A Chapter of the Battle for Kelbajar

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Taking the mountains

AIM – November-December 1994

« Sixteen years old… I had to deliver the body to his mother this morning. Sixteen years old, and he’s dead. I’m forty-six, I’m still alive. Why? If you don’t have an answer, don’t say anything at all!”

Major Serjik looks up with his green eyes. His words are harder than the expression on his face. He speaks with gravity, in order to interrupt me. He keeps the little box of matches cupped in his palm, using it to light cigarette after cigarette as he sits before the stove in which the last log of the night is burning.

He’d gone and found the wood for me. Serjik doesn’t eat in any of the houses he takes me to. He knows all these people are poor. Visiting his best friend Vanik’s house in the countryside off the shore of frozen lake Sevan, he says, after a while,

 “How can I eat if my soldiers are hungry? Can I direct the fighting with a radio from staff headquarters when my kids are up in the mountains? The people from Yerevan want me to live the way an officer’s supposed to. I’m not interested.”

Major Serjik is one of the men who have just recaptured the mountains around Omar. Last December, on the 28^th, the Azeris had moved into Kelbajar which is one of the gateways to Karabakh.

Five days without eating, five nights of sleep in the snow, with a handful of snow to quench one’s thirst. In the beginning, there were only forty of them. When Serjik was a professional singer, in the Yerevan TV orchestra, this mountain chain the falcons soar over seemed inaccessible. But, a year ago, that didn’t keep him from heading to the mountains on foot, in order to take part in the march on Kelbajar under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Hovsep.

Dressed in white, shoulders sagging under the weight of the forty-five pound combat jackets, the soldiers crunch the virgin snow under their boots.

In January, the threat to Karabakh still came from this region. It provided the occasion for a reunion between Hovsep, Serjik, Arabek, Arkadi and young enlisted men or officers from Karabakh – Hamig and Vanik, for instance, the geographer and the tank commander from Mardakert. Like the last time, they had to ford the Terter river, plunging into the freezing cold current up to the waist. “Five men can win a battle, if they’re resolved to hold out”.

At the approach to Omar, Hamik was the first to head up the slope under the hail of bullets, moving up into the mountains ahead of the infantrymen. Facing three battalions, the young tank commander retook the slope he’d already helped capture last year. The abandoned T-800 – the one he was in when he was wounded last April - is still perched on this slope.

         

In February, the Armenians dug into the former Azeri position at Yantchak. In the depths of the gorge just opposite to the trenches of the outpost, four hundred bodies are lying under the new snow. They are still officially “missing in action”. Azerbaijan made no effort to recover the bodies of its soldiers who fell in the battle of February 17. How does Serjik manage to find a kind word for them?

“President Aliev should give his people an account of their battle dead. These men have mothers somewhere, don’t they? And the right to a tomb?”

But when? In the major offensive that lasted from December to February, eight thousands men fell in the fighting. As many died in two months as had died in the preceding year. Five hundred Armenians and two thousand Azeris in the mountain pass of Omar alone. Eighteen year-old boys, cut off from the rest of the world, froze to death at minus forty degree temperatures. Others suffered frostbite, and had to have their feet amputated. Around Karmir Kach, or the clearing of Chaply, the Azeri soldiers were thrown into a panic by the counter-offensive. They lost their way in the turmoil. The whole route is covered with shells, upside-down helmets, abandoned boots, scattered cartridges – traces of a long, hasty retreat, a long, desperate effort. The snow on the slope still shows traces of the footsteps of these attackers tuned fugitives. In the end, the snow got the better of them. 

Twenty-five miles of white desert to Yanchak – three of them on foot. No drinking water is to be had at the outposts; there is nothing but snow to drink. What names were once attached to these frozen bodies, their wounds still fresh under the thin film of ice, their eyes wide open? One of them is still bleeding: he had wrapped his hand in a bandage, the next shell caught him in the belly. He lies there on his back, a dirty marionette, half trapped by the snow. A worried soldier brushes the snow from the dead man’s features. “Is he Armenian?” His papers say he isn’t. 

An explosion. A shell comes whooshing in, leaving the snow filthy with grime and soot. The soldiers don’t pause, they keep climbing. The acrid odor follows them at each turn of the route. More rounds come in after them as they continue to climb.

What devil put it into the Azeri’s heads to send troops into these mountains? Little valleys carved out of the rock as if with a chisel, air so pure it sets your head spinning as you slog on, the snow tugging at your feet, your breath cut short by the altitude. The mountains look out over sheer emptiness. Fog one minute, sun the next. Endless whiteness – opaque, glittering, like fire in your eyes. Seen from up close, Omar might pass for the ninth circle of hell.

Scarves pulled tight over their foreheads to protect themselves from the cold, their faces taut, they keep climbing. One has a new assault rifle captured from the Azeris: Western, to judge by the writing on it. Another rifle, with its short butt sitting on a metal support engraved with Japanese characters, is they say, Korean. “Who’s fighting this war against us here? The whole world?”

That night in the tent, a concert of coughs. They’ve all lost twenty pounds or more, up in these mountains in which you’re constantly famished and parched. Many of them are fighting despite old wounds, marching on legs twisted by injuries.

A room with a skylight. The walls are black with soot. Staff headquarters. There’s straw for those who have to sit on the floor. The air is foul with cigarette smoke and stale breath: the skylights stays closed to the conserve heat. The water in the courtyard cuts like a knife, freezes your fingers. Someone ladles out beans and hard, underbaked bread. A little butter, weak tea. Everyone looks tired enough to snap. Who’ll finally make the decision to barter the victories of these worn men for peace?

                

 “Family? What does family mean now?Your family are the people you’ve been hungry with, felt the cold with. The people who were standing next to you when you heard the bullets whistling around your ears – and, sometimes, behind your back. You know what I mean?” Robert smokes slowly, taking long puffs. “They’re playing with us. Sometimes there are weapons., other times there’s no more ammunition. When they want, we lose. When we can, we win. And the kids keep dying. As for us, we keep going. We keep going – can you believe it?”

How do they live with the contradiction? The war makes off with everything – one’s victories, one’s friends. They know they’ve been condemned to be in these mountains more by the crimes of states than by the hatred between peoples.

“As soon as Moscow and the other capitals are finished playing around with us, we can go home”. Robert gives me his wife’s telephone number so I can let her know how he’s doing. But, back in Vardenis, the telephone’s not working.

Up here, words seem to have the power to heal. The words uttered during the interminable tamatas [toasts in homage to the living or to them memory of the dead], when you tremble at the thought you might hear a name you know, one more face lost forever; or else the words of the songs the children sing at the top of their lungs. In these parts they only know one, the one in which this or that fedayi, “devoted to the fatherland, fights like a lion for freedom”.

Four winters have gone by already since the day Leonid, the physicist from Yerevan, showed up. He and Apo, the local police chief, found a common language straight-away. Of the thirty-six villages, twelve were inhabited by Azeris. Reconnaissance patrol followed reconnaissance patrol. The mountains began to yield up their secrets.

When Leonid came back to see Apo again, he was accompanied by a young man from France. His name was Hovsep and he didn’t speak a word of Armenian, let alone the rough dialect spoken here. The young fellow from Marseilles made the children and grandmothers laugh; the expert in armed struggle caught the attention of the best fighters. A case of mutual understanding. Leonid and Apo threw all the doors in the region wide open for him. They scrutinized maps, reconnoitered the terrain and its pitfalls, organized a line of defense at Vardenis. Then the threat hanging over Shahumian exploded into reality. These were still the days of the Soviet Union. Hovsep, Leonid and Apo left for Karabakh in a helicopter.

Hovsep came back two years later, at the head of a battalion. He set up in a barracks of pink tuff whose muddy courtyard was ringed out with the snow that blows in off the massif stretching toward Kelbajar. Tough, generous, quicker with a reprimand than a word of praise, the lieutenant-colonel became a popular figure.

“He’s strong. He trains us”. Before long, the two stars on his epaulette could be spotted all over the region around Lake Sevan, from Krasnoselsk to Tativank. Making alliances and winning people’s confidence are also victories. Which is why the people of Vardenis wanted to make sure Hovsep was staying. He had become one of them. Ant they wanted to stay in Vardenis themselves, with his help.

After his arrival in Armenia, Hovsep, working in a team with two other men, Leonid and Vladimir, became a link in the chain of solidarity that reached from Marseilles to Paris to Mardakert. Thanks to their force of character, it became a chain of solid gold. Leonid, the physicist, Vladimir, the stonecutter, and Hovsep, the former anthropology major, organized the Azatakragan Panag (Liberation Army) around the principles of discipline, devotion and fraternity. Hovsep familiarized himself with the mountain country. All three learned about tactic, weapons, and the art of commanding. On May 9, 1992, when the Armenians captured Shushi, and the Latchin corridor. The course of the war changed.

The other road connecting Armenia to Karabakh winds towards and then over the mountain-crests which surround the region, passing through Kelbajar and Tativank. It was closed to the Armenians. Leonid made one attempt to capture it. But it wasn’t yet ripe.

Leonid and Vladimir were to be killed in action in June 1992, within twelve days of one another, in the course of the attack on Martakert. It was then that Hovsep made another move. Overwhelmed by the Azeri tanks, the soldiers had had to abandon Martakert. Their lines were pushed back as far as Gantsasar. With his back to Vaghuhas, Hovsep, with Volod, Misha and Manch at his side, held his position in the forest at the head of thirty men. “We’re going to die and rot here!” Raised to officer’s rank, Hovsep marched into Kelbajar, as Leonid had wished. It was Hovsep who fired the ceremonial salute in Kelbajar, accompanied by Leonid and Vladimir’s heirs, by Serjik and his men.

Earlier, they wouldn’t have thought it possible, with the ramparts of Mount Mrav looking down on them and the snow reaching up to the chests of their white uniform. In January, they had still been together. As they approached Kelbajar, at the spot where the gray mountain looks as if it wants to come toppling onto the road, the bullets came whistling down from high up on the mountain.

 “I’m not moving another inch”, Movses, the old driver at the wheel, had said. “You’re not moving? Give me the keys.” Hovsep stepped on the accelerator and went plunging into the mountain gorges in search of Hamik, out on reconnaissance without a radio. Nobody gets better protection than Hovsep’s “kids”.

Time has come to a stop. All day, the morgue has been filled with the cries of weeping women. In the Vardenis barracks, twenty officers are sitting around a single oil lamp. The building is plunged into the darkness of night, the men bump up against one another, recognize each other by their voices. “Tomorrow, when the Ministers get here, you can count on having light!”

Last year, on the 21^st of September, at the Independence Day banquet, the men they were already calling “veterans” had posed for pictures. During the celebration, a moment outside of time, everyone knows that tomorrow, these strained, harried men will turn back into generals and war heroes, disappearing behind closed doors at the Defense Ministry, attending interminable meetings. That their voices would take on another, official tone.

The night of a putsch in Moscow, Colonel Allik thumps his breast pocket, the one he keeps the photos in, the pictures of those who have been killed. How many names the two of us could recite! Allik’s eyes get wider: “You have to live! To live! Otherwise, you wear yourself out, a little bit of yourself goes every time someone disappears… But the thing is to live, Mariam – for them, for us too!”

It’s almost midnight. I know where Vrezh wants to take me. To Yerablur. At night, sometimes, he drives all the way up to Yerevan’s military cemetery, facing the eternal snows of Mount Ararat. Sitting on a tombstone of tufa, he smokes bad tobacco and talks to his friends who have been killed. Vanik, Vladimir, Leonid. Those who came from the Diaspora had been pronouncing the word “fatherland” for a long time. In a country they had all dreamed of, a special bond cemented them together. And their quarrels, like their passions – our acts of injustice, like our acts of faith – are etching themselves on the pages of our history books.

AIM – November-December 1994

Myriam Gaume is a Paris-based journalist.

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Translated from the French by G.M. Goshgarian