British publishing house Hurst Publishers has published journalist Gabriel Gavin’s book “Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Gabriel Gavin is a journalist and writer from Oxford, England. He has covered the politics and foreign affairs of the former Soviet Union and Turkey as a reporter for Politico, as well as for outlets including Time, Foreign Policy and The Spectator.

Mediamax had an exclusive interview with Gabriel Gavin.

When you were covering what was happening in Nagorno-Karabakh, did you have in mind that someday it could become a book?

No, absolutely not. When I first arrived in March 2022, I had very little idea about Armenia. I first covered a flare-up of violence, and I had no idea about the conflict. It was something that I’d really only seen in the headlines from the 2020 war. And I quickly became quite obsessed with the conflict.

I remember driving down to Goris through the mountains; it’s one of the scenes I describe in the book. I had to hire a taxi driver because the ‘marshrutka’ was full. This guy was talking to me about life, and he said, ‘Why are you here’? I said, ‘I’m a journalist, I’m here to cover recent tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh’. And he was so delighted and happy to meet someone who was there to cover that side of the story, because he felt that the only hope the region had of avoiding another conflict was international attention. He reached into the glove compartment of the car and pulled out his military commission book. He showed me the stamp that he got when he was 18 years old and first went to the army. He showed me the stamp that he got when he volunteered in the 2020 war. And he showed me the space for future stamps as well. And it raised the prospect of yet more conflict. He pulled out his phone and was cycling through pictures of people he’d fought with who had died. And I remember thinking, ‘I know nothing about this’.

I don’t think anyone I know knows anything about this. There’s this bitter, raging conflict, burning away at the edge of Europe, and nobody seems particularly interested. And I think Azerbaijanis in particular have always been really frustrated that in the nineties there wasn’t very much international attention on the conflict then either.

I think some of the failure to arrive at a suitable settlement comes from the fact that there wasn’t enough attention paid. But unfortunately, I found myself bitterly disappointed in September last year when, despite the warnings, despite the public attention, the world did nothing as Nagorno-Karabakh’s entire population was forced to flee their homes. So, for me it was a very bitter experience.

And it’s something that I think about every day. There really should be a question as to why journalists do what they do, why politicians do what they do.

The text posted on the publisher’s website says you were working from both sides of the front line. So, you were working in Azerbaijan as well.

Yes, I was fortunate enough to travel to Azerbaijan several times over the course of my reporting and spent a couple of weeks there. I was able to visit territory taken in the 2020 war. When the mass exodus happened in September 2023, I spent about two weeks living in Goris, out on the border in Kornidzor, meeting people who’d fled, seeing people who I’d communicated with throughout the blockade, who had told me what they were eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner – sometimes nothing. I watched them come through; I saw these scenes unfold.

I saw the sorrow and the joy of families being reunited, the fear of what comes next and the reality of a historic and unique society being destroyed in real time. And then, within about two weeks, I was on a flight from Tbilisi to Baku. The guy at the airport checkpoint gets his stamp ready to let me in, and then he sees Armenian stamps in my passport and starts pressing a button on the table. No one comes, so he bangs on the glass, and his boss comes over and stands over his shoulder.

He shows him my Armenian stamps. And the boss looks up at me and asks, ‘Why did you go to Armenia?’ I said, ‘For work’. And I was thinking, this is quite a scary experience because I’ve just spent weeks and weeks covering in very blunt and accurate terms, what Azerbaijan had been doing during the blockade and then during the mass exodus. But they looked at each other, stamped my passport and let me through.

You said you were in Nagorno-Karabakh after the ethnic cleansing happened. I think you are one of the very few foreign reporters that were allowed to visit there. Can you please say more about that?

You see this enormous government effort to put money to change things, to build things, to show progress. But at the same time, it’s really rare that you see or meet an ordinary Azerbaijani who’s benefiting from that progress. I have sat down with people who returned to what Azerbaijan calls the liberated territories. I’ve met people who could remember down to the spot where their village was in the nineties. In some cases, they’ve been given new houses, but one of the things that I found was that it’s actually a kind of ‘Potemkin’ economy in many ways because while people get a house, it’s often not clear how and where they’re going to work.

I met a family on my most recent visit there who had been given a house in Lachin, and the man said, ‘Nobody helps us, I can’t work here’. These are the people who the Azerbaijani state says it is doing all this for. But they’re telling me that they don’t have enough food for groceries. So, how does that reflect the Azerbaijani state’s priorities?

I am sure you know that the societies both in Armenia and Azerbaijan are very sensitive about anything that is produced about the conflict – be it an article, a book, a documentary, etc. Have you prepared yourself for the mixed perception of your book?

I think in the case of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, being an outsider was really helpful because it’s almost impossible for Armenians and Azerbaijanis to cover each other’s countries, even just to get access and deal with each other and hear each other’s stories. What I’ve always tried to do is to play that role of being a bridge, being able to see simultaneously two very different, very contradictory worlds. And I also really tried to come at it with a sense of humility.

One of the things I talk about in the book is the idea that if we report on this, if there’s coverage, then maybe the outcome won’t be violence and tragedy. And just realising that wasn’t going to be the case was something that shook me to my core and made me question what I do and why.

The other thing is that my general stance – the British media culture – is that I try and start from a position of contempt for all politicians, people who make decisions, people who stand up and say, well, it should be this way. I think my starting point is to question those people as seriously as possible about their motivations and their actions and the consequences of their actions.

If I have sympathies, it’s with the people who are affected by their decisions. It’s the ordinary people. It’s the Azerbaijani guy who lived in a village in the nineties and farmed his land and then had to pack up and flee, or it’s the young boy who died in 2020 because of government mismanagement and incompetence.

It’s about the people who had to pack all their possessions with a few hours’ notice, in some cases having lost sons, brothers, husbands in the fuel depot explosion during the mass exodus in September, and who then faced the decision to flee to Armenia, maybe with just a picture of them and not even their bodies. You know, it’s those stories that drive this book for me. Nobody is interested in what I think is right or wrong.

And that’s quite right. I wouldn’t ask for a moment that Azerbaijanis or Armenians look to my book or look to me for a solution to the conflict or for a question of justice in true journalistic style. All I’ve tried to do is present the facts, and people can decide for themselves.

I say in the introduction that I leave it to my readers to decide when an eye for an eye is justice and when it just results in collective blindness. I’ve also tried to avoid what’s often been a criticism among Armenians and Azerbaijanis of Western reporters who say, on the one hand the Karabakh Armenians say that they haven’t got anything to eat, on the other hand, there is this road from Aghdam, and you would never really help readers to understand why that’s the case.

Or, for example, I’ve interviewed the Azerbaijani ambassador in Brussels many times. I would talk about the blockade in Karabakh, and he’d say, well, what about the blockade in Nakhichevan? And there are plenty of journalists who will just report those two things and say that both sides say their territory is being blockaded. But it’s a dereliction of journalistic duty to report about people starving in Stepanakert, and not point out that that’s not the case in Nakhichevan. It’s not been the case in Nakhichevan for 30 years; it has air transport and road transport from Iran and Turkey.

I think one of the reasons that this region has been so badly served by reporters in recent years, is because it is such a complex issue, and people are really afraid to engage with it. One of the things that I saw a lot was that the instant reaction to anyone writing about the region was fury.

You know, I’ve seen journalists covering the most minor aspects of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, maybe a legal dispute or something like that. And they will be inundated with complaints and criticism. That’s in some ways understandable because it’s something that means so much to people involved in the conflict.

At the same time it makes it – I’m not making a judgement, I’m just saying objectively – a really intimidating thing for journalists and news outlets to cover. I’m sure that there are editors across the Western media who say, ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not write about that. That’ll be a nightmare, you know. We will be attacked if we do this.’

And also, we don’t understand it well enough to be able to report on it. When you are writing a book – because I’ve also written some books – you always keep in your head the audience that you would like to reach, not necessarily one single audience, maybe a couple, to whom you would like to reach out with your book: people in the region, or people in the international community who were so inactive, who did nothing to help people.

I always say that the target audience for my reporting is my mom. It’s one of the things that motivated me to cover the region. I remember being in Goris reporting on some flare-up, or maybe it was the two-day war in 2022. I was messaging my mom, saying this is happening and this is happening. And she was like, well, it’s not on the news in England. And that was one of the things that motivated me to stay and work on the region. I didn’t feel that ordinary people who are bright, engaged, and interested had the information in front of them to be able to understand what was happening. And I think it’s important to understand what was happening.

I remember pitching the book when I was in a hotel room in Baku. I remember sitting with my notebooks of people’s stories, people’s testimonials, notes from the ground and little facts of what happened each day, and thinking no editor ever commissioned me to write a story about this. Politico has been fantastic in allowing me to cover the conflict as closely as I did, but the news cycle can’t allow a year writing stories about people who were affected by conflict, right? It’s never going to happen in the format of a news article. So, I felt that doing the book was the only way to make sure that that material, those stories saw the light of day.

And I felt a bit of a sense of obligation for the historical record to put something together in just the way I saw it. And I think my account is a bit like watching World War Two through a CCTV camera. You know you can only report on what you see in front of you. You know that it’ll never be the full picture. But what I’ve tried to do is to allow someone to imagine that they’ve spent the last three years covering the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and to see it through my eyes, and through the eyes of people that I’ve met who’ve shared their stories.

I think personally there’s never been more interest in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine has rightly created attention about what’s happening elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. I think that officials and policymakers who want to understand what’s happening in this part of the world need to look to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to work out how power dynamics are changing; how Russia’s role is changing; how the fight for democracy and freedom is playing out. So, it should be of interest to everybody. The people who it will be of least interest to, I would say, are Armenians and Azerbaijanis because they tend to know their own stories. But then I think, well, they often don’t know each other’s stories. And this will be the most interesting focus for people from the region or further afield, in the US or elsewhere.

Fundamentally, I also wrote the book for me because it was a way of processing some of the things that I’d seen, and doing what I felt was my duty in presenting the biggest, holistic picture of the conflict, which isn’t always possible when you are writing a 300-word news story.

Would you like your book to be translated into Armenian and Azerbaijani?

I would love my book to be translated into Armenian and Azerbaijani. I think that would be fantastic. I’m not sure what the publisher’s plans are at the moment. I know that there is talk of some potential translation. That will be their decision. But it is really important that these things are discussed in languages that people speak.

I know far more Armenians and Azerbaijanis who don’t speak English than who do, and I think it’s a great opportunity for people to hear this. But again, I never wanted this book to be the definitive word on the conflict. What I’d actually love to see is more Armenians and Azerbaijanis producing their version of the conflict and producing more content.

We’ve seen very few books, certainly for an international audience, since the 2020 war, right? There hasn’t been that much on the Velvet Revolution or the Azerbaijani experience of what happened in the 1990s, and their forced exodus from Karabakh. What’s disappointing is that in Azerbaijan in particular, stuff gets discredited because it’s not organic; because it’s the government putting together a book of pictures of Aghdam or something, and we never hear genuine, unadulterated stories from people directly involved who reflect on their real perspectives on things. The people who’ve suffered from this conflict are Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and people continue to suffer, right? We are talking about Azerbaijani political prisoners. We are talking about Armenian refugees living in schools and barracks. There is so much shared experience here. And I think it’s a real shame that we rarely hear it in an organic way. It always comes with an agenda.

One of the things that I saw recently that makes me cry every time I watched the trailer – and I was lucky enough to watch the screening of it at the Golden Apricot Festival in Yerevan – was the documentary, ‘My Sweet Land’, which I thought was just a fantastic portrayal of one person’s perspective on the conflict as my book has tried to be a portrayal of people’s perceptions on the conflict. I’d love to see more like that.

I don’t think it’s possible for there to be an Azerbaijani ‘My Sweet Land’ at the moment because it requires criticism of the state in a way that I don’t think is possible at the moment. But I would love to see more Armenian and Azerbaijani accounts and testimonials and perceptions of what this war has done to their countries, to their societies, to their families.

Ara Tadevosyan talked to Gabriel Gavin