Eyewitness | Jonathan Steele in Baku
THEY STOOD in small groups under the trees outside the headquarters of the Popular Front, perhaps 300 people in all, anxiously waiting to know if Shusha’s fall was really true.
“It is the heart of Karabakh. It’s all our history, the birthplace of our best poets,” explained Makhir Guseinov, an engineer. “We thought it was impregnable. We’re all in a state of shock.”
Shusha, the Azerbaijani capital of the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, was also a vital strategic stronghold.
For the Armenians of Stepanakert, Shusha used to spell fear. High on a hill above Stepanakert, the town housed the artillery and rocket emplacements which rained shells mercilessly on Armenian blocks of flats, forcing thousands of women and children to live in basements. For Armenia to capture it would be the body blow to Azerbaijan in the four-year war of Karabakh.
The Azerbaijanis in the square outside the Popular Front sensed it well enough.
“It is a serious defeat. Our republic must declare a general mobilisation and send all forces in for the fight,” Mr Guseinov declared. The crowd around him nodded vigorously.
The defence ministry claimed the town had been lost on Saturday, but recaptured during the night. Many in the square did not believe the second part. They thought the Popular Front which has its own representatives in the battle zone, was more reliable.
“It was like a stab in the chest, I thought I was having a heart attack,” said Rovshan Gambarov, a chemist.
It was time for the United Nations to do something just as it had with Kuwait and Yugoslavia.
“Don’t just treat us as other Muslim countries. We feel the Christian nations are less serious about what’s going on than about Yugoslavia,” he complained.
Many felt the Armenians always won the propaganda war, making out that Azerbaijanis were barbarians and Islamic fundamentalists. Others put the blame on Russia for, as they claimed, helping the Armenians by giving them weapons.
Ardil Gasimov was lying in the military hospital in Baku yesterday, his girlfriend holding his hand as she sat at the end of his bed. He had light wounds round his nose and on one leg. He had been brought in from Shusha by helicopter on Friday night. Four other wounded soldiers lay in the same small ward.
“The attack was quite unexpected,” he said. At about 2 am there had been heavy shelling and rocketing from the Armenian-held villages nearby.“It went on for several hours but we thought it was routine,” he said. At daybreak he was driving an army lorry when Armenian tanks and artillery cut the road into the town from the west. “There were about 30 armoured vehicles. They fired on us, and we managed to get to an Azerbaijani village where they took us out.”
On Martyrs’ Hill the official gravedigger was working hard yesterday morning. Along a row of graves spared four feet apart with black-framed photographs of the dead at the head of each one, he was digging new holes between the gaps, doubling the eventual number of bodies. The park used to be a favourite Baku beauty spot with a fine view of the Caspian Sea. The lilacs were in bloom yesterday. It became a national cemetery after January 1990 when Soviet tanks put down demonstrations by the Popular Front similar to those which ended the Communist monopoly of power in Tajikistan last week. About 120 people died.
The war in Nagorno-Karabakh has added to the burials. Shirjat Farhab said his 23-year-old brother was killed with five friends after six months of service in Karabakh. “We must go to Shusha and liberate it ourselves or die,” he said. The fall of the town was like a death in the family.”
As we walked out of the cemetery a woman was moving slowly between the cypresses. “I was bom in Shusha,” Solmas Askerova said. “For me it’s everything.” She turned and walked away.
Publication date 05/11/1992
Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform
