New Players in the Middle East

...All of them have a point...

...To many Armenians, the war over Nagorno-Karabakh is a struggle for national redemption...

...An oriental linguist by training, he vowed to liberate Karabakh come September...

...That's why reforms are making little headway...

...It was of the Caucasus that Aleksandr Pushkin wrote: "I know how to use a dagger—I was born in the Caucasus...

...They did so well in Bulgaria in the 1870s that a horrified British public called Gladstone out of retirement to teach the savages a lesson...

...Fighting the Russians for almost thirty years, he was legendary for his personal courage and uncompromising zeal and even earned the grudging respect of the Czar himself...

...Armenian horror stories of Russian betrayal are matched only by Azerbaijani tales of how Russia helped the Armenians...

...Gladstone annexed Egypt and the Middle East never looked the same again...

...Widely ignored and under-reported, the northern Caucasus is but a part of the political equation...

...A constant battle ground for three empires—the Russian, the Turkish, and the Persian—it has been a homeland for an unparalleled mosaic of nations, tribes, languages, and dialects...

...The Cherkess renaissance in the Caucasus is strongly felt in the diaspora, where many openly dream of a return...

...To disguise this, they have removed a memorial originally erected to commemorate the establishment last century of the first Armenian settlement in the region...

...In Syria and Turkey they have penetrated the highest echelons of the armed forces while their kith and kin proudly are part of the Israel Defense Forces...

...And Russians still remember the 1918-20 civil war in which the Caucasus served as a launching pad for both the Red and the White Armies...

...Disagreement in November 1991 over the Caucasus heralded the conflict between Boris Yeltsin and diehard conservatives in Russia's parliament...

...The Caucasians seem well on their way to teaching the Balkans a lesson...

...A constant source of internal and external instability, Karabakh deprives Azerbaijan of the chance to capitalize on its enormous oil wealth, and seek shortcuts to a market economy...

...As late as 1912, a Russian governor-general of the Caucasus informed the Czar that the people of the Caucasus would "submit to cohabitation only under the influence of the Russian government, without which they would plunge into bloody rivalry...

...Both are conflicts inspired by national myths and mythologies rather than politics...

...Endless attempts to resolve conflicts in the Caucasus—like those between Georgians and Abkhazians, Georgians and South Ossetians, North Ossetians and Ingush, and between Moscow itself and the Chechen—reflect mounting Russian concern about the region...

...While we stayed in Armenia, three leaders of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) engaged in a bloody eight-year guerrilla war against Turkey, visited Yerevan, not for the first time...

...It was in Nalchik last September that Russian security forces lost their nerve and arrested Shanibov under the cloak of darkness...

...Its leader, maverick former Soviet air force general Dzhokar Dudayev, plays a key role in Yuri Shanibov's Confederation...

...He files grim reports to his superiors in Ankara where concern is mounting that Caucasian instability could spill over into its own territory...

...Felix Mamikonyan, Armenia's ambassador in Moscow, is one of many 'Armenians who boast a family tree with roots in Karabakh dating back to the twelfth century...

...Its disintegration could give wrong ideas to other non-Slavic nationalities within the Russian Federation like T4tarstan and Bashkorostan, two Muslim and Turkic-speaking republics in central Russia...

...Denied the long tradition of statehood and nationhood enjoyed by the Armenians and the Georgians, an Azerbaijani nation is already emerging in battle...

...The Caucasus is more than a precious piece of real estate...

...At the same time, Iran is successfully luring with Armenian government support un- or under-employed Armenian physicists and nuclear scientists to work in the Islamic Republic, and last year dispatched a member of the Iranian parliament to lay a highly symbolic wreath at the Iranian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan...

...Dudayev's bluster is taken seriously in Moscow, where the Security Ministry, Russia's renamed KGB, believes that hundreds of Chechen agents "could organize terrorist acts on order from Grozny...

...When Moses took the Israelites out of Egypt, he walked them forty years through the desert until the generation with the slave mentality had died...

...Give me a month," he says almost boastfully, "and I'll simply walk into Tbilisi...

...To the Azerbaijanis, never sure who they are and where they came from, the mountains of Karabakh constitute the battlefield on which they can reassert their identity...

...But it is also an example to Iran's own estimated 15 million Azeris, who may see it as their lever finally to escape Persia's embrace...

...Russia is unlikely to cede control of the northern Caucasus as it did with the Ukraine and the Baltic states...

...War offers it the opportunity to define not only its enemies but first and foremost itself...

...Viewed as the Moammar Qaddafi of the Caucasus, Dudayev has threatened to send his supporters to blow up nuclear power stations in Russia if Moscow attempts to overthrow him...

...Russia is the chief conduit for anti-Islamic aggression," he declared last year...

...With Nalchik as its administrative center, Shanibov'shome state of Kabardin-Balkaria, a former Soviet autonomous republic, is populated primarily by Cherkess, a nation of handsome and fierce warriors who fought valiantly until their final defeat in 1863...

...Deceived and manipulated, they were persuaded to migrate to the domains of the Ottoman Sultan...

...All insisted that "we will return and, if need be, fight our way back...

...Known in Armenian as "artzakh," or "homeland," it plays a role similar to that of Kosovo in Serbian national consciousness...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Caucasus is rejoining the club of Middle Eastern nations it was forced to leave in the middle of the nineteenth century...

...Beyond merely failing, they gave birth to even more radical forms of nationalism such as that of deposed Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia...

...But Shamil's increasing posthumous popularity is an indication that history could as yet take strange twists if Caucasians indeed maintain unity and strengthen their international relations...

...Independent Azerbaijan is the world's only other Shi'ite nation...

...Wrapping himself in the cloak of Islam, Dudayev sees the wars in the Caucasus and in BosniaHerzegovina as a conspiracy to suppress the Muslims...

...Among them, Shanibov is a prime contender to don the mantle of Imam Shamil, a nineteenth-century Muslim mystic and ascetic who still inspires Islamic militants across the Middle East and Central Asia...

...A town of unfinished apartment blocks and decrepit oil refineries that boasts more imported Western cars than any other formerly Soviet city, Grozny has virtually no water and has been unable to repair its broken telephone system...

...Shanibov was mysteriously allowed to "escape," an exploit that earned him instant folk-hero status...

...Pliny, the ancient historian, wrote of one Caucasian port city alone: "We Romans did business there with the aid of 130 interpreters...

...In return, Armenia expects Iran to help it offset a hostile geography, which renders the small country an easy prey to its neighbors...

...They came from different corners of the world searching for their roots...

...Among the diaspora dreamers: a retired Syrian general offering his military expertise, a prominent Turkish banker, a young businessman from Jordan, a tourist from the Serbian-dominated province of Kosovo, and an ostentatious wheeler-dealer from Berlin sporting his old Mercedes in the dusty streets of Nalchik...

...From his second-floor office in the former Communist party headquarters there Yuri Shanibov runs his confederation and dispatches armed volunteers to help brothers and cousins throughout the region in need...

...His mild manners, cultured voice, and sense of history reflect his distinguished academic and legal career rather than his new-found status as a revolutionary determined to reverse 200 years of history...

...Yet Armenians only recently became a majority in Nagorno-Karabakh...

...o less crucial is the southern Caucasus, or N Transcaucasus, where in 1987 the bells first started tolling for Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika...

...A cross town from the presidential mansion, a no-nonsense Turkish general follows from his country's newly established embassy Azerbaijan's poor conduct of the war...

...As he explains his vision for the Caucasus, Shanibov's thick fingers move across the map in substitution of his battle-hardened warriors...

...Controlled by Muslims for centuries and formerly part of the Azeri Khanate of Karabakh, it is seen by Armenians as the cradle of their civilization...

...Grouping under one umbrella sixteen nations who often have only geography in common, they seek to carve out of Russia and Georgia a new Caucasian state that would stretch from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the estuary of the Don...

...Unwilling to lose another part of the empire and be forced to retire to their sixteenth-century borders, Russian politicians and generals are doingtheir utmost to perpetuate Caucasian weaknesses, supplying arms to whoever will take them...

...In this murky, transcendental world few are open to the dynamics of give-and-take peace negotiations...

...Carefully shielded for much of this century from the outside world by Moscow, the Caucasus, whose resistance to the Russian occupation was the most violent the Czarist empire ever encountered, is today emerging from its cocoon...

...It would also almost certainly redraw beyond recognition the boundaries of the Middle East and spark brutal ethnic conflicts across Eurasia...

...Azerbaijan's emerging identity finds its macabre manifestation in the ever-expanding cemetery opposite parliament on Baku's Avenue of the Fallen...

...Together with the foremost Muslim cleric in the Caucasus, Dudayev issued a statement stressing "the need to unite all the Caucasian Muslims [into a force] capable of resisting the ideology which is being imported here...

...Such a state would push Russia out of the Middle East and force her to retreat into her sixteenth-century reclusion...

...We are fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh for the next generation, not this one," says Arkady Saakian, a gaunt, bearded 28-year-old former guerrilla leader who was crippled in the war...

...He nearly succeeded in dragging Britain into a war to preempt Russian expansion into the Middle East, tantalizing European romantics in the process...

...Inept handling of the war by successive Azerbaijani governments finally culminated in May in the fall of the last remaining Azerbaijani stronghold in Nagorno-Karabakh...

...With Abkhazian secessionists today pushing Georgian troops out of a key Black Sea province linking Georgia with Russia, his troops now see an opportunity to redress perceived historic injustice...

...It's Russia's fault...

...A Turkish nightmare envisions alliances between odd and ominous bedfellows: Christian Armenia joining, hands with Shi'ite Iran to undermine secular, Western-minded Turkey and/or Armenian revolutionary socialists collaborating with Marxist Kurds in pursuit of a common dream to push the Turks out of Eastern Anatolia, and carve it up between themselves...

...He never did, and the very ghosts he rode to power are now coming back to haunt him...

...With no end in sight, the war provides foreign powers like Iran, anxious to expand its influence and break out of international isolation, with tempting but risky opportunities...

...Enmities, only thinly disguised under Soviet rule, have fully erupted in the last four years, tearing communities apart, doing away with notions of coexistence...

...Just back from a visit to the Gulf, Dudayev sits on the ninth floor of Government House in the center of Grozny, the Dodge City of the Caucasus, amid his newly acquired Gulf paraphernalia: a Saudi flag with its Koranic inscription on his wall and a copy of a Saudi-owned London newspaper on his desk...

...The old Communist nomenklatura in Baku was overthrown by a popular revolution, and within a month Abulfez Elchibey, an austere intellectual and fierce nationalist, came to power...

...C ompeting with Cherkess Nalchik to lead the Caucasus away from Russia and away from reality is Grozny...

...His would-be successors are by and large atheists and agnostics, more at ease with the precepts of Kemal Ataturk than those of Ayatollah Khomeini...

...But Russian pacification is unpopular in the Caucasus with Russia being everybody's favorite villain...

...An increasingly frayed Russian army in the north, numerous militias and paramilitary groups in the center, and well-armed guerrilla groups and regular armies in the south are bound to coin a new sinister term in international relations, Caucasification, or the overthrow of an entire territorial order, a quick descent into disintegration and internecine warfare, and the inevitable involvement of foreign powers...

...The leader of history's last North Caucasian state, Shamil would today be described as an Islamic fundamentalist...

...Named after Ivan the Terrible and even more militant and outspoken than' Nalchik, Grozny is the capital of Chechniya, which unilaterally declared itself independent from Russia a year and a half ago...

...The comparison with the Jews is so obvious that their Arab diaspora speaks of Cherkess Zionism...

...They crisscross the Caucasus, pilgrims to the Old Country, still conversant in a language their ancestors spoke 150 years ago, some from Anatolian villages whose social structures have remained intact ever since their exodus in the 1860s...

...The Russians are encouraging the wars here to maintain control...

...Within days, supporters besieged the town's public buildings...

...Recently, a Russian newspaper compared the Chechen network with Narodnaya Volia, the revolutionary party that employed assassination and terror in its bid to overthrow the Czarist regime...

...Sipping tea in his presidential residence, President Elchibey reminds visitors that there is an "unwritten law" in the United States according to which people fighting for liberation should be encouraged...

...B uilt as a fortress against Imam Shamil's troops, Nalchik is now a main center of Pan-Caucasian agitation...

...Villages, sometimes only a mile apart, couldn't communicate with one another prior to the Russian annexation...

...Too much of its modern literature is influenced by Caucasian images and landscapes...

...The Caucasus could be called the Russian Balkans, were not the Balkans a model of rationality by comparison...

...Shevardnadze is a dictator, no better than Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler," Dudayev thundered during our interview...

...At the same time, they present themselves as the only saviors capable of protecting the warring nations from each other's wrath and vengeance...

...A land of towering mountains and epic legends, it was the Caucasus that inspired Mikhail Lermontov, an imperial army officer, to write Hero of Our Time, and eventually agree to a senseless duel that cost him his life...

...Thousands have joined the ranks of Shanibov's Confederation as volunteers willing to die in an attempt to reclaim what was the divine property of a non-Slavic, largely Muslim population until Russian imperialism in the late eighteenth century raised its head...

...Almost daily, Azerbaijanis bury their war dead in Shi'ite funerals that send Baku into a frenzy...

...Perfidious Russia will never be forgiven by the North Caucasians for selling them out to the Georgians, who, in turn, will never forget how Russia stabbed them in the back...

...Too much of its political and military thinking involves the preservation of the region as both a buffer zone and a launching pad...

...Allowed to form a military caste, they fought the Sultan's wars, settled his rebellious frontiers, and at times massacred his disloyal subjects...

...Dispersed today over five Middle Eastern countries, the Cherkess often serve in rival armies...

...Russians and Georgians are the same...

...They are isolated...

...Nagorno-Karabakh, the impoverished, mountainous region at the heart of the Armenian-Azeri conflict, carries little practical significance, but is heavily loaded with symbolism...

...A wall-size map recalling the lost era of Soviet-inspired fraternal internationalism dominates his modest office in the North Caucasian resort of Nalchik...

...The focus of foreign policy in the region, the ethnic roots of its people, and the predominance of Middle Eastern specialists in government signal the return of once lost tribes...

...Enough was enough...

...If the Azerbaijanis in Iran struggle for their independence . . . they deserve to be supported," he says...

...Iran is a very realistic country when it comes to its neighbors...

...In its minuscule, often artificial autonomous republics, created by Stalin to mix up the races and weaken their sense of nationalism, romantic visionaries and self-serving opportunists plot national liberation...

...The Caucasus is certain to emerge in the next few years as a major political and military hub, an avid importer of Middle Eastern conflicts, and an eager exporter of its own wars and rifts...

...The nightmare is not far-fetched, given Turkey's refusal to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with Armenia...

...The map's politics contrast starkly with his rebel movement, the Confederation of North Caucasian Mountain Peoples, which is both a product and an engine of violent disintegration...

...We can help Iran break its isolation and establish ties with Europe," a senior Armenian official, Ruben Shugarian, told us in American-accented English...

...It bleeds Armenia to death, and forces Armenians to queue for hours late at night for meager bread rations...

...The Caucasus was also the setting for Moscow's most bloody and futile attempts to stifle nationalism in the final days of the Soviet empire...