Jacob Resneck’s

Little boxes, little boxes, Little boxes all the same There’s the green one and the pink one And the blue one and the yellow one And they’re all made outta ticky-tacky And they all look just the same… � Malvina Reynolds (sung by Pete Seeger, 1963)

TBILISI, Georgia � It all started out with the best of intentions. A local non governmental organization had purchased scores of native saplings to plant in a settlement for people displaced in the August war. Around 160,000 people fled their homes last summer during Georgia’s disastrous tangle with Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.That added thousands of displaced families to the more than 200,000 internally displaced people from the wars of the early 1990s.

The latest wave has been �resettled� by the government in sprawling grids of concrete huts, many of which lacked even basic sanitation and are below international standards for housing refugees.

Erected on a floodplain off a major highway, Tserovani is more than 2,000 small structures that stands as a damning indictment for a failed policy toward the two breakaway regions. Painted in garish pastels, it’s nightmarish version of Levittown; it resembles an American suburb from a distance, but a closer look reveals something even worse. The roads are unpaved. There is little space between each house for a vegetable garden or anything useful. Many of these people had been rich farmers but now they are squeezed into a space without arable land and far from an urban center where they might find work.

I asked a Georgian architect for his opinion on this type of urban planning. �It’s a disaster,� he said. �It’s nothing but a show. To make it look like they are doing something.�

Our plan was to plant trees around some of these homes in what at best would be a beautification project. As a journalist, it would give me a chance to meet some of these people � and I hoped � conduct some interviews that I would be able to weave into my reporting.

Enter the government and their minions.

The day before our outing, two top apparatchiks � Environment Minister Goga Khachidze and Minister for Refugees and Accomodation Koba Subeliani � got wind of the day-out and decided it would be the perfect PR stunt. When we arrived the two men were surrounded by local camera crews as they drilled holes in the earth along a river bank planting conifers underneath power lines.

Our contact with the NGO was furious. We had meant to be helping the refugees beautify a kindergarten. But when the government showed up with their legions of young helpers, machinery and a media circus, most of the local people understandably hid in their homes. They wanted no part of an exercise that would suggest their government cared for their welfare. This was the same government that had tried to convince a German housing agency to provide fewer amenities � like running water and flush toilets � lest is would raise the expectations in settlements elsewhere.

We stood to the side drinking homemade wine from the hood of the truck while the environmental volunteers vainly pleaded with the government workers not to plant the trees beneath powerlines and in a grid that would resemble less of a park and more of a Christmas tree farm.

�I feel like I am part of some show,� one Georgian volunteer remarked bitterly as he swallowed a mouthful of his homemade wine.

A gaggle of refugees stood at the side watching the pageant. Their impressions filtered back to our group. This is a flood plain where cattle graze; the saplings won’t stand a chance.

After the ministers and their legions of green-vested helpers and television reporters who had enough tape to beam back to Tbilisi in time for the evening news � we went to work uprooting the poorly laid conifers and lending volunteers to refugees who were now venturing out of their huts and accepting help tilling their garden.

To our delight we discovered that some of the more enterprising refugees had stolen the better trees for their own use near the huts, so it wasn’t a total waste.

As a journalist the day was a bust. The presence of higher-ups and television cameras had ruined any chance for speaking to these people in a frank manner. But in the end we got plants in the ground and polished off a few liters of wine � which I consider a qualified success.

YEREVAN, Armenia — For an interrogation it seemed awfully genteel.
“We hope you go back to your country and tell everyone good things about Nagorno-Karabakh, that we want to be independent.”

These words came from a local primary school teacher commandeered by the police to translate while they held us for questioning.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand why we were detained you have to understand what Nagorno-Karabakh is. Like all unrecognized republics its history is tragic.
Getting the visa in Yerevan could hardly have been simpler. A passport photo, a nominal fee and some cursory questions and we had permission to visit this former territory of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic whose ethnic Armenian population fought a bloody war of secession.

The conflict killed and displaced thousands over six years before simmering down in 1994. Today this beautiful backwater is only accessible by a winding highway paid for by the Armenian diaspora. The territory has since been ethnically cleansed of Azeris and Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a state of undeclared war that continues to this day.

The two country’s armies continue to skirmish and and kill each other’s conscripts - a few at a time - along the mountainous frontier. This is the principle reason why you can’t place a telephone call from Armenia to Azerbaijan and the train between from Baku and Yerevan is only a memory dating back to Soviet times.

Visas in pocket, we began to thumb it out of Yerevan.  My traveling companion was a Spanish woman with similar misguided aspirations to be a foreign reporter. We got many lifts with rickety Ladas, Nivas and other Russian cars. The drivers were bemused by our lack of Russian language skills but all seemed sympathetic that we wished to hitch the 400 kilometers to Karabakh.

The road narrowed as snowy peaks rose from the valleys and we began to climb. Dusty villagers dressed in black cheerfully took us further into the interior. One Lada had its rear window spray-painted black, presumably because the driver couldn’t affort the tint-job.

Rain threatened as dusk set in. We still had at least 100 kilometers to go over the roughest terrain when a Japanese SUV stopped. The occupants were three architects from Yerevan on their way to present plans for a new open-air market in Karabakh’s former capital Shushi. All three spoke English - the Armenian raised in Iran spoke the best - and they agreed to take us all the way. Their musical tastes echoed mine and we raced through the darkness singing along to Jimi Hendrix’s “Catfish Blues.”

The next morning in Shushi we made our first contact with the plainclothes police. We had only walked across town to use the internet in the “state” controlled telecom building with the ominous-sounding slogan, “Karabakh Telecom: Always at Reach” when the cop flashed his identification.

Documents were shown and we left building trying to figure who had called the cops on us. In Stepanakert, a largish dusty town with a provincial air and little in the way of sights, we remained conspicuous.

Young Armenian men wear black leather, smoke slim cigarettes and have pointy shoes. Armenian women wear flashy fake leather and carry large handbags. With our dusty jeans and disheveled hair we received long stares that showed neither friendliness nor malevolence.

On a dusty side street and elderly man called to us to join him for coffee. We hesitated.

“??????????!” he implored.

We ascended a staircase into his two-room hovel. He dusted off the table to make tea and coffee and we proffered maple candy and Russian sweets we carried just in case. He went to the shop and came back with a small bottle of Armenian brandy. In broken German sprinkled with Russian, he explained that his three children all lived in Moscow. It was obvious he was bored and lonely so we chatted amiably about this-and-that.

He made a remark that I heard a lot in Armenia about how good the United States (and Spain) are because they are Christian countries. Muslims are fanatics, he said. Not all, I argued, and with a shrug he agreed. Yes, not all. I knew better to expect a people who had endured Civil War to break out in Koom-Bah Yaw and sing about brotherly love, yet it never ceases to depress me.

After wandering dusty streets for more than an hour we finally found our boarding house. The next day our destination was Aghdam, a former city that was completely razed by Armenian forces after the war to prevent its Azeri majority from ever returning. It lies on the buffer zone with Azerbaijan and, while not dangerous, is not something Armenians encourage tourists to visit. After hitching there we could see why.

The outskirts were an abandoned Azeri cemetery. Weeds and bushes pushed up between the Muslim headstones. It got worse

Every house, every building, everything had been systematically destroyed. We marveled at the attention to detail that must have gone into razing a city that used to be home to some 50,000 people.

We stood there not five minutes - mouths agape - when a blue BMW was a professional tint-job pulled up. At first glance the passenger wore a Marine marching band uniform, but no this was a Karabakh authority figure. The driver was plainclothes. Both wanted to see documents. We had no permission to be here, they explained. They pocketed our passports and drove us back to Askeran, a dusty town flanked by an ancient fortress outside of Stepanakert. I can’t say we were maltreated - the driver asked our permission before he lit a cigarette in his own car.

We were ushered into a dimly lit office. We waited quietly while they fetched the English teacher from the local primary school. Before the police inspectors returned I tried to warm her up.

You’re getting paid for this, right? I asked. She shook her head sadly. They really should be paying you, I insisted. We wanted the interpreter to be on our side.

It wasn’t a stretch to play the part of moronic tourists that had wandered astray. I explained to them that Aghdam is listed in a popular tourist guide called Lonely Planet and that we wanted to see it. I had read the Karabakh entry from a borrowed copy in Georgia.

“And this book you write- Lovely Planet - what will be its theme?” she asked.

I suppose I had overestimated her English skills and explained again. This satisfied them. They explained that Aghdam is in the buffer zone with Azeri forces and not safe for tourists. Funny, the farmer who had given us a lift hadn’t seemed concerned about safety.

They asked us our opinion on the conflict. Being a hayseed kid thousands of miles from home with little background in a long-running ethnic civil war, I didn’t take the bait. We both shrugged and looked at the door. They told us to go back to Stepanakert. They released us but only after deleting each and every photo I had hastily snapped from the back of their BMW.

Defiant, we didn’t leave immediately but instead scaled a ruined fortress. A local man told us there were no mines and we took him at his word, though as a precaution we didn’t stray from the visibly worn footpath leading to the summit.

The next day we hitched a lift with a jovial truck driver that took us the whole way from Stepanakert to Yerevan in his dusty Russian semi-truck. We nearly had to fight him to allow us to buy his lunch and it was a scenic eight-hour trip back over the twisty highway.

And that was that.