It all looks very tidy, a postcard-perfect picture of a small country's capital city. The central square is fenced off to traffic; inside, a flag flaps lazily over the four-story presidential offices, near the white-domed parliament building and a shiny new hotel with red awnings over its outdoor cafe. A few policemen and pedestrians stroll about admiring the view of the local sports stadium and the green plains beyond it.
Upon closer observation, however, the picture becomes stranger. The flags have a curious design: red, blue, and orange stripes punctuated with a jagged white step pattern. In the city center there are no embassies, no branch offices of global banks, no international businesses or ads -- in fact, almost no foreigners at all. The list of U.S. officials who have visited this place in the past 20 years numbers in the single digits.
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This is Stepanakert, capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, virtual state and the relic of one of Europe's forgotten wars. Everything in Karabakh -- a mountainous region slightly larger than Rhode Island and home to 100,000 people -- is Armenian and Armenian-run. But Karabakh is still located in the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. The large numbers of men in camouflage fatigues on these streets also tell a story: This would-be state was forged out of conflict, fought over between 1991 and 1994, and 16 years later remains perched on the edge of it. More than 20,000 Armenian and Azerbaijani troops stare at each other from trenches on either side of the cease-fire line.
War is still in the air. The situation on the Line of Contact, as the cease-fire line is known, is a barometer of the health of the peace process, and this year it is in bad shape. In 2009 around 19 people died in shooting incidents there, and 2010 has already matched that level of bloodshed. On the night of June 18, four Armenian soldiers and one Azerbaijani died in a fierce clash, only hours after Russian-mediated talks between the two countries' presidents in St. Petersburg. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Armenia and Azerbaijan -- though not Karabakh -- this week, she will raise the issue of the crumbling cease-fire with the presidents of both countries.
I have made a dozen or so visits here over the years, and spent a lot of time in these streets and hills, researching my book on the Karabakh conflict. Azerbaijan is so sensitive about foreigners' visits that when I come here, as a sign of respect, I make sure to inform the Foreign Ministry in Baku that I am making the trip (though I do not ask its permission). A lot has changed over the years. When I first came in March 1996, much of Stepanakert was still in ruins from Azerbaijani bombardment; there was nowhere decent to stay, and virtually no shops were open. Since then the city has been completely rebuilt. The little de facto Armenian state has become a pet project for many diaspora Armenians, who fund a school here, a clinic there. The final stretch of road into Stepanakert bears a sign saying it was funded by the Armenian community of Argentina.
Most of the funding for the territory's annual budget of $200 million comes directly from the government in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, making Karabakh, economically and militarily, an outpost of the Republic of Armenia. Yet the state of siege has given the Karabakhis a very different outlook. The Karabakh Armenians always prided themselves on being highlanders, more stubborn and hardy than their cousins across the mountains in Armenia proper. First war and then international isolation have hardened their defiant streak. A decade ago, the locals in war-shattered Stepanakert were only too glad to share their problems with me. Now their message to the outside world is, "You're not talking to us, so why should we talk to you?" As a rare visitor, I am treated like an emissary from a whole international order that has rejected them.
There is a logic to this intransigence. The Armenians of Karabakh do not even have a place at the negotiating table in the talks over their own future -- that is handled by the sovereign governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The agreement being hammered out by the two countries will offer the Karabakh Armenians "international guarantees," including some kind of international peacekeeping force, in return for them giving up territory to Azerbaijan. But no international official has ever spelled out to the Karabakh Armenians what these guarantees will be. Whenever I raise this issue in Karabakh, I get a negative response. "Name me a successful international peacekeeping mission," says one Karabakhi friend.
There is a tough answer for everything. When I visit my old acquaintance Vartan Barseghian, deputy minister in Karabakh's de facto foreign ministry, the tone is friendly but the message is implacable. "We can't talk about peace when our enemy is preparing for war," says Barseghian. "Our soldiers and civilians need to know they should be ready for war."
"We now have full independence, but just lack the formalities of it," he says. "Achieving those formalities is not an end in itself. We will not sacrifice anything to achieve it."
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