Diplomatic source: "When Azeris purchase attack helicopters we'll know they're serious about settling a conflict by forceful means"

"We were engaged in heavy fighting with Armenian troops near my home village of Lachin when a mortar shell hit my friend's trench. When I got to him I saw that his belly had been ripped open by the shrapnel and he was screaming in mortal pain. He died in my arms as I tried to stuff his intestines back inside him."

At this point the storyteller suddenly goes silent as he relives the horror of that experience, which occurred nearly 14 years ago. Now 37, Gurhan Iliyev was just a 23-year-old sergeant in the Azerbaijan civil defence force when war erupted with Armenia in 1992. With the international media focused at that time on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda, this border dispute in the Caucasus region got very little news coverage in North America.

Yet it was a brutal clash spanning 24 months that left 30,000 dead (mostly civilians), 100,000 wounded and nearly one million people forced from their homes. Armenia and Azerbaijan were both former republics of the Soviet Union and were formally granted (along with Georgia) their independence in May 1992. All three republics were allocated the same amount of Soviet military material to form their own independent armies.

Within the recognized borders of Azerbaijan there is a mountainous region known as Nagorno Karabakh where a sizeable Armenian minority resided. Taking advantage of Azerbaijan's post-independence political disorder, the Armenian army entered the territory in 1992.

"We fought back, but our local defence battalion was short of heavy weaponry?- we had only two trucks and 650 men," said Iliyev. "The Armenians were well equipped and they were assisted by the Russian 366 Motorized Rifle Regiment. As a result, we took enormous casualties."

After completely securing the region, the Armenians continued to push into Azerbaijan. Ethnic Azeris were forcibly removed from the newly occupied territories.

Having successfully ousted his political rivals, then-president Heydar Aliyev was able to solidify his leadership of Azerbaijan in 1993 and ordered creation of a formal army to deal with the crisis situation in Nagorno Karabakh. Within 12 months the Azeris had managed to train and field six full infantry brigades, and their deployment to the front reversed the Armenian advances.

"In one offensive in the south we were able to recapture 12 villages occupied by the Armenians," said Maj.-Gen. Ramiz Najafov, one of the key architects of the fledgling Azerbaijani army. "While in the north we were able to destroy an entire Armenian regiment in just three days of heavy fighting."

The campaign became a stalemate, and a ceasefire was signed in 1994.

After the ceasefire, Armenian forces fortified their positions in the occupied Azerbaijani territories; the Azeris built trenches around the disputed region and the root causes for the conflict remained unresolved. What had been a little-regarded war would soon become an almost completely forgotten, but still simmering, flashpoint.

My discussion with Gurhan Iliyev took place at a pleasant outdoor restaurant close to the train station in Saatly, southern Azerbaijan. In the company of two other Canadian journalists and escorted by officials from the foreign ministry, we had been brought to the city to observe firsthand the ongoing plight of the nearly 800,000 Azeris who were forcibly displaced during the 1992-94 war.

Across the tracks from this restaurant is a four-kilometre stretch of railway boxcars, which serve as temporary homes for some 2,000 Azeri internally displaced persons.

There is minimal privacy because on average, two families share a single boxcar. Even after 14 years of continuous residence, there are few comforts.

"Every (displaced person) is entitled to a monthly ration, which includes flour, rice, sugar and oil," said Senan Huseynov, the Azerbaijani director for refugees. "On top of that they receive an allowance of 30,000 manats ($8 Cdn) per month to purchase meat and other foodstuffs."

As well the Saatly boxcar compound we visited a camp of crudely constructed mud brick houses, home to about 10,000. The standard layout for these shelters is three tiny rooms totalling 240 square feet of space and housing up to seven people. The luckiest of the refugees are now being relocated into custom-built compounds complete with community centres and medical clinics.

These new housing developments are still intended to be temporary. The displaced Azeris remain in virtual limbo — pawns in a political process that has been bogged down for 12 years.

When the 1994 ceasefire was first brokered, the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe established the Minsk Group to oversee and monitor the agreements. To date the United Nations has passed a total of four resolutions calling upon the Armenians to withdraw their military from the occupied territories as a first step to resolving the Nagorno Karabakh situation.

That was supposed to be followed by the resettlement of the displaced people into their former homes.

With no threat of any international military force being deployed to enforce these resolutions, the Armenians have refused to pull back their forces.

Fact-finding missions and the security organization continually report that the Armenians continue to destroy Azeri infrastructure while building their own facilities inside the occupied territories in flagrant violation of the ceasefire.

One of the main roadblocks to settling this crisis is that both Azerbaijan and Armenia refuse to budge on a referendum on the future state of Nagorno Karabakh. The Armenians want any decision on self-determination to be limited to people who live in the region. If Azeris are returned to the area before such a vote, the Armenians would still represent about a 3:1 majority in Nagorno Karabakh. The Azerbaijani position is that any such referendum must be decided by all 8.5 million residents of the country, which would certainly reject any separation of the territory.

Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov recently conceded that Azerbaijan would grant Karabakh the "highest level of autonomy in exchange for an immediate withdrawal." But the Minsk Group has grown frustrated with the lack of any real progress. In a statement released earlier this month, U.S. co-chairman Matthew Bryza chided both the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents for their failure to make any concessions. In response to the OSCE report, the Azerbaijani president said he remains "committed to peace, but he cannot accept the current situation."

To up the political ante, Azerbaijan has embarked on a massive military build-up.

"By next year we will have doubled our defence budget up to a total of $1.2 billion (U.S.)," said Maj.-Gen. Najafov. "We will be spending the equivalent of the entire Armenian federal budget just on defence."

While such a build-up would certainly change the regional strategic balance, international observers say this posturing is a long way from resulting in war. "Most of the money being spent is to increase their own salaries, not to add to their tactical capability," said one Baku diplomat.

"They are not out purchasing attack helicopters right now, but if they start to do that we'll know they're serious about settling this by forceful means."

That is not to say that the international community takes the Nagorno Karabakh situation lightly. The same diplomat summarized the crisis as being mistakenly identified as a frozen conflict. "There are tens of thousands of soldiers equipped with tanks manning trenches and occasionally shooting at each other," he said.

"When people are being killed, it is difficult to say the conflict is frozen."

By Scott Taylor

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