ARCHIVE ARTICLES – ON SITE
LACHIN: LIFE IN NO MAN’S LAND
Anyone taking the road from Goris to Stepanakert has passed through Lachin, the strategic main artery in the lifeline between Armenia and the self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Few actually visit the town now of course, perhaps unsurprisingly given the destruction evident throughout. The only interest for many passing through is that Lachin lies not in Karabakh, but within what the international community considers sovereign Azerbaijani territory.
Published by Transitions Online 2001
CLEARING THE KILLING FIELDS
A few kilometers from the border of the officially unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, a shepherd sits with his grazing cattle in the lush pastures of Armenian-controlled Azerbaijan. The scene could grace the front of any postcard from the scenic Caucasus.
The twisted carcasses of rusting vehicles along the roadside tell a different story, though. The shepherd is sitting in a minefield.
Published 2004
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate. But, with salaries low in the medical sector, many doctors are all too willing to provide fake diagnosis to parents wishing to enroll their children into residential institutions.
Published 2003
AN UNDERCLASS EMERGES IN ARMENIA
For many visitors to Armenia, the center of the capital resembles almost any other city in Europe. As in Baku and Tbilisi, new hotels, restaurants and boutiques have sprung up where once stood communal markets and gray, drab shops selling wares that the majority could afford. But travel just ten minutes from the city center and it’s as if you’ve entered another world. Roads have deteriorated, buildings are in disrepair and some have even collapsed.
BEING YEZIDI
When Aziz Tamoyan sits behind his desk in the cramped and dilapidated room that serves as his office in the Armenian capital, he says that he does so as president of the country’s largest ethnic minority, the Yezidis.
Pointing at the handmade posters stuck on the wall to one side of his cluttered desk, Tamoyan reads aloud the slogan that also serves as the motto for his newspaper.
Published 2004
LACHIN CONFRONTS A DEMOCRATIC CRISIS
The flag of the unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh flies over the local administrative buildings in the center of Lachin, the strategic lynchpin connecting the disputed territory with the Republic of Armenia. The town and surrounding area, regarded as vital for Karabakh’s security, appear to be experiencing an unsettling demographic shift.
Published by IWPR 2006
LACHIN: THE EMPTYING LANDS
The local residents of Suarassy seem oblivious to the hidden danger as they herd cattle down a road known to have been mined during the Armenian-Azerbaijani war of the early Nineties. Despite the mangled military lorry rusting in a ditch to one side, none of their cows have so far detonated seven anti-tank mines still believed to be buried underneath, so they reckon the road is safe.
Published by Eurasianet 2006
Culture that Unites rather than divides
An Azeri teahouse, and naturally Azerbaijani can be heard spoken inside. A dozen men, identical in appearance, sit at tables, chain smoking and drinking cups of çay (tea). “Salam,” we say, before approaching the waitress. The owners of another Azeri teahouse, ironically run by ethnic Armenians just around the corner, directed us here, saying that the waitress too is Armenian. She is, even though the teahouse is owned by an ethnic Azeri. We take our seats at a table with the intention of once again exploring the reality of peaceful coexistence in at least one part of the South Caucasus.
Published 2010
MUSICAL DIALECTS OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
The two farmers standing barefoot outside their vegetable enclosure close to Georgia’s border with Dagestan meant well, but the wine they offered tasted like vinegar. Likely to put a grimace on the face of any foreign visitor, it did at least become more bearable with each additional glass. For the Sayat Nova Project, a team of two Americans and one Gibraltarian, the homemade beverage was an interlude to work documenting the diverse musical traditions of the South Caucasus.
CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS: DEINSTITUTIONALISATION IN GEORGIA
At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.
According to EveryChild, a British children’s charity with a country office in Georgia, very little was known about them.
Published 2014
BEYOND PANKISI: RADICALISATION IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
Children jump over puddles on the pock-marked street outside the mosque in Duisi, a small village situated in Georgia’s scenic Pankisi Valley. Inhabited by 8,000 ethnic Kists, a minority group related to the Chechens of the North Caucasus, Pankisi is also home to refugees from Chechnya who fled during the wars of the 1990s and 2000s.
Women dressed in in colourful chadors circumvent the water-filled holes caused by years of neglect while others have their heads uncovered or simply obscured by traditional Kist head scarves.
Published by 2015
FROM TBILISI WITH HATE: UNDERGROUND PUNK AND METAL IN GEORGIA
“Come, let me show you an example of how Georgian machos were enjoying their lives in the 1990s,” says Dato Tsomaia, the Sukhumi-born drummer of veteran Georgian Punk Band Vodka Vtraiom. It’s January and Tsomaia is still wearing his coat as he walks through the dilapidated corridor linking a number of nondescript rooms in a cold and decrepit building hidden away behind Tbilisi’s Tumanishvili Theatre.
Published by Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, May 2020
ARCHIVE ARTICLES – OFF SITE
ARMENIA–AZERBAIJAN: THE RISKS FOR GEORGIA
Two sizeable communities of Armenians and Azeris live – mostly separate – in Georgia. The current conflict has exacerbated the spirits of the two minorities, particularly on social media, arousing the concern of analysts
Published by Osservatorio Balcani e Caucasus, October 2020
In Georgia, It’s Open Season for the Far-Right
With authorities often turning a blind eye to far-right and neo-Nazi activities and an increasingly unpopular government opening the way for more ultraconservative groupings to enter Parliament and spread their views, Georgia stands on the verge of a shift much further to the right.
Published by Stratfor, August 2019
Counterterrorism Operation in Georgia Brings Home an Uncomfortable Truth
Overnight, a counterterrorism raid in Tbilisi shattered any sense of security in Georgia, from which dozens of citizens are believed to have joined militant groups in Syria and Iraq. Opposition parties and some media outlets in the country criticized the operation’s execution — in no small part because, in the absence of official information and updates, rumors ran rampant.
Published by Stratfor, December 2017
The Curious Case of Afgan Mukhtarli
At around 7 p.m. on May 29, Afgan Mukhtarli, an Azerbaijani activist and journalist living in self-imposed exile in Tbilisi, rang his wife, Leyla Mustafayeva. Mukhtarli said he was on his way home after meeting a friend at a cafe in the Georgian capital. He never showed up.
Published by Stratfor, November 2017
UNLIKELY NEIGHBORS
Published by Stratfor, May 2017
A Narrative of Peace: Ethnic Armenian-Azeri Coexistence in Georgia
Walking past Tbilisi’s Meidan Square towards Heydar Aliyev Park, it’s difficult not to notice dozens of tourists posing in front of a floral fixture that has become a main attraction for visitors to the city. “Tbilisi Loves You,” it reads.
Published by Meydan TV, May 2017
LATEST BLOG POSTS
Interview on Armenia-Azerbaijan Normalisation
Earlier this month I was briefly interviewed by Nazrin Babayeva from Report.Az. It was published in two parts so included below is the full text in whole.
Hope for breakthrough with Azerbaijan dims as Armenia a no-show
Hopes that Armenia and Azerbaijan might take a step towards normalising relations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku this month were dashed when Armenia failed to send a delegation to the event, despite receiving an official invitation.
Armenia-Azerbaijan talks in the balance as COP29 deadline approaches
Many remain skeptical that such a breakthrough can materialise, though it is clear that international pressure, especially from the United States, continues unabated. It is believed that both Yerevan and Washington hope to have an agreement signed before the U.S. presidential elections on 5 November and especially by COP29 just days later.