Note – This article was published in The Valley of Death by Tatul Hakobyan. The article was first published in 2020.
Those who had a chance to travel on the main highway connecting Voskepar village with the city of Noyemberyan, could not miss several half-built houses near the St. Savior church on the border with Azerbaijan.
These houses were built during 1980-ies, when Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan were in the middle the so called “wars of maps”. You will not find a single word about that “war” in Soviet media.
Based on Soviet maps these semi-built houses of Voskepar are located precisely on Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Just a couple of meters from these houses, Azerbaijani village of Aksipara is located, which became part of Armenia in early 1990-ies before the full-scale war in Artsakh began. The leadership of Soviet Armenia and its people believed that by building houses right on the bordering area, they would be able to prevent Azerbaijan’s territorial enlargement policy. Besides Ashagi Aksipara, there is also Yukhari Aksipara village, which is located to the west of Voskepar village, deep in the forests. This village is also under Armenian control, while the houses, like in some other cases with former Azerbaijani villages, are mostly destroyed.
The first clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis after Yeraskh and Sadarak, continued in the summer of 1990 in the area of Ghazakh and Noyemberyan. During early Soviet years, especially from 1922 to 1936, when Armenia was part of the so called Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic together with Georgia and Azerbaijan with the center of Tbilisi, there have been numerous cases of land swaps between the three republics, which were often accompanied by local clashes.
As much as there were talks about brotherly relations, when it came to territorial disputes, brotherly relations would turn into violent clashes. One of the episodes of Armenian-Azerbaijani map wars which happened in my birthplace Dovegh village in the fall of 1984, turned into physical fight between the parties and created animosity for a couple of years.
I was a school kid but remember that day very clearly. Our village had visitors from Moscow, who came to fix border disputes between Armenians of Dovegh and neighboring Azerbaijani villages. It was either late 1984 or early 1985. Our village is located on a triangle where the three South Caucasus republics Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan meet. The closest Azerbaijani village is Kemerli with which Dovegh had around 13 km of border.
During the Soviet era, the state borders between republics were a relative phenomenon. Formally, there were borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or Armenia and Georgia, but while crossing those borders people did not need to show passports or get checked by customs. You would only realize that you are not in Armenia where the road signs appeared in Georgian or Azerbaijani languages.
My memories of Azerbaijanis begin at a very young age. My grandfather had Azerbaijani acquaintances who would come to our house. My father also knew Azerbaijanis. We would call them with the term “dost”, which is the Azeri word for pal. In each village every person would have his or her “dost”.
Almost every single day we would see Azerbaijani women going through our village to take their agricultural goods on donkeys to the market of Noyemberyan. On their way back, they would stop by our village again to buy produce at our local stores. Sugar was the most sold product in this case. I guess Soviet Azerbaijan had sugar scarcity.
The relations between Azerbaijanis and Armenians were not simple. On the one hand we were all citizens of currently non-existent Soviet Union, on the other hand there was always tension in the air between us. Around 1800 hectares of forest, which belonged to our village, was mostly used by Azerbaijanis.
In the fall of 1984 tensions between us with Azerbaijanis became serious. The dispute was about who is going to use the forest, especially the water coming from that forest turned violent, to the degree when several people were hospitalized. One of the wounded was the deputy prime minister of Soviet Armenia Vladimir Movsisyan, who later describes these events in his memoirs.
The issues came up, when Azerbaijanis built a pipeline to take drinking water from the forests of Dovegh. It became such a big problem, that the head of Soviet Armenia Karen Demirchyan had to hold a conversation about this topic with his Azerbaijani counterpart Kamran Bagirov in Moscow. The parties decided to appoint special envoys who would deal with the issue on the ground, thus Armenia was represented by Movsisyan, while Baku sent their deputy prime minister Rasizadeh.
Movsisyan and Rasizadeh first meet in Ijevan and travel from there to Dovegh through Noyemberyan. They were accompanied by other local officials. “The car which I was sharing with Rasizadeh stopped by a water fountain, where Azerbaijanis were actively working on construction. As we continued our way through the forest a big group of armed people appeared before us. After these people attacked us, the Armenian delegates were separated from the group and were taken to the crossroad of Kemerli village. At this location a couple of trucks appeared, with another group of people with axes and sticks. An unexpected fight began and I got severely wounded. We were then told to sit in the trucks, while the attackers continued hitting us by fists and sticks”.
This is how Movsisyan describes the events in his memoirs. Together with deputy prime minister other Armenian official also fell victims to the attacks in the forests of Dovegh and Kemerli village. After the situation calms down, Movsisyan and the other officials accompanying him were let free. Meanwhile gossips go around Noyemberyan about Movisiyan and other Armenians being killed. The villagers pick up their hunting rifles and head towards Kemerli village. Fortunately, it becomes possible to prevent further bloodshed and growing discontent.
“After spending a couple of days at a hospital in Yerevan, I went to the first secretary Karen Demirchyan and told him the details of the story. I cannot forget, that after hearing my story Demirchyan turned around and cried in silence. It was the first time that I saw tears in his eyes” yet another episode from Vladimir Movsisyan’s diary.
This incident becomes a matter of discussion in Moscow. One of Soviet leaders Yegor Ligachov invites Vladimir Movsisyan to Moscow, to hear the details of the story from the first hand. Meanwhile, Azerbaijani leader Kamran Bagirov travels to Yerevan and formally apologizes for the incident. After this episode in Dovegh, Moscow decided to make territorial clarifications (demarcation) between Armenia and Azerbaijan, starting from the north in Noyemberyan, to the most southern border of Armenia in Meghri. A document under the title “Clarification of borders between land users of Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan” gets adopted.
June 9, 2020
