An Interview with Thomas de Waal
Institute of War & Peace Reporting

Thomas de Waal is the Caucasus Editor and Project Coordinator for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London.

Having covered the Caucasus for the BBC World Service, his book on the conflict in Nagorno Karabagh, "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War," will be published by New York University Press in late 2002/early 2003.

This interview was held in Yerevan, Republic of Armenia, on 16 April 2002, a day before de Waal presented a lecture on Western policy in the Caucasus at the American University of Armenia.

Onnik Krikorian: Congratulations on your new position with IWPR. In that capacity, what brings you back to Yerevan?

Thomas de Waal: In collaboration with the new Caucasian Media Institute set up by Mark Grigorian and Vicken Cheterian, I’m here to take part in a training seminar for young journalists from Armenia and Karabagh. Basically, I’ve been involved with that, talking to journalists, refreshing my impressions, and seeing my friends here.

OK: Will you be doing the same in Georgia and Azerbaijan?

TDW: I was in Georgia and Abkhazia a couple of months ago and I’m off to Azerbaijan at the end of May.

OK: Let’s talk about your book, The Black Garden, which follows one on Chechnya (co-authored with Carlotta Gall) in 1997. Why follow it up with one on Nagorno Karabagh?

TDW: Well, I suppose a flippant answer would be that as I was sitting in London working for the BBC and getting a bit bored, I decided to write a few grant proposals to see if anyone would fund me to research a book on Karabagh. The US Institute of Peace came up with the money.

However, why was I interested in writing a book on Karabagh? Well, I had been to the region a couple of times and was aware that there really was nothing in English, or in any language for that matter, that looked at the conflict from both sides. Instead, there were quite a few propagandist books, or one sided books to be kinder, which looked at the conflict from only one perspective.

Both sides were living in alternate realities and it was an intellectual and personal challenge to go back to the beginning of the conflict in 1988 to see if I could come up with an outsider’s view of why the conflict started and what’s happened since. I suppose that if you can understand the symptoms of the disease, you can possibly find a cure.

The problem with Karabagh has been that too many people have suggested solutions for the conflict without really understanding the symptoms.

OK: Regarding partisan books, are you just referring to Armenian and Azeri authors or those by writers such as Thomas Goltz, for example, who really only presented “Azerbaijan Diaries” as an account of his experience on the other side of the contact line.

TDW: Thomas Goltz is a friend of mine and I think his book on Azerbaijan is absolutely tremendous. However, and I think he would admit this too, he saw the war from the other side which inevitably colours what he writes.

Despite this, I think that his book tells you an enormous amount about Azerbaijan and how society, corruption and everything else in the Caucasus operates. All of that is in the book but it doesn’t actually tell you that much about the war in Karabagh.

In my opinion, the conflict was all about a very fundamental misunderstanding between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. It was about their own identity and fears vis-à-vis each other, and their own perceptions of history. To understand that, you need to talk to both sides, and that’s what I’ve done.

Interestingly enough, in that capacity I became a bit of an informal postman. I took messages back and forth between Azerbaijan and Karabagh and between friends living in Yerevan and Baku. I even managed to link up people who lost contact because of the war.

On a personal level, I was someone who was repairing a tiny bit of the damage done by this conflict, and I was constantly struck by how much Armenians and Azerbaijanis have in common. In fact, many would jokingly remark that they were on better terms with each other than with the Georgians.

As a result, many very good friendships were blown apart by the conflict including, bizarrely enough, a man who used to work in the Komsomol in Shusha [Shushi] who’s now in exile in Baku. He used to be a friend of Serzh Sarkisyan and Robert Kocharian and had fond memories of both.

He even produced a photograph taken with Robert Kocharian sitting at a café in Yalta in 1986, and he wasn’t bluffing either. After an interview with Serzh Sarkisyan I mentioned his name, and he had fond memories too. Even on that level there were friendships.

There’s another story that didn’t end up in the book because it’s such a complicated account, but the short of it is that there are still quite a lot of Armenian women, mainly the wives or widows of Azeris, living quietly in Baku. Most have Azeri names.

There was one [Armenian] woman who had all sorts of problems in Azerbaijan. Her [Azeri] husband died but she stayed in Baku because her children were effectively Azeri. After many problems, her daughter ended up losing her job in a bank when someone suspected her of being Armenian.

They fled to Iran and the Dashnaks helped them with money to get to Armenia. They had to leave Azerbaijan because the children were having problems, but when they arrived in Armenia the children had problems with neighbours and at school because they were accused of being Turkish.

They lost out both ways, even though they were cosmopolitan. Instead of it being a blessing it was a curse, and it’s almost as though you come up with this conundrum. If people were getting on so well, why did they end up fighting a war with each other?

This wasn’t a war imposed from above; it was a war that came from below. There are obviously many reasons for this, but I think that the intellectuals from the soviet era have a lot to answer for.

OK: They say that there’s something like 20,000 Armenian women in Baku that married Azeris, and the US State Department recently reported that there were something like 300 Azeris in Yerevan. They keep a low profile but are they more open about this in Baku?

TDW: The dynamics are different. I think that it’s a paradox on the one hand because Azerbaijan is more of a mixed, cosmopolitan society and Armenians can operate a bit more freely there. On the other hand, ethnic propaganda against the Armenians is stronger in Azerbaijan.

That might have something to do with Azerbaijan being the losing side in the war and that the wounds are still fresh, but it is true that there are Armenian women in Baku. However, I think that this has a lot to do with the nature of the city.

It’s always been international with many Russians, Jews and Armenians living there as well as Azerbaijanis. Russian was always the main language spoken but even that has been changing over the past few years, and Baku is becoming less cosmopolitan and more of an Azeri city.

OK: Is your book also going to be full of stories like this, or is it just a chronological account of the conflict?

TDW: I aim to tell the story from 1988 to the present day although it also includes snippets of personal reportage from people I’ve met along the way. It’s an attempt to be counter-factual so as to debug the myths in circulation on either side.

For example, I write about the role Armenians played in Baku and about how Yerevan used to be a largely Moslem city in the nineteenth century. I write about how Sayat Nova wrote many of his songs in Azeri even though there’s this misconception among Armenians that Azerbaijan didn’t exist before the twentieth century.

In fact, Sayat Nova wrote a lot of his songs in a language that’s now recognized as being Azerbaijani, it just wasn’t called that. It was called Turkish or whatever. However, it was Turkish of a Caucasian variety that wasn’t from Turkey.

It was basically what we now call Azeri so the book will write a different history of the Caucasus. Many people won’t like this but as I’m only one journalist, they can ignore me if they want to.

It’s a modest attempt on my part to suggest that things were different, that they didn’t have to be like this, and that they could be different again.

OK: I would imagine that a journalist researching what is still a sensitive issue would be treated with some suspicion. Did you encounter any obstacles?

TDW: Surprisingly few. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to interview Heidar Aliyev, but apart from that, I interviewed pretty much all the major politicians such as Levon Ter Petrosian, Robert Kocharian, Arkhady Ghukasian, Serzh Sarkisyan and quite a lot of senior people on the Azeri side such as Ayaz Mutalibov.

I didn’t get to talk to Elchibey because he died just as I was about to interview him. Most were quite happy to be given the chance to put their side of the story across.

OK: From speaking with you in the past, although I don’t know what you’ve written, I think it will be an interesting book. However, there will be references to events that are not widely spoken about and which are hotly disputed by one side or the other. For example, you refer to the death of two Azeris on the outskirts of Askeran before the pogroms in Azerbaijan started.

TDW: When did it all start? Both sides say it started with this before then going back and saying it started with that. In fact, there was actually violence in November 1987, three months before the demonstrations in Stepanakert, when some Azeris started leaving Kapan. It’s still not quite clear why they left but they turned up in Baku in a shocked and miserable state. However, it is well known that there was an incident in Askeran when a crowd moved from Aghdam to Stepanakert and two Azeris were killed.

What is less well written about is how 200,000 Azeris left Armenia between 1988 and 1989. The majority of them left peacefully, but the rest were driven out in pretty much the clothes they were wearing. Then of course, 350,000 Armenians left Azerbaijan and everybody knows about the horrible things that happened in Baku and Sumgait. Obviously, I go over that in my book.

There are no angels in this conflict and it is one of the symptoms of an ethnic dispute when both sides seek to portray themselves as the innocent victim. It justifies every act of aggression as being in self-defense, but I’m afraid that’s a bit of a myth.

OK: When you say that some people won’t like the book you’re referring to both Armenians and Azeris?

TDW: Yes, and I think that a lot of the propaganda is repeated out of habit. However, if you speak seriously to both sides, they acknowledge that the whole conflict is a tragedy and that both sides committed acts of savagery.

OK: Has any of your research for the book given you grounds for optimism?

TDW: Well, yes, in that the sense that Armenians and Azeris aren’t like the Israelis and Palestinians. Armenians and Azerbaijanis have far more in common with each other than they do with me, for example, and there is intermarriage and connections in terms of culture.

In that sense, there is optimism but unfortunately, what has happened is that the Karabagh dispute has taken a grasp of the soul of both nations in the past ten years, if I can put it like that. The authorities still repeat to their people in subtle ways that it is impossible to exist without Karabagh.

In Armenia, it’s a great victory, and in Azerbaijan, it’s a great wound. Somehow, there’s no sign of getting over that. There’s no attempt to see Karabagh as a bridge, as somewhere that can be shared, or as a crossroads. Were we to get into that position I can see that both Armenians and Azerbaijanis could get on quite well.

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