Shusha: The Broken Heart of Karabakh

Shusha, a cradle of the Azerbaijani musical and poetic traditions, stands out in the Azerbaijani national thinking as the most important place in the Karabakh region.

In May of 1992, on the day when Azerbaijanis for the first time as an independent nation were preparing to celebrate victory over the Nazi Germany, Azerbaijan suffered perhaps the most painful loss in its war with Armenia.

by Elin Suleymanov

For some reason most people thought it would never happen. Even after the massacre of Khojaly, the mountainous Shusha, though cut by Armenians from the rest of Azerbaijan and inaccessible by land for a while, was still the embattled and proud historic capital of Karabakh.

Then came the unthinkable, and Shusha fell to the Armenian forces at the same time as Azerbaijani and Armenian delegations were having another round of peace talks in Tehran. Once a beautiful mountainous resort with rich history and cultural tradition that used to inspire poems and songs, now lies in ruins – a symbol of devastation brought by the Armenian aggression.

How it happened is still a subject of conflicting accounts, though one thing is clear: Shusha’s one-time military commander and self-proclaimed hero Rahim Qaziyev, who swore to kill himself, should it fall, chose to leave the town and not to commit the promised suicide. Some defenders fought, but without a strong, organized defense Shusha became an easy pray for the Armenian attackers. Thus, the fortress of Shusha, impregnable for centuries, a symbol often called the soul of Azerbaijan, became a victim of overzealous Armenian aggressors and of the lack of unity among the Azerbaijanis.

Shusha, a cradle of the Azerbaijani musical and poetic traditions, stands out in the Azerbaijani national thinking as the most important place in Karabakh. Brenda Shaffer compared Shusha’s significance to that Jerusalem and within the context of the Caucasus this is a very appropriate parallel. The symbolism of the town’s fall can hardly be overestimated as it made the Armenian ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh an accomplished fact leaving no Azerbaijani presence on these historic lands of Azerbaijan and also underscored the inability then of then self-proclaimed Azerbaijani authorities to organize defense of the most important sites. It will take years to fully understand what was lost with the fall of Shusha.

The future is Shusha remains an enormously important part of the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a vital element of any settlement. Essentially, it would be hard to imagine a sustainable solution without some form of Azerbaijani presence in Shusha; this must be understood both by the Armenians and the mediators. While the exact form of such presence can be negotiated, leaving Shusha exclusively in Armenian hands cannot be accepted as a reasonable compromise in Azerbaijan.

Just as it has been throughout history, what happens in Shusha may well be the test of what the future of the Caucasus is going to be. Plans to rebuild Shusha’s Mosque advertised by the Armenians come as a bitter irony for all of its former worshipers are scattered throughout Azerbaijan’s numerous refugee camps. What is needed is not an empty architectural shell to cover up ethnic cleansing but the return of real IDPs to their homeland.

In the Caucasus, people have lived side by side, fought and made peace with each other for centuries. Shusha can continue to be a symbol of aggressive ethnic cleansing it has been for the last 11 years or become a place where the healing between embittered neighbors begins. The streets of Shusha are empty without its Azerbaijani inhabitants.

Note: Elin Suleymanov is a PhD student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in  Medford, M.A., USA