September 21st-27th issue, 1996, page 53

" Stepanakert - Nowhere have the Armenians been as energetic and tough as in Nagorno-Karabagh. In Soviet times, Karabagh was a beatiful, hilly (nagorny means mountaineous in Russian), mainly Armenian populated exclave in Azerbaijan. Nowadays, it is in effect part of Armenia, its population of around 130.000 entirely Azeri-free. And it would return to Azerbaijani sovereignty only with huge loss of life on both sides.

As in Armenia proper, things have improved sharply over the past year or so for the Karabakh Armenians. Electricity and food are far more abundant. Trade with Iranians, who have been allowed systematically to strip such captured Azeri towns as Agdam of almost anything movable, from pipes and tiles to copper wire, is brisk. This year there will be a surplus of homegrown grain.

Most strikingly, the Armenians have been tightening their military grip, have heavily resettled former Azeri-populated parts of the area (especially the villages along the crucial road through Lachin), mainly with Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, and have built new roads and improved old ones linking the exclave with Armenia proper. They are tough and determined lot who, so far, have proved much better fighters than the Azeris.

The only compromise the Armenians might contemplate is to give back some of the lower land to the east and south of Karabakh, perhaps including the towns of Agdam, Fizuli, and Jebrail, which are anyway probably indefensible in the long term. But the corridor around Lachin, which is only seven kilometers wide at its narrowest, seems not negotiable. The Armenians also want to hang on to Kelbajar, which has gold mines nearby. It is conceivable that the Azeris, in return, might be offered an even narrower corridor along the Iranian border to link their own exclave, Nakhichevan, with the main bit of Azerbaijan. So far, such a deal is unpalatable to the Azeris.

Meanwhile, the Karabakh Armenians remain armed to the teeth, mainly with Russian weapons that are at least partly paid for with cash from the Armenian diaspora in America and France. They may even have surface-to-surface missiles capable of hitting Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, and its nearby oil installations. Karabakh's president, Robert Kocharian, is a presentable former silk-factory boss who is the public voice of Karabakh abroad, but the real leader is Samvel Babayan, the 30-year-old defence minister, a diminutive but ruthless and charismatic former carcleaner whose brother, Kamo, is interior minister. Samvel Babayan is an arch-expansionist who thinks Karabakh should stretch even farther north. But at the end of the day, what the government in Yerevan says goes. "