders. As far as I was concerned, I was in Artsakh, a place Armenians have inhabited for millennia. Even through Muslim rule, which lasted from the seventh century until 1805, Armenians had governed themselves, with five meliks, or princes, overseeing the region’s five principalities. After World War I, however, Joseph Stalin offered the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) and Nakhichevan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) to Azerbaijanis as an incentive to join the Soviet Union. So, the territory became recognized as part of the Azerbaijan SSR. The Russians, it should be noted, also laid claim to the region, and therefore viewed this territorial gain as a reconquest. This border drawing followed Stalin’s modus operandi of dividing and controlling, not only intentionally weakening the cohesiveness of these protectorates to mitigate the threat of revolution, but also setting the stage for conflict for decades to come. As for demographics, in 1929, nearly 90% of the population of NKAO were Armenian and 10% Azeribaijani. By 1989, the Armenian population was reduced to about 75% and Azerbaijanis made up over 20%. In 1991, as the Soviet bloc was fracturing, the Armenians in the NKAO had a referendum in which they declared themselves the Republic of Artsakh, independent of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan passed an analogous referendum about six weeks later. I say, “the Armenians in NKAO,” because the Azeris living there boycotted the election, thereby complicating the argument for recognizing Artsakh’s independence based on self-determination. But even if they had participated, the majority rule would have been the 21
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