“They kicked me out of my land when I was 31 years old. Three decades later I return and I feel as if I were still 31 years old,” Firengiz said three weeks ago in his new home in Zangilan.
“I was offered a job as an architect in Sweden, but I prefer to reconstruct my origins,” said Igmat in Lachín.
The defeat of the Armenians occurs in a landscape - the Karabakh that the Azerbaijanis reconquered in 2020 - marked by cranes, bulldozers, concrete mixers, holed mountains and massive reconstruction.
The small cities of Zangilan and Lachin, such as Agdam, Fizuli or Shusha, are now experiencing what Baku calls the Great Return: a huge economic investment in Karabakh reconquered from the Armenians in the second war, three years ago. The objective is to link the Karabakh that they control with the rest of Azerbaijan with powerful roads, tunnels and bridges, and pave the way for the return of the Azerbaijanis expelled in the first war, three decades ago.
From the semi-arid lands to the high mountains, the pattern is repeated: Azerbaijani towns in ruins – hauntingly beautiful – alongside new and impeccable housing blocks, hotels, schools, houses with gardens, conservatories or spectacular airports. All driven by oil and Baku's determination.
Like every post-Soviet war, this one also has its Dramatic Theater crushed: only three large arches remain of the Agdam Coliseum. As if the Drama Theater and the rest of the buildings had not been destroyed by projectiles, as if someone had taken them away stone by stone.
“The Armenians took the stones... and brought us the mines,” they say. Karabakh is one of the most mined areas in the world, and Agdam is the most mined area in Karabakh.
In front of the ruins, in the areas already demined, the cranes raise new residential areas. “We will preserve the ruins as a memory, and we will build a museum of Victory,” says Araz N. Imanov, special representative of the President of the Republic in Karabakh. “It's not just about returning, it's about ensuring that those who return have jobs.”
After the second war, the Armenians handed over mine position maps in exchange for prisoners, but those maps have “large gaps,” and the rains cause landslides and mines, explains Xaliq, chief bomb disposal officer. And Ukraine always in the background: “One day we will do great work there, we are the first country to apply artificial intelligence in demining,” says Imanov.
He wants to show us a mosque so we can see how the Armenians used it as a stable, including pigs. With it we also penetrate one of those points that, in a war, measure the intensity of hatred: a cemetery. And the stories they tell of mines placed between tombs, unearthed corpses and theft of marble greatly enhance the score.
Azerbaijanis and Armenians accuse each other of genocide and of plundering the carpets and civilization they weave, and it is in the highly desired city of Shusha (Shushi in Armenian), almost fifteen hundred meters high, where this clash takes on its most cultural dimension. . A young poet accompanies us to see two statues in a green park. The first is a large bust of Uzeyir Hajibeyli, composer in 1908 of the first opera in the Islamic world. The bust has several bullet holes in the face.
–Armenian shots?
–Shots from our enemies. Not all Armenians are our enemies –Teymur answers.
The other statue, dedicated to the Azerbaijani poet Khurshudbanu Natavan, had a finger torn off. The daughter of the last prince of the Karabakh Khanate, she was an extremely cultured woman: in 1858 she discussed literature with Alexander Dumas in Baku.
In the first war, with the Armenian entry into Shusha, these large busts from Soviet Azerbaijan ended up in a foundry in Georgia, from where Baku rescued them. It is the war – like all wars – of molten metal: the Armenians accuse the Azerbaijanis of plundering the bells of the Cathedral of San Salvador in 1989: they located them in a market in Donetsk.
In that first war, the Armenians also accused the Azerbaijanis of storing Grad missiles inside the cathedral, and the Azerbaijanis now accuse the Armenians of having poorly restored the Yukhari Govhar Agha mosque with Persian overtones, stripping it of its Azeri identity. . The Azerbaijanis have just restored the mosque in their own way and covered San Salvador with scaffolding: Baku's ambassador to the Holy See has promised to return the Armenian cathedral to its original appearance.
All missiles, in the end, are cultural. The Vaqif Mausoleum was built in Soviet times with the name of the Azerbaijani poet and statesman written in Cyrillic. It was destroyed in Armenian times and has just been rebuilt under the name Vaqif in the Latin alphabet of today's Azeri.
At the highest point of Shusha there is a meadow that ends in the Hunot abyss. Teymur tells stories of warriors and poets who have defended or conquered the city along this precipice. Old battles that never get old: the bullets of 2020 are still in the rocks. “The Azerbaijani special forces trained for fifteen years to scale this cliff,” he says of the reconquest. A force of will reinforced with Israeli drones.
At the other end of Shusha, next to the park of shot busts, the road descends towards Stepanakert, the capital of the self-proclaimed Armenian Republic of Artsakh, the Armenian island of Azerbaijan. Everything is just a stone's throw away. On the hill opposite rises the Russian flag of the interposition forces and a large cross.
“Sometimes Armenians go up the hill to contemplate Shusha,” says Teymur: the others also dream of a return. Great or impossible.
In Zangilan (majority Azerbaijani in the last Soviet census) it does not seem that they have rebuilt a village. It seems that they have built the set of a television series: a landscaped center with a pharmacy, bank, hospital, post office, supermarket... a first phase with one hundred individual houses with rose bushes at the entrance. With the ruins in the background they talk about sustainability and smart cities.
At school, the laboratory is brand new, the blackboards are electronic and in the library there is universal literature in the Azeri language: Svana drogu (Swann's Way) by Marsel Prust or Lamançli Don Kixot (Don Quixote of La Mancha) by Migel of Servantes.
It is the desire to clear the landscape of mines and to act as if time had not passed. The bell of the new school is the same as thirty years ago: they found it half buried and have restored it.
“The neighbors are the same, it is as if these three decades of occupation did not exist,” says Firengiz, one of the few women who wears the veil. She was, in the first war, the last to leave Zangilan before the Armenians entered. “I stayed at home silently, with a shotgun, to take care of my husband, who was injured. I took care of him as if he were my brother.”
In Lachin (Berdzor in Armenian, a town that gives its name to the corridor that connects and disunites Armenia with the Armenian island of Azerbaijan) the trip returns to the high mountain air. Close to heaven and far from God: “There is no mosque here,” says Yusif, a painter with nostalgia for Lenin, almost proudly. Completely Azerbaijani according to the last Soviet census, there was no church in Lachin either until 1998, when the Armenians built the Holy Ascension. On a hill, dedicated to his first – and only – victory over Azerbaijan, demolishing the house of an expelled Azerbaijani. Now the Azerbaijanis do not know what to do: the neighbor claims the land and demolish a church that is not historic. At the moment, it is made invisible by a scaffolding.
Here, too, they press the accelerator: in one year they have built a power plant, an industrial zone, a hotel made of individual cottages that could be in Sweden, and an idyllic village – Zabux Kendi – next to the river. Everything is within walking distance of everything: a mountain further west, Armenians; one mountain further east, more Armenians.
At the top of Lachin, the French photographer Reza – born Azeri in Iran – organizes a colorful exhibition: faces of boys and girls from all over the world in a huge cubicle looking at this landscape before the battle.
“Three years ago,” says Reza, “there were eighty photojournalists from all over the world covering the Armenian side of the war. Only me on this side. I called major Western media outlets in case they were interested in images – he has worked for National Geographic, Newsweek, Time... – and no one wanted them. "We don't need them, they told me."
Azerbaijanis celebrate with fireworks the first anniversary of their return to Lachin (until a year ago it was occupied by Russian peacekeepers). It is night and, behind the mountains, Armenians on both sides can see the bright flashes of gunpowder.
There is no more artificial fire than war.
