In an interview on Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic by Thomas Goltz

Goltz was one of the rare reporters in the 1980s and 90s who was actually in Baku. It was one of the most complicated periods in Soviet history because Azerbaijan was one of the few republics openly asking for independence. Unfortunately, the story of this movement isn’t known about in Europe. I was living at home in Baku and there were 10,000 people out on the streets in 1990. The Soviets were concerned because it was a clear threat to the whole system and they were scared. At that time the Armenian-Azeri war had unofficially being going on since the 1980s and it became very dangerous with the armies gathered on both sides – very brutal. Thomas Goltz was extremely brave and crossed the borders, got past the KGB and all their attempts to stop him and he went straight to Karabakh and followed the soldiers from region to region, recording what he saw with his own eyes.

Does what he writes reflect your own experience of what it was like at the time?

Yes, he does it very, very well. I was young and didn’t know exactly what was going on from a political point of view. I met him later and expressed my gratitude to him for doing what he did because I know it could have cost him his life.

On January 20 1990 the Soviet Army brutally demolished the independence demonstrations in one night. Officially there were 300 dead but really there were thousands. People had gathered in the main square (probably some Soviet propaganda had got them there) and the Soviet army came from planes and ships and tanks and the tanks just drove through the square killing everybody. We had been taught, we believed, that the Soviet Union was the most peaceful country in the world. When the tanks came they didn’t stop. The next day there was no electricity, no television or radio. There were so many dead in the streets and the army loaded the bodies on to ships and dropped them in the Caspian sea.

Is this in Goltz’s book?

It mainly touches on the war in the Karabakh region. What is in the book is the massacre that happened in Khojali in Karabakh. The whole population was killed by the Armenians in one day. Babies, pregnant women, children, everyone. February 26, 1992. The evidence from the few people who escaped was that it was horrific – the people were not even shot. They were cutting noses and ears off and it was brutal. Goltz was there and I spoke to him about it when I met him. I believe that event has affected his whole life and his work.

In an interview on Conflict in the Caucasus

We’ve got Thomas Goltz next.

Thomas Goltz is another extraordinary character. He’s an American journalist who was living in Turkey and spoke Turkish, and almost by accident ended up in Azerbaijan in 1991. To my mind this is the best on-the-ground inside account of what it was like to live in the margins of the Soviet Union as it broke up. We’ve got a lot from Moscow in that period, where there was still this veneer of civilised political discourse, but once you got out to the fringes you realised that actually it was much more about the desperate scramble for the spoils of the Soviet Union and extraordinary battles for power. I think Azerbaijan must have had the most bizarre battles of all. It had this war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and then it had all these internal battles. At one point there were three coups or counter-coups in a week. Goltz was there and he knew all the characters and he saw the Karabakh war from the Azerbaijani side close up. He doesn’t buy into any of the ‘transition to a market economy’ or any of the nice little models that most journalists were using. He writes in a totally direct fashion and has this sort of Hunter S Thomson style of the heavy-drinking, fast-living journalist in Azerbaijan. This is a small classic. 

Doesn’t Azerbaijan Diary include the account of a massacre that he alone witnessed?

One of the themes running through Goltz’s books is that foreign editors have a very narrow agenda and ignore important stories that fall outside it. Goltz was the first witness to all these Azerbaijani refugees coming out of the town of Khojali where there’d been a massacre by the Armenians. He and a couple of other people saw what was happening and desperately tried to alert the world media but initially got a brush-off because it didn’t fit with the news agenda the editors had. Eventually it did get out and became a big story, and that whole Khojali story has become a central part of the national narrative of modern Azerbaijan. It was a great mobilising factor for Azerbaijanis to go to war. Goltz gives you the blow-by-blow account of how it all happened – and it doesn’t reflect on anyone, on either the Armenian or Azerbaijani side.