Jacob Resneck’s

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.

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