Nagorno-Karabakh was interesting to me, as a great fan of Armenian temple architecture, because of the old monasteries of Gandzasar and Dadivank there. My friend Max, who has already travelled as a news photographer to Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was interested in the present-day life of the ex-Soviet unrecognised
republic. As a result, we saw neither: we were kicked out of Karabakh. As we weren't told the reason why, we have to invent our own one.
We entered Karabakh on the 12th of September, driving from the Armenian town of Goris in a beat-up old truck. At the border control we were told obtain some paperwork from the Karabakh foreign ministry in order to leave the country. On Monday, September 13, we decided to observe a beautiful mosque, a picture of which we saw in a tourist map that we bought in Stepanakert, the capital of the unrecognised republic. The mosque is situated in the town of Agdam, known for its port wine produced during Soviet times.
The town was inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis, and Armenians didn't lay claim to it when they declared independence in 1992. During the war the town was one of the main Azerbaijani strongholds and when internal contradictions paralysed Azerbaijani troops, Armenians decided to attack it in the summer of 1993. The battle lasted two months . When Armenian troops entered the town, there was no town left, frankly speaking. I think Agdam was a beautiful town, a calm oriental town, with elderly men sitting in its streets playing at tables and drinking tea. There were still grape and pomegranate trees everywhere. I climbed over some barbed wire and picked two pomegranates – a kind of souvenir.
We observed the mosque and climbed up the minaret. It was a horrible view: there were ruins everywhere, a town of 50,000 people had been demolished in two months. We met five locals living here, as they have nowhere else to go. After three hours spent in Agdam we went to the village of Drmbon, where a gold mine was situated. My friend Max decided to make a photo essay.
Apparently, guys from the Base Metals company took us for spies, so the next moment we were detained at the first police station and sent to a National Secutiry Service officer, Leonid Arustamyan, who told us: “Agdam is forbidden territory”. “But there aren't even any gates there!” we cried, “How could we know that it's forbidden?!” Arustamyan tried to confiscate our cameras but we alowed him to confiscate only memory sticks. He said that we should go to Stepanakert and be registered. When we got there, the Foreign Ministry office was already closed. The next day we were told to leave Karabakh, but no one explained why to us. They returned our memory sticks, with all the photos from Agdam deleted. The only photo that was left was a photo of the two pomegranates that I picked. We were very angry and started calling our colleagues from Moscow to get numbers of Armenian and Karabakh officials to make a great fuss.
And we managed it: when our Armenian friend phoned the Armenian presidental administration, he was asked : “You are also calling about these two idiots in Karabakh?” In the Karabakh Foreign Ministry they said that they will “settle the problem”, ensuing in tired from calls from Armenian and Karabakh presidental administrations and from several mass media. On the 15th of September we had a talk with Marcel Petrosyan, head of the Foreign Ministry's Information Department. He told us that we should have obtained accreditation before visiting Karabakh. “But we went here as tourists! You made us journalists when you started detaining us, forbidding us to take photos! How could we imagine that Agdam is a forbidden zone – there are no warning signs!” It was a vain discussion. Later that evening five serious men were waiting for us in the hotel. “Criminal Investigation Department. We will escort you to the border,” one of them said, showing his identity card. We said that we couldn't afford a taxi so we would hitch-hike.
So the guys from the Investigation Department drove us to the border, where custom officers took copies of our passports and saw us into a passing car. In this way we got to Goris. We can only imagine as to why we were kicked out, and the only reason we can see for this is that the Karabakh authorities don't want anyone to remind them about Agdam, where Armenian troops demolished a whole town and occupied a territory, that the don't even regard as their own. And we didn't ant to. Unless we were forbidden to do it.
By Artem Yefimov
