The Baloch have been living in a state of siege ever since 1948, when their territory was incorporated into the nation of Pakistan. Under the thumb of Islamabad, their rights and autonomy have been deliberately ignored by the international community, which has its own agenda for the region. Balochistan declared its independence on August 11, 1947, three days before Pakistan.

The sound of the explosion hardly raises an eyebrow among the restaurant patrons. This is the dining room of the bus station in Khuzdar, a Baloch town halfway between Quetta and Karachi. After a couple of minutes, Abdulhamid, a local journalist, gets a call. Only now does the  busy lunchtime crowd pause.

Abdulhamid breaks the dining room’s silence. “It was a communications tower. No injured or dead,” he announces. It’s good news for Sattar, who’s sitting nearby. The guerrillas’ actions won’t keep him from opening his shop in the bazaar this afternoon.

“Whenever the BLA (Baluch Liberation Army) kills somebody there’s always payback in the bazaar. The army drives down Jinnah Road (the main street) and shoots at the people from their jeeps,” says the Merchant, as he uses his fingers to wrap pita bread around a morsel of beef. He explains that four people died that way last June 4th, and a dozen more were wounded. In addition, seven local students have “disappeared.” This was the army’s response after the BLA killed a Punjabi officer a few months ago.

Khuzdar is like lots of other Baloch towns in Pakistan-controlled Baluchistan. Viral graffiti with the initials of the BLA and BRA (Baluch Republican Army), accompanied by the slogan “Down With Pakistan” spreads across the walls of almost every building. On the other side of all these discomfiting acronyms in Khuzdar stands the Pakistani army, the Pakistani Police, the Frontier Corps (border police), the Rangers and other paramilitary detachments, simply called “scouts.”

“Whether the Baloch attack or not, the army fires their bombs and weapons in order to scare us. Their training camps are right next to our houses,” complains Sattar. “Have you seen the barracks they’re building now? Some say it will be the largest military complex in all of Pakistan,” says the trader before leaving for work.

Indeed, the new military site appears large enough to accommodate all 600,000 troops in the Pakistani army. It’s so massive, it has already ‘swallowed’ two mud-brick villages. The villagers, mostly shepherds, continue grazing their livestock inside the huge barrack walls that lead from the road into the mountains. They won’t be evacuated until the wall has completely encircled the area. But it’s just a matter of time before yet another settlement of displaced persons  sprouts up in Khuzdar’s outskirts. Just like in Quetta–head to the settlements around there and ask  people how and why they came to live in the suburbs of a city, which is itself already a huge slum.

Other explosions

“Punjab (Pakistan) treats us like animals,” explains Sirbaz, a trucker who has stopped here on his way to Karachi. This man, around forty, is originally from Dalbandin, a town which lies very close to the place where Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in 1998. They were five explosions in the Chagai hills–explosions the local people will never forget.

“My sister has skin cancer, and so do two of my brothers. There are also plenty of people with eye cancer, and malformations are not uncommon among newborns,” says the trucker. Islamabad has used every means at its disposal to prevent any investigation into the impact of the nuclear tests on the local population. But today, everyone understands that the radiation, at some stage, reached the underground aquifiers–the only water resource in this arid region.

“If you pass by Dalbandin and the surrounding area, stay away from the water.” Shirbaz warns. “Do not even use it to wash your face.” After lunch, tea with milk is served–yet another British colonial legacy of the region. No one among the elders doubts that life here was much better in Balochistan under British rule than under Punjab’s. “What do people in Europe think about what is happening in Balochistan?” asks Atik, another passenger on the road to Quetta. As he waits for my response, he gazes at me steadily with the eye they didn’t burn out with a cigarette while he was in prison.

Victims of Stalin´s cartography of yesteryear, the inhabitants of this unrecognised territory face an uncertain future. Transnistria could end up as a bargaining chip in the often difficult relationship between Russia and Moldova.

“It´s not fair to call us ‘separatists’. It wasn´t us who wanted to split from the USSR,” says Sergey Simonenko from his bureau at the government buildings of a country that still nobody recognises as legitimate. Simonenko happens to be the Deputy Foreign Minister of the ‘Moldovan Republic of Pridnestrovie’. It´s a patch of land better known outside its boundaries as “Transnistria”.

In the fractured world of post-Soviet politics, Moldova emerged as a separate country, its boundaries conforming to those of the erstwhile Soviet Republic. The left bank of the Dniester had been annexed to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic by Stalin back in 1940. Mainly populated by Russians and Ukrainians, the inhabitants of this narrow strip of land decided a few years back that they rather fancied being masters of their own destiny. With Moldova’s independence from the Soviet Union, the two factions on opposite sides of the Dniester, those on the west speaking Moldovan and more attuned to Romania, and their neighbours on the east bank, having greater affection for Russia and Slavic values, quickly turned against each other.

“Moldova even considered joining Romania,” continues Simonenko, “but the majority of us here are Russian. What kind of future was there for us under Bucharest´s rule?”

The Moldovan-Transnistrian conflict was one of the many that reshaped the Eurasian map back in the early nineties. Boundaries were redrawn from Tajikistan to the Dniester. “Half a million Transnistrians finally got their independence,” claimed the Slavs. “And half a million Moldovans are kidnapped by a tyrant regime,” the right bank of the river.

Last September, Transnistria celebrated the 18th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, something that had already happened a year before Moldova declared hers. European Union officials like Javier Solana approved moves against Trans-Dniester on the basis of respecting Moldova’s territorial sovereignty. Quite ironic, seeing how many EU governments have applauded and recognised Kosovo´s independence.

Today, no country in the world recognises an independent political entity on the left bank of the Dniester other than the Ukraine. But some “quasi” states as Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been regular attendants to the annual celebrations in Tiraspol, the Transnistrian capital. Moreover, the two breakaway regions recently recognised by Russia have had representatives here for years, a sort of “would be” ambassadors.

Very much the same as the Caucasian republics, Transnistria also boasts its own passport, its flag, car plates…and they go further by printing their own stamps, and even coining their own currency: the Transnistrian rouble. Needless to say that none of these are valid outside this country which barely doubles the size of Luxembourg.

As for the national anthem, there are three versions, one for each official language: Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian. The melody, a candidate for the USSR anthem composed in 1943, is common to the three but the lyrics change depending on the language we use.

“Let´s praise our factories,” says the Russian version. Small wonder here as most of Moldova´s industry was located on this side of the river when the war started. The 90% of the electricity of the Latin country was produced here so the loss of Transnistria left the Moldova in literal darkness.

Lenin versus Sheriff

“No, we are not communists; the Moldovans are!” continues Deputy Minister Simonenko, despite the hammer and the sickle on the Transnistrian flag on his desk, and also on his business card.

“We still keep the Soviet symbols because we are proud of our past, that´s all”

In fact, Simonenko is right when he states that the communists are those on the west bank of the river. Vladimir Voronin is Moldova´s Communist Party´s First Secretary as well as the president in functions of the country since 2001. But his son, Oleg, owns the dubious honour of being the richest man of Europe´s poorest country. It seems that equal share of wealth is still a distant concept in Moldova.

Back in Transnistria, just a light stroll from 25 October street towards Gagarin boulevard is more than enough to realise that this is far from being a communist stronghold. Despite the severe look of Lenin´s red granite statue opposite the government building, Gazprom branches, jewelleries change offices and other outsiders to former Soviet taste work hard in the name of the privatization policies that rule here. The biggest example is probably Sheriff, the company allegedly linked to Igor Smirnov; that Kamchatka born bushy eye browed man who happens to be Transnistria´s first and only president up to date.

Sheriff owns the local petrol stations, a supermarket chain and the telephone company, but also the casino at the city centre, the brandy distillery, and even the local football team: Sheriff Tiraspol FC! Paradoxically enough, football is the only thing that links both banks of the river Dniester. The local team has been the indisputable winner of the Moldovan league since 2000. Moreover, Sheriff stadium is still the only one that fits UEFA criteria, so Tiraspol hosts Moldova´s squad´s international fixtures.

Just clichés?

“Western journalists come here on a daytrip: they take pictures of Lenin, the billboards, the war memorials, and they always write the same cliché afterwards “Transnistria: the last Soviet Paradise”, “the Soviet theme park”…But we are a modern country!” explains Svetlana, a chemical engineer in his late 30´s. “If it were for me, I would pull down all those symbols straight away”.

Svetlana’s anger towards these stereotypes is evident. Yet, the Soviet cliché is far from being not the most harmful of all those Transnistria has to bear.

“Chisinau constantly spreads rumours about arms and drug trafficking here”, continues Svetlana. “European observers have been checking these borders for years and they’ve found none of that”. She refers to the European Mission for Border Assistance that monitors both the Ukrainian and the Moldovan sides of the border. According to them, smuggling to and from Transnistria consists mainly on chicken and alcohol.

Abkhazia and Chechnya are also alleged “black holes” for drugs and weapons, but such rumours are not exclusive for quasi states or “Muslim threatened” areas. “Unfriendly” legal states are also targeted by this kind or accusations:

“During Kuchma´s rule, the Ukraine was also suspected of all sorts of arm trafficking. Surprisingly enough, all those accusations vanished when Yushenko and his ‘Orange Revolution’ came to power,” remembers Svetlana. “Nobody has mentioned the smuggling issue ever since”.

Nonetheless, we could have more easily stuck to an example everybody knows: the also alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction weapons’ in Iraq.

Whether there´s any truth in the rumours surrounding Transnistria, they´re very likely to tone down in the near future. Everything points now that Moldova´s long claimed territoriality will be solved by an agreement brokered by Moscow rather than by any kind of military intervention.

After being backed by Russia in and after the war, it seems that the Kremlin is now putting its weight behind Russia’s Slavic brothers on the Dniester. Moldova has been pressurising Russia for years by boasting her intentions of joining NATO. But now that the US global ballistic missile defence has reached Russia´s very borders, and with the Ukraine and Georgia willing to join NATO, Moscow is likely to buy Moldova´s ‘neutrality’ by forcing the Tiraspol authorities to bend down their knees and fully integrate within the Moldovan state.

For Moldova happens to be now a very strategic spot between the borders of Romania (already a NATO member) and the Ukraine. What can Transnistrians offer today to their former allies?

Not too far from here, the Russians from Crimea gather at the port of Sevastopol in support of Russia´s Black Sea Fleet. Will Russia take military action on the Ukraine in case Kiev finally joins NATO and kicks out the Russian fleet? Can Sevastopol be the future capital city of an unrecognised state like Transnistria is today?

“We feel bretayed,” confesses Yuri, 41, looking at his Russian passport once handed out by Moscow; the same one he used to vote for United Russia, Putin´s ruling party, last March. Yuri also keeps his Moldovan passport for practical reasons, and the Soviet one too.

“I keep it for my children,” says this mechanic from Tiraspol, looking at the CCCP abbreviation in gold on the red cover. “One day I want to tell my children that I was born in the biggest country in the world.”

“The Georgians have built a funfair in the neighbouring village, I can see the ferris wheel from my balcony”, says 20 year old Alik Gassiev.

There are also rumours of a hotel, a fitness centre and a swimming pool being built on the nearby village. In any case, there’s bigger certainty about the brand new cinema, this one very close to Alik’s house.

But Alik lives in Tskhinval, the capital city of the non recognised state of South Ossetia, and the only cinema in the area is in Tamarasheni, one of the handful of villages still under Georgian control within South Ossetia. Both Tskhinval and Tamarasheni are more than just close to each other: it’s as simple as a checkpoint blocking Stalin Street, Tskhinval’s main avenue.

The South Ossetian soldiers in grey camouflage won’t lift the barrier unless you are a member of the Russian peacekeeping troops, or you happen to live in the couple of houses that lay today in no man’s land. Looking is not forbidden, though, so you can see the straight road passing the Russians and the Georgians’ post. You can even spot that big yellow crane on the other side, and try to figure out what’s the whole construction thing about. That’s Tamarasheni: just at the throw of a stone, but still a world apart. The checkpoint will prevent Alik from going to the cinema today and there won’t be any Georgian couples strolling along Stalin Street either. Little wonder here, as it’s been like that for the last 15 years.

Today, both communities live divided by a number checkpoints like that one at Stalina, but also by a complex web of roads. Not content with the physical obstacles, they even have different time zones: Moscow’s one for the Ossetians, and Tbilisi’s for the Georgians. If there’s ever a chance to go to the cinema in Tamarasheni, it will be wise to remember that it’s always an hour later on the other side of the checkpoint.

With the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Georgia, as well as many other republics from Estonia to Tajikistan, formally declared its independence from the Soviet Union. “Georgia for the Georgians” was Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s slogan, Georgia’s first president. The Ossetians didn’t fancy the idea of being citizens of a country whose president considered them as “newcomers”. Besides, they would be split from their fellow North Ossetians, who have remained until today as part of Russia. War erupted when South Ossetia broke away from Georgia with a cost of thousands of lives a displaced. Today the conflict is an open sore in relations between Georgia’s Western-backed government and its neighbour Russia. Moscow has peacekeeping troops in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Tbilisi accuses them of siding with the separatists.

Re-elected last January, Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili has a two-pronged approach. In a direct challenge to South Ossetian president Eduard Kokoiti, he has set up a rival government, led by Dimitry Sanakoyev, a former independentist prime minister who switched sides. At the same time, Saakashvili is funnelling large sums of cash into the cluster of villages inside South Ossetia that remain under Tbilisi’s control. “There’s a battle for hearts and minds going on” he says, very often.

“Tbilisi is making huge investments as the funfair and the cinema in the villages are under their control”, tells Alik “They want to split South Ossetian society, but I’m sure such a thing will never happen”.

The last episode in Tbilisi’s “charm offensive” was a gig last October by Boney M’s former member, Marcia Barret. As many of the improvements going on are in the handful of Georgian villages of South Ossetia, the concert also took place in Tamarasheni. Ms Barrett admitted there that she didn’t know much about the situation in South Ossetia, but that she felt “honoured to be invited to a peace festival”.

Needless to say, the Ossetians couldn’t get there. The train has been out of work for more than a decade, and checkpoints as well as “mono-ethnic” roads are all built on purpose. Alik’s help is most welcome when it comes to understanding the intricacies of South Ossetian roads. He uses a map, one of those which links both North and South Ossetia, and that are so popular in Tskhinval.

“The Trans-Caucasus highway built in the eighties to link Tbilisi with Moscow, is now closed, as it criss-crosses Georgian and Ossetian villages”, Alik says. “We fully depend on the Russian supplies we get from North Ossetia, so we built a by-pass road northwards on the west of the republic. The Georgians have built their own one on the east side that goes south towards Tbilisi”.

Such is South Ossetia today; that buildings are in a state of crumbling dereliction, where neighbours use different stairs and go out at different hours, with the sole purpose of not meeting each other.

From Stalina to Moscow
But there’s definitely much more than just a checkpoint to Tskhinval’s main avenue. You could walk from there along its two kilometres of avenue to stop at the bollards that mark the end of the stroll. Nonetheless, you should spend some time at the theatre square, Tskhinval’s very centre. The place owes its name to the theatre building, today roofless due to a recent fire. Next to it lays the Iriston hotel, the only hotel in the city. Floors one and three are visibly abandoned, so any tourist paying the visit to Tskhinval is supposed to sleep on the second floor. And that’s also where the city’s only internet café is, so despite the lack of comfort, the occasional visitor will still have the chance to check his e-mail while still in his slippers.

But not every spot in the centre is in a state of crumbling dereliction. There’s a nice park devoted to Kosta Khetagurov, the father of Ossetian literature, which also hosts a statue of him handsomely dressed in a cherkesska. The Georgians beheaded the statue during the nineties war, but the first man to write poetry in the Ossetian language eventually got his head back when the conflict was over; for sure, a much easier and cheaper task than giving the theatre a new roof.

Theatre square is where the locals of all ages meet, mainly around the circular Soviet-styled modernist fountain covered by a colourful mosaic. There’s no water running from it but the teenagers sitting on its edge are far more concerned about new tones for their mobile phones. Just nearby, a handful of pensioners comment on the fire interchange last week at the checkpoint between Georgia and South Ossetia, just 15 minutes’ walk from here. That is, in fact, the main conversation in the area as the cluster of concrete governmental buildings is just on the other side of the road. Next to them stands an imposing billboard displaying a picture from Independence Day’s celebrations: It’s a very interesting parade indeed, the participants, dressed in medieval costumes, are riding horses representing the Alans. Both north and south Ossetians proudly claim their ancestry; they call their land “Alania” and, what is more, they still keep this old Sarmatian tribe’s language alive: a lingo close to Kurdish and Farsi, which has survived as a real oddity in the middle of the Caucasus.

The knights in the billboard are carrying the three striped Ossetian flag (white, red and yellow), but also the Russian one. In fact, it’s difficult to find an Ossetian flag without a Russian one escorting it in South Ossetia. Both of them wave together in governmental buildings, the national bank, the post office, and even in some of those tiny shops where you can buy almost anything; from a screw to an onion; the shops they call magazin across the whole Soviet world.

But if there’s been a day where both flags were almost as ubiquitous as on Independence Day, that was December the 2nd, the Election Day for the Parliament in Moscow. For yes, South Ossetia is officially Georgian land, but almost every South Ossetian holds a Russian passport. It gives them the chance to travel north and, of course, to vote too. Vladimir Putin’s party got an overwhelming victory among the South Ossetians who voted at the Russian peacekeepers’ compound. The huge numbers of posters with the former KGB leader’s face on Tskhinval’s walls were telling enough about locals’ vote intentions.

“Total independence is a utopia for us”, tells deputy minister of foreign affairs Teymuraz Dzodziev. “Our main goal is independence from Georgia, to join North Ossetians within the Russian Federation” explains a young bearded man in unaccented English. “We don’t suffer the embargo imposed to Georgians by Moscow, so we get all our supplies, our pensions… almost everything from Russia. Besides, almost every family here has a relative working in the north that helps to counterbalance the low local salaries. Those who can afford it have a son studying at the University of Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia’s capital city). If the Roki tunnel ever collapses, we can all say “bye bye” to South Ossetia”, admits the young vice minister.

If Russia is South Ossetia’s oxygen ballot, then the Roki tunnel is doubtless its “snorkel”: a 3.5km-long work of engineering that sections the High Caucasus range and connects both North and South Ossetia at an altitude of 3000m. Its flow of people, money and supplies is diverted afterwards to the by-pass road, of course.

Mixed couples
A sheepskin hangs from a tree next to Khetagurovo’s remarkable Georgian church, yet another reminder of how present the Pagan element is in the Caucasus. Despite somebody’s efforts to clear up the Georgian inscriptions on the temple’s solid stone walls, a good observer will still spot their traces. On the contrary, the hundreds of black graves on the snowy cemetery nearby are difficult to miss. The photographs of the deceased, many of them soldiers holding a Kalashnikov and a fiery look have been engraved on basalt. Around them, bottles of wine and vodka lie half emptied amidst the flowers left for the departed. The Ossetians might not be “100% Caucasian” for their neighbours’ standards but their graveyards hardly differ from those all over Georgia.

A handful of villagers gather on the strip of land that functions as the main square here, right in front of Khetagurovo’s only magazin. A pleasant chat under the winter sun, occasionally interrupted by an old Lada or a bus coming from the north. Unfortunately, none of those breaks the Vladikavkaz-Tskhinval journey here

“During Soviet times there was work for everybody. We wouldn’t care about anything”, says Vladimir Tarasov, a regular assistant to Khetagurovo’s busiest spot. “I never thought I’d have to struggle to survive after retiring. If it weren’t for the pension I get from Russia, I would starve to death”.

“Ossetians and Georgians lived together before”, adds Konstantin, Vladimir’s neighbour, “We would even marry each other. Actually, there were lots of mixed couples.”

It’s Saturday but the kids of Khetagurovo, are at school, the same as everybody their age in South Ossetia. A wide range of Soviet symbols still hang from the school’s walls: red stars, black and white photographs of the local heroes, and many other reminders of the Great Patriotic War (WW II). Only the South Ossetian hymn on a poster reminds us that there’s no Soviet Union any more, despite the disturbing presence of Stalin on a big canvas.

A bell marks the end of today’s classes and dozens of kids walk home under the threatening look of the Soviet leader. None of them witnessed Soviet times, not even its last years. Nonetheless, they all know that the man who bet the Fascists was an Ossetian, “despite her mother being a Georgian”.

“And how did Stalin’s parents get to meet each other?” may have asked one of these kids during today’s classes.

The same question might have been raised in the neighbouring Georgian village. Classes were over exactly an hour ago there.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

There´s only one place on the entire planet where it is possible to secure the visa necessary to enter Karabakh. And that´s at the country´s permanent mission in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. The delegation from Karabakh occupies a rather handsome building, very close to the Iranian embassy. Nonetheless, the visa procedures for Nagorno Karabagh are pretty much smoother and less restrictive than Armenia´s southern neighbour: fill the application form, bring a couple of pictures, pay the corresponding fee, and you can get the visa stamped on your passport the very same day.

Everything’s perfectly normal, except for one odd thing: once stamped on your passport, Azerbaijan becomes forever off-limits. Small wonder, as Azeri government in Baku regards Nagorno Karabakh as being most definitely Azeri territory.

Oblivious of geopolitical odds, public taxis bound for Stepanakert, NK´s capital city, run daily from Yerevan´s Kilikia Central Bus Station. Once the Yerevan´s tufa-pink outskirts have faded out, the highway then runs southeast parallel to the Arax river towards semi-arid central Armenia. Across the other side of the Arax valley, Turkish territory, the twin peaks of a snowy Mount Ararat reach for the sky. The view of Ararat dissapears once the road reaches the Zangezur region, a longish corridor flanked on both sides by Azeri territory; the Nakhichevan exclave to our right and Azeri mainland on our left side. Iranian petrol tankers aplenty cross this road southwards on their way home. Their moustached drivers sound the horns of their rusty trucks, at the request of the kids who gather alongside the road without much else to do.

The marshrutka makes a necessary logistic stop atop the southern village of Goris before heading for the Lachin corridor. This “umbilical cord” connects Armenia´s mainland with the enclave proper and is, by far, the best road in the whole Caucasus. Unsurprisingly, it has been funded by the Hayastan Fund, the Armenia Diaspora spread all over the world.

A billboard welcomes us to “Free Artsakh”, which is the name Armenians give the enclave. A little further, an immigration officer makes sure documents and passports are in order at the Berdzor checkpoint. Very unlike those other de facto borders between Georgia and its rebel republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, military presence here is scarce, as this is just a spot between two different areas, yet inhabited by the same people. Among Armenians, Karabakh folk have a reputation for being stubborn highlanders; defenders of Christianity´s easternmost edge, but they weren´t the only mountain people in the region. Berdzor is the new name for Lachin, the capital village of an area once called €œRed Kurdistan€. Unfortunately, the original name isn’t the only thing that´s vanished, for nothing remains of the Kurdish people that lived here before the war. Kurdish book-printing and cultural flourishment reached an end when the Karabakh war started. The local Kurds happened to live in the finger-shaped area between Armenia and Karabagh, which would turn into a place of strategic key importance. The risk for Karabakh Armenians of getting firmly locked in Azerbaijani land was too big, and had to be avoided by any means. All the Kurdish settlements and districts were occupied by Armenian forces with the military support of Russia. Moslem Kurds were victims of an ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Armenian forces during shameful episodes like that one of Kelbajar, where twelve Kurdish villages were razed from the face of the Earth. Most of the Moslem Kurds and the Azeris living there removed themselves to parts of Azerbaijan well distant from the front line, and the few who remained paid for their stubbornness with their lives.

Soviet Naples
The descent into Stepanakert is an easy run down through stunning scenery. The marshrutka lurches into the bus station where a handful of taxi drivers look in anticipation at the new arrivals. But the Karabakh capital is a small city, a place for walking, so there´s no need to pay any overpriced ride in a Lada.

Non-Armenians are required to register upon arrival at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they are warned against visiting villages in the front line such as Aghdam.

There´s nothing to see there but destruction€, says the official in charge.

Besides, the place is still heavily mined; you are risking your legs or even your life.€

I´m also warned of the risk of getting arrested and deported in case I take the trip, which makes me wonder whether I´d be expelled from Karabakh or Armenia proper.

Developed during Soviet times, there´s not much this three-traffic-light capital has to offer. The old quarter of the city is almost in ruins, except for a handful of sorry buildings that remain in a dire condition. Nonetheless, the lack of historic sights is counter-balanced with a screechy Ferris wheel and a legion of babushki selling pop-corn and sunflower seeds in paper cones, some of them recycled pages from old annuals recalling another year of Soviet success. If you are lucky, you might even get sunflower seeds in a picture of Lenin.

Another must are the colourful local carpets, embellished by graphic military scenes like that one of a Soviet chopper overflying Karabakh´s national symbol; a tacky sculpture of an archetypal pair of Karabakh´s grandparents just outside Stepanakert. War reminders in Stepanakert are also visible in the abandoned buildings or the bullet holed façades, sometimes conveniently hidden by the laundry, hanging Napolitan style.

If you feel curious about the origin of all this war and rubble, you may pay the visit to the National History Musem. An enthusiastic English speaking guide will brief you for an hour on Armenian Epos; from the massive Urartian Kingdom to the first Armenian woman to drive a tank. When you enter the room dedicated to the Great Patriotic War you feel you are in some kind of chapel. Small wonder here as the red velvet curtains and the low light reflected on Armenian heroes´ marble faces confer the place an atmosphere of sacred mistery.

Back in the sleepy streets outside, a flight of stairs leads to the ruined stadium nearby Stepan Shaumian´s park, named after the communist leader to whom the capital city of Karabagh owes its name. This Tbilisi born Armenian Soviet hero was, paradoxically enough, the leader of the Baku commune during the Russian Civil war years. The Baku Armenians, a vibrant community for centuries of the Caspian city, were entirely expelled during the population exchanges between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the late eighties and early nineties. The pogrom suffered by Armenians in the Azeri town of Sumgait led to mass deportations of Azeris from Armenia, and the subsequent retaliatory deportation of Armenians from Azerbaijan. The transnational population exchanges then turned into a village-scale exercise, so mainly Armenian Stepanakert and neighbouring Shushi, which was predominantly Azeri, exchanged their populations. Absurdity reached its climax in the tiny village of Tug in southern Karabakh. Its ethnic composition was fifty-fifty so a line was drawn in the middle of the town´s square splitting both communities, mixed couples and their children included.

Jerusalem

Shushi, Shusha in Azeri, overhangs Stepanakert from the top of its 1,400 meters at the very heart of the enclave. Today it´s rather difficult to believe that this was once one of the largest cities in Transcaucasia, and that it also also hosted one of the largest Armenian churches in the world. Shoushi Hotel claims to be the best in Nagorno Karabakh: “Hotel rooms overlooking the city with great panorama view of Ghazanchetsots Cathedral”.
Reconstructed in white limestone, the church stands like a crystal palace amid the debris that Armenian refugees from Baku or Ganja now call home. Azeries were the major group in Shushi before the war but all of them left when Armenian troops took this town, which had turned into a perfect garrison to shell Stepanakert. From this city in the heights, GRAD rockets were fired downwards towards the Armenians´capital, only 10 kms away. Well protected by a Persian fortress, Shushi looked unconquerable and easily defendable by a small number of soldiers. Nevertheless, every guess proved wrong, for Armenians captured the town in just one day. Shamil Basayev was one of the last warriors to leave. He complained afterwards during an interview for Azeri TV about the lack of organization and discipline the Azeris showed during the assault. “Shusha was just abandoned”, concluded the Chechen warlord.

Shushi is also known as the “Jerusalem of Karabakh” for its huge historical importance for both communities: Azeris claim Shusha as the cradle of Azerbaijan´s poetry and music, whilst Armenians argue that the political and scientific-cultural Armenian elite of the Transcaucasus were found in this, once one of the major religious spots in the whole Caucasus. Unfortunately, nothing here recalls the religious crossroads still visible in the Middle East holy town. Shushi´s former three mosques lie in ruins and only a couple of minarets stand up bearing witness to the town´s former Moslem community. In case visitors are not discouraged by the ubiquitous rubble, the rotten carcass of a cow has been left inside one of them to prevent any praying towards Mecca.
The only sign of life in this semi-ghost town can be seen around the cathedral. Kids too young to have known the war exercise in the football ground nearby, or try to ride downhill on overloaded bikes in groups of three. They´re probably tired of playing hide-and-seek amidst the debris of Shushi.

Last Stop: Hiroshima

A tourist agency from Stepanakert hands the few foreign travellers an English brochure with maps of both Shushi, and Stepanakert and a list of the main tourist sights in the enclave. There´s obviously no space for all the 4000 churches perched in the mountains, but it does list every village in the area. Surprisingly, though, there´s also a brief note on Aghdam ghost village: “An abandoned town with a Persian mosque from the XIX century. Liberated in 1993″.

Armenians say that Karabakhi Armenians are historically highlanders, the original inhabitants of this Mountanous Karabakh, and that Azeris belong to the plains. Aghdam, once a large Azeri town in the plains of 150,000 souls, lies only twenty five kilometres from Stepanakert but still within artillery range. The city was therefore reduced to ashes in an “action of self defence”, according to Armenian officials.

Aghdam is a shameful episode Armenians don´t want the world to know about; a taboo word which brings dark memories of the past. But there are more: Khojali, Fizuli, Kelbajar…
Visitors to Karabakh eager to pay the visit must keep a low profile about their intentions, especially when it comes to writing your planned route on the visa application form.

Actually, Aghdam doesn´t lie within Karabakh bounds but in the buffer zone between both sides. Armenians are aware that Azerbaijan will claim the territory as theirs sooner or later, so they´ve made no efforts to settle in this town in no-man´s land.

No marshrutka goes to Aghdam, as nobody lives there today, so one of those Lada taxis is the only choice. Most of the drivers are reluctant to drive me there as nobody wishes to risk running into the militia. Luckily enough, the youngest of them is willing, and ready, to take me to Aghdam and wait around for me for half an hour, always depending on the military presence, of course.

Try and picture the most depressing and forlorn spot you have ever seen; Aghdam is much worse. An abandoned Moslem cemetery on our right hand side marks the entrance to a post-nuclear scenario. There are no people, no cars, no sounds, not even the singing of birds can be heard. Houses, cinemas, governmental buildings€¦everything has been levelled to the ground. Even the remnants of a sculpture, probably one of those Soviet heroes, have been sawn to pieces, as if any reminder of the human race had to be methodically razed from the face of Aghdam; just old Kolkhos workers are still visible in what remains of a big mosaic on a façade. A small bus stop, where Aghdamis would wait for the bus to Stepanakert, is slowly being engulfed by weeds growing on its concrete carcass. Road surfaces are cracking and almost every building is in a state of crumbling dereliction. Aghdam came in handy when it came to finding building materials for renovating Shushi and Stepanakert, so doors, wiring, window frames, plumbing and anything else worth taking, has long since been looted and plundered.

The Persian mosque, though battered, is the only building that stands up in Aghdam, although not since the Armenians took over, has the muezzin climbed the spiral steps. The two minarets soar upwards towards heaven, in vain, for life´s burning stream has long dried up in Aghdam.

“What’s this I asked myself, sitting up on my bunk. A mirage or the island of Tahiti? Or the heavenly lands of Samoa? That was Konstantin Paustovsky´s first impression when he first saw Abkhazia.

It was just after the Russian Civil war when the Ukrainian journalist and adventurer decided to move to the Caucasus from his native Kiev. The sea seemed to be the only feasible entry to Abkhazia, as roads and bridges had been blown up, but no one was allowed off the ship due to a quarantine that was being enforced against the typhus that was ravaging the neighbouring provinces.

Roads and bridges have been reconstructed more than once during the last eighty years but things haven’t changed that much. Abkhazia still remains blocked since the tiny republic seceded from Georgia back in 1993 after a brief but brutal war. Paradoxically enough, it is now the sea route which is impracticable. The former “quarantine” has been replaced by the current trade embargo from the Georgian government, who, of course, doesn’t recognise any new country in the Black Sea region.

Leaving the Abkhaz de facto border behind, the exuberant vegetation pays contrast with the emptiness of the place. Silence is abruptly broken by the helix sound of a Mi 24 Russian combat helicopter flying low. Cows graze alongside the road, indifferent to the scarce road or air traffic; or even lie down in the middle of it as if they knew that asphalt is doubtless a safer surface than the still heavily mined forests of this border region.

“Cleared by the HALO trust” proclaims blue panels at the entrance of every ruined village. The British NGO not only takes anti-personnel mines off the ground, but also advises the local kids against the risk of playing football outside the school yard. Too many apples on a tree or too much moss on a graveyard may indicate the same as the international yellow triangle with the black skull inside that warns against land mines. Another fact Gali kids are aware of.

The eleven o’clock bus to Sukhum waits at Gali’s tiny bus station, the first real place of any size after the border crossing over the Inguri River. Despite the Russian ruble being the ordinary currency in Abkhazia, Georgian laris still come in handy in this sector to buy a drink or a khachapuri (a cheese filled pastry) at the handful of kiosks nearby.

The road reaches the Black Sea at the small village of Ilori just before the ghost city of Ochamchire, to wind along the coast afterwards all the way up to Sukhum, the Abkhaz capital. An old sign in Cyrillic at the entrance still keeps the Georgian name of the city: “Sukhumi”. Nonetheless, name changing is scarcely surprising here, as this has been a major trading port for centuries. The original Abkhaz name is “Aqwa”, but it was also called “Dioscurias” when the Greeks colonised this corner of Colchis more than 2500 years ago. A restaurant in downtown Sukhum is also named after Sevastopolis, the name given to the city by the Genovese sailors back in the XIV century.

The ruins of the ancient prosperous trade centre lie just offshore, so, very unlike those ones on the surface, they can’t be visited. In the “new” Sukhum, families pick their way through rubble en route to the beach, as the concrete debris seems to pop up from the soil alongside the climbing plants that struggle to hide it. The “queen” of the ruins is doubtless a burnt Stalinist building, which was the Presidential palace during the Soviet times. Edvard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet minister of foreign affairs, turned Georgia’s second president following a coup, personally commanded his troops during the war but narrowly escaped afterwards from this besieged building. Today it remains as an appalling symbol of the Georgians’ defeat.

Very close to the ruined palace stands a mural of a triumphant Vladislav Ardzinba in camouflage gear, Shevy’s Abkhaz counterpart during the conflict, and Abkhazia’s first president. Also telling are the bullet holes, still visible on façades or even park statues, as well as the pictures of the “martyrs” that hang from the walls of a centric building nearby the renewed Hotel Ritsa. Unfortunately, very little remains of the former Hotel Abkhazia, once a luxurious resort opposite the now empty harbour. So far, it seems that priority is given to accommodate the dead soldiers at a centric park facing the sea. A mosaic of a smiling Lenin looms out of the tropical vegetation at the entrance of a Russian R&R compound, which “miraculously” escaped the bombing back in 1993. Small wonder as it were the Russian fighters who shelled the city from the air. Deliberate or not, Mir Prospekt, the Peace Avenue, got the first bomb.

Still, Sukhum is a city of exuberant vegetation, where citrus trees hang heavy with ripe oranges. New shops have opened during the last year along Mir Prospekt; a necessary ball of oxygen in this suffocating war-torn atmosphere. Despite the embargo they don’t look in short supply, probably thanks to the “illegal” cargo ships that arrive from Turkey, but mainly to the fluent ground transportation from neighbouring Russia, via Sochi.

Leaving the capital behind, the road meanders northwards along the semi-tropical coastline, pressed close to the sea by the Caucasus range. Eventually it climbs up the slopes in order to avoid being pushed into the water, offering a remarkable aerial view over Sukhum before reaching Novy Aphon (New Athos) Monastery.

Back in the twenties, Konstantin Paustovsky took the same journey by coach with his close friend, Isaak Babel. The beauty of the place was then eclipsed by a young Russian nun at the monastery hostel: “the apotheosis of woman”, according to young Babel. Soon afterwards, this complex, built by monks from Athos in the XIX century, would be turned into a Soviet holiday camp and severely vandalized for years.

Today, Novy Aphon is the “must see” of the Abkhaz Orthodox Church, as well as a major tourist spot alongside the Anacopia gorge nearby. The numerous Russian tourists come on a day trip from neighbouring Gagra, and both sites get particularly busy in those grey days when sunbathing is not an option. Small wonder, as Gagra doesn’t offer much apart from its long beach, which is, on the other hand, what the average tourist from central Russia has been longing for throughout the year. Still, the curious traveller heading for the hilly streets up the Caucasus slopes is likely to hear a dozen languages: from Armenian or Pontic Greek to the north Caucasian family; Adygean, Circassian, Chechen, Kabardin…and Abkhaz, of course; “a language spoken in guttural voices, somewhat reminiscent of an eagle’s cry” according to Paustovsky’s perception.

Unfortunately, despite Abkhaz being the only co-official with Russian, it is still an endangered language. Besides, it’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which has proved almost useless for the North Caucasian weird phonetic system: Hardly 3 vowels but 56 consonants. Even Fazil Iskander, Abkhazia’s best known writer, wrote his whole work in Russian, which is, in fact, the language everybody understands here.

Gagra’s outskirts offer many more surprises: Here a Greek graveyard, there a tiny Armenian church, or even a restaurant in the heights where the tourists can take a picture of themselves holding a Russian machine gun or even a bird of prey for just 50 rubles.

But nothing compares to the beauty of Lake Ritsa. The road that climbs up to almost 1000m is crowded with tourist buses that make several stops at the gorges and waterfalls on the way before they reach the lake. Then comes the moment when everybody marvels at the blue water, topped off by the 3256m peak of Agapsta. Most of them will sit down afterwards at one of the terraces nearby, but those feeling more adventurous may take up some high altitude boating to reach Stalin’s dacha on the opposite shore. The Georgian dictator realised here that dynamite proves more effective for fishing than a simple rod, so it was easy to guess for the local shepherds if they were being gifted by the most powerful man on Earth. Shopping is also a choice up here, with souvenirs ranging from Abkhaz flagged cups and key rings to T-shirts with the same logo – green and white stripes with a white hand on a red background.

Packed tours stop nearby the lake but the road keeps climbing up to the border with Karachai-Cherkessia, another North Caucasian republic within the borders of the Russian Federation. Other groups, yet very different from these, took the same road down from the neighbouring republic during the war. Northern Caucasus battalions composed of Circassians, Adygeans, Kabardins and Chechens crossed the high border post to help the Abkhaz fight the Georgians, and laid the first brick to build a North Caucasian Confederation flanked by the Black Sea and the Caspian. Amazingly enough, the recently deceased Shamil Basayev fought alongside the same Russians who would shell Grozny a year later during the first Chechen war. He commanded the so called “Abkhaz Battalion” despite its members being Chechen volunteers.

War is still latent in this corner of the Black Sea, especially since Georgian troops took control of the Kodori Gorge in upper Abkhazia last July. Tbilisi made the symbolic movement of installing what they claim to be the “true Abkhaz Government” back in motherland Abkhazia, or at least on the heights of it. Furthermore, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakhasvili said during his New Year speech that 2007 would be a decisive year for Georgia.

For the time being, tourists still flock every summer to what is left of the former “Soviet Riviera”. Buses and marshrutkas run full with sunburnt tourists along the Abkhaz highway, but, by no means go any further than Sukhum. Small wonder, for whatever happens near the Georgian border belongs to another world, yet in the same tiny corner of the Black Sea.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza.

An irate Saakashvili looks towards the lost land on the other side of the river from a big mural. This is the Georgian checkpoint, even if Georgia doesn’t recognise any border here. Nor does anyone else.

——

After a brief but savage war back in 1992, the Abkhazians beat the Georgian troops with the help of the Russians and a group of volunteers from other Northern Caucasian republics, such as the recently deceased Shamil Basayev. Eduard Shevardnadze commanded his troops personally but narrowly escaped death afterwards in the siege of Sokhumi. Quoting Neal Ascherson, the British writer and journalist: “The Abkhaz were finally the owners of their own house. But the house had no roof and they wandered alone in its devastated rooms”.

It has been more than 13 years since Abkhazia became a de facto republic, only recognised by other non-recognised countries such as South Ossetia or the Republic of Transdniester. Still, the Abkhaz have managed to produce their own flag, car plates and 11 ministries. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues visas to those non-CIS travellers willing to visit the former “Georgian Riviera”, but hardly any can be found among the refugees gathering at the Georgian post.

In 1999, only those refugees from Gali, the region near the border, were allowed to return to their houses, or what was left of them. Today, some of them wait for the UN-sponsored white bus, whilst some others prefer to take the stroll across the Inguri on foot. Most of them are women dressed in black; widows with the pictures of their lost relatives hanging in badges on their black clothes. They carry bags full of goods, most of them bought at the street market in Zugdidi, the closest city to the de facto border. Zugdidi is the capital of Mingrelia or Samegrelo, which is how the locals call their region. It has its own distinctive language, Mingrelian, but unlike the Abkhaz or the Ossetes, Mingrelians never showed any will to secede from the Georgian mainland. Famous Mingrelians are Beria, the KGB leader, and Gamsakhurdia, post-Soviet Georgia’s first elected president. Today Mingrelia is a meeting point of refugees and armed people, who want a military assault on the breakaway region.

After a 500m walk, the silence is broken only by the running water of the Inguri. A metal sculpture of a gun with its cannon tied in a knot marks the beginning of the bridge, controlled by the Russian checkpoint. The alleged peace-corps, most of them soldiers under twenty, stare at the widows with boredom. Flaxen blond soldiers stand by their Kazakh looking mates by the barbed wire, which marks the corridor between the armoured vehicles. They also wear blue helmets, although not the UN troops’ sky-blue. In fact, everybody holds two passports: the Abkhaz, which is only valid inside the republic, and a Russian one, useful to sell hazelnuts on the Russian side of the border, or to study at a Russian university. Besides, the ruble is the currency of Abkhazia, and Russian language is co-official with Abkhaz. Needless to say that any attempt from Tbilisi to break into Abkhazia would be taken as an aggression on Russian citizens by Moscow. The MI-24 flying low over our heads makes it clear. Surprisingly, though, there’s no requirement to show your passport here.

More than 200.000 Georgians, most of them Mingrelians, fled Abkhazia after the war. Added to the humanitarian catastrophe, Georgia had to face the collapse of its tourist infrastructure and the consequent economic disaster – Abkhazia had produced 50% of the tourism benefits of the country. Besides, the majority of the hotels spread across Georgia were suddenly turned into “vertical refugee camps”, like the former Hotel Iveria: Once Intourist’s “Jewel of the Caucasus”, the Iveria, in downtown Tbilisi, became the symbol of the terrible living conditions of the refugees. From this tower block, the 800 or so refugees could enjoy the beautiful panoramic vistas over Tbilisi, yet they preferred to sacrifice these by closing their balconies with wooden planks. At a ratio of one room per family, balconies became an unnecessary luxury, which had to make place for a kitchen, complete with portable gas burner, an extra double dorm, or both.

Leaving the “peace” tanks behind, the refugees walk in silence across the long No Man’s bridge towards the Abkhaz checkpoint. One cannot help thinking of Glienicke´s bridge in Cold War Berlin; no spies exchange going on here, but still a spot between two blocks: Putin’s Russia and the “Rose Revolution” Georgia, backed by Bush. Maybe due to the newly-acquired importance of a bridge, which just linked two provinces not long ago, workers with straw hats paint the banister in blue and white, and fill the potholes with asphalt in the humid, hot weather. Some of the pedestrians recognise a friend or a relative among the workers and stop for a chat in Mingrelian, and a gulp of water. I wonder which part of the border sponsored the rehabilitation. Maybe it’s just the UN again, who wants the bus line as clean as it can get.

A couple of grey cows graze right below a bullet-holed panel that tells in Abkhaz, Russian and English that we are already in the “Republic of Abkhazia”. More barbed wire, two barracks, a tattooed soldier wearing a Stetson hat and another one leafing through a Russian porn magazine.
A third one with an Abkhaz flag sewed to his shoulder checks that my passport data matches that one in today’s visitors list.

“Dabai”, he says in Russian, “go ahead”.
Not “welcome to Abkhazia”, no football chat, no pleasantries. Maybe it’s just too hot.

Taxi drivers gather next to their Lada Zhigulis. Just nearby, a white “Marshrutka” with a “Gali” signal on the dashboard gets filled with refugees in black, carrying the images of the dead.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

When Claudius Bombarnac, Jules Verne´s imaginary hero in The Adventures of a Special Correspondent, arrives at the Apsheron peninsula on the shores of the Caspian he is appalled by the pollution, but thrilled at the same time by the naphtha that seeped out of the ground.

——-

“A marvellous phenomenon indeed! Do you want a light or a fire? Nothing can be simpler; make a hole in the ground, the gas escapes, and you apply a match. That is a natural gasometer within reach of all purses”

Map courtesy of ICG.org

Despite Verne’s concern, nobody has ever paid much attention to ecology in this part of the world. Sumgayit, Baku’s neighbouring town 40kms north of the Apsheron peninsula bears brutal witness to this. Sophisticated Bakunians occasionally laugh at Sumgayit locals; “they dry wool in the middle of the street!” some say. But textile handicraft is doubtless the least to worry about in the city once designed to be one of the biggest petrochemical complexes in the whole Soviet Union. Housing was easy to get here, so this village of 4000 souls in 1940 turned into today’s concrete-tower city of 270.000 people.

The main goal of “Azerbaijan’s pride” was to maximize low-cost production, so the nomenklatura cared very little about the wastes being dumped into the air, into the sea and onto garbage heaps. Despite the region’s “generous” government providing milk, cheese and meat to those workers in factories where toxicity was extreme, the environmental disaster had direct consequences in cancer mortality rates and premature-born babies, many of them with genetic defects as well. It’s not by chance that the city that once held the world record for infant mortality has got a separate section of its cemetery for children, many of them with severe malformations, according to the portraits engraved on their tombstones.

Travellers still eager to pay the visit will find marsrutkas aplenty leaving for Sumgayit outside Baku´s 20th January metro station. It’s just an hour’s drive northwards across the Apsheron peninsula during which the collective taxi stops whenever and wherever the passengers wish.

The greens provided by Baku city centre’s trees are substituted by the greyish thicket once in the outskirts. Verne had already pointed out that only the wormwood, the plant from which absinthe is made, survived in this barren land beaten by the winds, so Bakunians had to wait until the Nobel brothers started pumping oil here to get to enjoy the trees and the parks that cool down the city still nowadays. The story tells how the first Swedish oil tankers were filled with tons of fertile soil on their way back to Baku after cruising the Volga; a remarkable example of sustainable development, which unfortunately Exxon, BP and the rest of their heirs are not willing to follow in any way.

The feeling of movement comes from the continuous interchange of people in and out the mini-bus, as Baku´s outskirts couldn’t be more monotonous under the grey concrete towers called “Stalinska”, “Kruschevska” or “Breznevska”, named after the man ruling the Empire at the time. Actually, post-Soviet cities’ outskirts look exactly the same, from the Caspian shores to those of the Pacific coast.

The view from the hill before Sumgayit couldn’t be more appalling: The familiar mass of concrete, but this time surrounded by rusty pipes, rusty chimneys and rusty oil derricks here and there, many of them standing alone in the middle of a black puddle. Anyhow, Sumgayitans probably get used to it from an early age as rust also covers the swings for the children downtown.

But the city has some pleasant areas too, like the open air-market at the city centre, whose colourful display of fruits and vegetables helps to break the monochromy of the place. From there, the waterfront can easily be reached through the Sulh (peace) Avenue, which leads to Sumgayit’s two sole pieces of art just before the beach: the “Dove” sculpture, and the Nagorno Karabagh martyrs´ monument. Both made of concrete, the first still has a certain modernist charm, but the latter looks more like a rocket launched by resentful Armenians from the very heart of Nagorno Karabagh, willing to avenge the pogroms the local Armenians suffered here back in 1988. Armenians would also stick to the ethnic cleansing of Azeris and Kurds during the Karabagh conflict, hence the thousands of refugees from the war-torn region spread out all over the country, including Sumgayit.

Two rows of stairs help us leave the war memorials behind and make our way to the beach, beaten by the Jazri, the onshore wind. Looking towards the sea, one cannot help think of the strategic place this country has on the world map: Turkmenistan and Central Asia to the east, Russia to the north and Iran to the south. Some may say it is part of Europe; some others consider it the gate to Central Asia. President Ilham Aliyev, the last of the Aliyev dynasty, in power since time immemorial, goes even further and promises his people a “New Kuwait” for the near future. But plain Azeris hardly get to see any benefits of their “black gold”, most of which runs across British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipe – almost 2000 Kms long, running across the Caucasus and Eastern Turkey to reach the Mediterranean.

The long beach also gets its dose of rust, present on football goals and kiddies’ swings; on a big wheel that could be a replica of that one in the ghost town of Pripiat, near Chernobyl; and also in a wrecked ship that marks the end of the stroll.

Even if ecology has dramatically improved after the breakdown of the most poisonous factories during the economical discord of the early nineties, the majority of sewage here is still dumped into the sea unprocessed, turning the Caspian shoreline into a biological “dead zone”. Oblivious of this fact (or maybe not) Azeri tourists, longing for the sea, flock to the Caspian beach resorts during the summer season; something that the famous visionary French writer would never have been able to predict.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

The “Hamilton route”, named after the New Zealand engineer who designed it, links both Iraq and Iran through astonishing mountain landscapes, deep in the heart of Kurdistan.

…At least that’s what my friends in Dohuk have assured me. Even if it were not like that, I’d much rather take this journey than head back to cross again at the nasty Turkish border at Silopi, on my way to Iran.

The mini-bus to Akra leaves Dohuk bus station, fully packed, at 9 am. It’s a relatively safe trip, as I won’t have to leave the Kurdish region. But east of Akra, public transportation will be scarce, so I’ll need to hire a driver or try hitching.

Dohuk, also called “The Kurdish Manhattan” for the great profit it makes from petrol smuggling, is already busy with traffic at this time, but once outside the city everything quietens down, as we take the straight road east across the Sheikhan region. The familiar image of people crouching down under the sun, alongside the road, gives way to one of massive queues of cars, waiting for their fuel tanks to be filled at a rusty gas pump; this in a country that owns some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

We leave the conical Yezidi shrines of the Sheikhan region behind and continue east, eventually reaching the dusty village of Akra. I’m impressed by the huge fortress built by Saddam Hussein. Strategically placed to dominate and control the area, this solid, architectural monster needs no reconstruction work, which is more than can be said for the sorry village. The bus terminates here, and I’m informed by a local guy that I’ll need to wait for at least three hours for the next minibus bound for Rawanduz. Whether this is true or not I never find out, as he immediately phones his cousin, Abdullah, who arrives 5 minutes later in a handsome pick up. I negotiate a price of 30Euros. Not a bad deal, considering that it’ll take him more than 7 hours to get to the border and back. Besides, and what is more important for me, I’ll hopefully get to Piranshar on the Iranian side during daylight, and from there to continue to Mahabad.

Abdullah, smartly dressed with his Shalwar (the traditional, Kurdish, baggy trousers) tells me that he made the same journey on foot during his peshmerga days: 10 days it took, to reach the border with Iran, during Saddam’s time. It’s obvious that he wants his rematch now, as he is driving fast as hell, except on the occasions when we see the number of smashed cars on both sides of the road, probably driven by other “vengeful” drivers. He still has time to point somewhere in the mountains from where the PKK presumably runs their operations deep into the Hakkari area. I thought I was well travelled, accustomed therefore to this kind of suicidal driving, but I simply couldn’t help yelling when we overtook a rusty truck at the brow of a hill; there was no human way to know the road ahead was clear. “Inshallah” says Abdullah humorously, just Allah’s will. – So that was the secret.

To counter the speedy driving, we have to endure numerous Peshmerga checkpoints. At the entrance and exit of every single village, or just in the middle of nowhere, our Toyota is stopped. As we drive east traffic gets scarcer, so these Kurdish soldiers have two ways to kill the boredom: sleeping under a shady tree, or making me unpack the full contents of my backpack. Occasionally, I’m asked for money to get my passport back, but luckily enough, I still have with me a card from one top dog that I interviewed in Dohuk two days ago. I had deliberately borrowed it for these occasions. It works as follows: when they ask for money, I tell them I don’t understand what they’re saying, but that I have this friend at the Governorate of Dohuk who could help translating. I would get my passport back immediately. No need to pay for it. “A very good card this one,” says Abdullah laughing, once back in the car. “Very good indeed”.

After watching the Zagros range getting ever closer as we drive east, we finally reach its base. We cross a remarkable iron bridge and the road instantly takes us to a gorgeous place, crowned by a fantastic waterfall named Beijal. This is a local tourist spot; not only for Kurds, but Arabs too, as such water opulence is a rare spectacle in this dry and barren part of the world. A cafe with a big covered terrace hosts dozens of families, drinking Pepsi or tea under the shade. Nearby, boys in their swimming trunks and girls wearing a scarf swim and laugh next to each other, while some couples queue to get a “honeymoon picture” at a particular spot just by the waterfall. The place really is full of charm, thanks to its glorious waterfall, which brings so much life to the area, as well as joy for the people in a country that’s suffering so much.

Leaving Beijal behind us, the road winds across the narrow canyon of Ali Beg – 20kms, flanked by 500m cliffs; another dramatic sight that I’ll never forget. “Hosha” (wonderful) I say to Abdullah, grateful for bringing me here. He nods.

After Beijal, we take a wrong turning and head north instead of east for several kilometres along a dust road, but Abdullah realises the error before we get hopelessly lost. I don’t care that much because wherever I look the mountain scenery is overwhelming. We stop at one of the marvellous springs in the area before we face the last stage of our journey.

The steep road and the high peaks surrounding us indicate that we are close to the border, but it’s the international landmine warning signs that give confirmation. The Iran-Iraq war, the first and second Gulf wars, two decades of unrest, and even WWII, have turned this landscape into one of the world’s most heavily mined areas. It’s not by chance that shepherds here, or in Afghanistan, always walk behind their flocks. Actually, we’ve seen plenty of humble black tents that identify their owners as Kurdish nomads, and it’s they who prove best how arbitrary borders tend to be, especially in this part of the world: Two countries, Iraq and Iran, but the same ethnic group of people on both sides; exactly what I thought three weeks ago when I crossed the Turkish-Iraqi border at Silopi, or what I’ll feel on the way back from Iran to Turkey. But now, at this border post, controlled by the Peshmerga, I get to hate these stupid man-made lines more than ever – I cannot cross.

A middle aged Kurdish soldier explains to me in Italian that I need some kind of “safe-conduct” document, that I was supposed to have acquired in Dohuk, to allow me cross the border. I have to go back to Dohuk, he says, and get the paper.

“Are you telling me that I have to go all the way back after a 7 hour drive and come again tomorrow?” I ask him, totally crossed.
“Mi dispiace” (I’m sorry) he answers.
Plan B: I try a bribe.
Nope.
Plan C: I try again with my “magic” card.
“Right!” he says, “that’s the man who’ll issue you the letter”
Jomeini frowns at me from a massive mural on the other side of the border, and I pointlessly do the same at the mustachioed, Italian-speaking Peshmerga.

Ataturk also looks irate, back in Silopi the following day, but not as irate as me. It will finally take me three more days to get to Mahabad on the Iranian side – three border posts, and just to reach the same people. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I took the trip across the Hamilton Route, even if I did have to do it twice.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza