Qarabag , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Emanuele Giulianelli

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118 pages

English

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On 23 July 1993, under the rain of artillery fire from the army of the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, the city of Agdam was levelled to the ground. The population fled to other villages or to the capital of Baku, while 60,000 of Agdam's inhabitants - their homes reduced to rubble - were forced to become refugees in their own country. The last standard-bearer of the once-bustling and historically important city of Agdam was its football team. Qarabag instantly became the embodiment of this obsolete city, and took on the role of keeping it alive for a population that had lost everything - a beacon of light in the darkest of times. The team, led by coach Gurban Gurbanov, would amaze the whole of Europe, first reaching the Europa League groups and then the Champions League group stage. This book tells the story of that incredible sporting feat and how the club's two-horse logo has become the emblem of an entire people, of a nation that struggles, suffers and holds tight to the dream of one day returning home.

Sujets

Azerbaiyán

Azerbaijan

Azerbaïdjan

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	16 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801502573
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Italy. Qarabag: La squadra senza citt alla conquista dell Europa, Ultra, 2018
Published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Emanuele Giulianelli, 2022
English-language translation Laura Bennett
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801500920
eBook ISBN 9781801502573
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Contents
Transliteration
1. Qarabag is Agdam
2. Black garden, black gold
3. Escalation
4. Imaret
5. From Mehsul to Qarabag.
6. Black January and independence
7. From the end of the USSR to the fall of Agdam
8. The Azerbaijan title and the last game at the Imaret
9. The end is a new beginning
10. The ceasefire and the never-ending war
11. From that muffled scream to the bright lights of the Champions League
12. Qarabag and the legacy of Agdam
13. IDP
14. The Champions League
15. SOCAR
16. Karabatsi and Qarabag
17. The future of Qarabag
Afterword: Return to Agdam
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Photos
Dedicated to Veronica

Transliteration
MOST OF the names of the people and places that appear in this book are in the Azerbaijani language, which uses a script with characters and sounds that differ greatly from the Latin script used in English.
I have employed the international transcription criteria for transliteration, attempting to write everything in the form used most commonly in texts written in English and by leading press organisations in the English-speaking world.
What complicates this is that many words have multiple transliterations rather than a single equivalent. One example is provided by the place name Agdam; in the original spelling it is written A dam, while western transliterations use both Aghdam and Agdam, the version you will find in this book.
Hours could be spent discussing the word that gives this book its title: Qarabag. The disputed region between Armenia and Azerbaijan is called Qaraba in the Azerbaijani language. Over the decades, the name has been westernised in a variety of ways: Qarabagh (as it appears in the club s official website address), Qarabag, Karabakh, Karabagh and even Garabagh. The form you will find in the pages that follow is the same as the one on the cover.
One final note on the terms used in this book. I have used Azerbaijani rather than Azeri almost exclusively. Azeri often refers to ethnic Azerbaijani populations living in Iran, while in English the terms are equivalent, according to the most commonly used dictionaries.
1
Qarabag is Agdam
AGDAM NO longer exists.
Rubbed out by the war, razed to the ground by the hatred and blind fury of boorish nationalism, of flag waving, flags later used as shrouds to cover coffins and corpses. I will not linger here to explain how war in general has no meaning other than for those who foment it and feed off blood and the dead; I will instead try, as best I can, not to take the side of either of the contenders in a territorial dispute that has turned into a fratricidal bloodbath, a storm of hatred, an insane and irrational yearning for destruction.
What I will try to do is tell a story, to talk about what has happened and what is happening, with some attempt to speculate on what will or what may happen. Or what can never happen. I will not lose my way in controversy. I will not try to say who is right and who is wrong because in a conflict between neighbours in which some 1,500 to 2,300 civilians and some 25,000 to 36,000 soldiers have lost their lives, with a million refugees forced to leave their homes, in a war that has continued for years, for decades, all reason has been lost. The shadow of reason has vanished in the fine dust that rises from the rubble of Agdam; reason has lost control, stunned by the smell of blood emanating from the mangled bodies on the streets of Khojaly; and reason has shattered on the ground, breaking into a thousand pieces like the windowpanes at Ghazanchetsots Cathedral and Shusha Mosque.
The story I will tell is that of a football team, Qarabag Agdam FK, which has not played in its stadium, its city, since 12 May 1993. And that of the city, Agdam, Qarabag is now all that remains. Qarabag is Agdam.
2
Black garden, black gold
IN HIS book Azerbaijan Diary , the American journalist Thomas Goltz tells the extraordinary story of how he found himself, almost by chance, an eyewitness on the front line during the war centred on the area of the South Caucasus commonly known as Nagorno-Karabakh. He sets out by questioning the very name of the former Soviet region, The Soviet/Russian designation for Karabakh lives on in press and scholarly reports that use NagornoKarabakh or even via the acronym NKAO , which translates to the Autonomous Territory of Mountainous Karabakh . Both uses are ridiculous, because there is a perfectly good word in English to replace the Russian adjective Nagorno, namely Mountainous .
Yet the denomination Nagorno-Karabakh embodies all the complexity, cultural richness and contradictions of a region in which the word peace disappeared from the vocabulary 30 years ago. While Nagorno, as explained by Goltz, is a Russian adjective that translates as mountainous , the name Karabakh, the traditional pre-Soviet toponym for the region, is in turn made up of two words of different origin: kara, meaning black , and bakh, meaning garden , a term from the Farsi language, Persian. To make the mixture even richer and the tangle increasingly inextricable, the local Armenian population uses the term Artsakh to describe this rocky and harsh patch of land, wedged between Armenia and Azerbaijan and disputed by the two countries for decades.
In this whole affair, as in every dispute involving the Caucasus, words are not just important, they are crucial; they too become a battle ground and pretext for clashes that are not merely verbal in nature. As young teenagers we are taught at school that the same object varies in weight depending on which planet we are carrying it on; in the history of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, words weigh the same as boulders, as bombs in the case of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Words themselves become weapons, thrown on to the pile without any assessment of their explosive power: words such as genocide and ethnic cleansing. Words that become excuses for justifying massacres and destruction, words that are the pretext for razing towns and villages to the ground and forcing hundreds and thousands of people to leave their homes forever.
23 November 2017
Baku, Tortuga Pub, Terlan Aliyarbekov st., 9
A pool table in the middle of the room, background music so loud it makes communication between human beings barely possible: five people of different nationalities sitting at the same table, talking about football and Nagorno-Karabakh the night after Qarabag Agdam FK s loss to Chelsea at the Baki Olimpyia Stadionu in a Champions League Group C game. Alongside me are the 63-year-old American war reporter, writer and director Thomas Goltz, who has granted us the honour of joining our happy band; his Azerbaijani chaperone Shakir Eminbeyli, journalist and cameraman; and Rustam Fataliyev, an Azerbaijani journalist currently working in the press office at Neftchi, known to some as Azerbaijan s answer to Juventus. Rustam was my kind and helpful guide during my stay in Baku; we had shared a friendship on Facebook for years without meeting in person. Also with us, our Dutch colleague Arthur Huizinga, who possesses an in-depth knowledge of all things Qarabag Agdam, about which he has written books of fundamental importance for anyone wanting to learn about the subject. He has shared many a memorable drink with me and Rustam, tasted local food and spent hours in endless discussions about the most absurd and unthinkable aspects of this wonderful game which, in the end, is only a pretext for talking about ourselves and our world: it is no coincidence that I once wrote a book of short stories entitled Il calcio un pretesto (translated as Football is a Pretext ).
George Michael belts out his Careless Whisper over the speakers until Thomas asks the waiter to turn down the volume so we can talk and then orders a beer. The wave of sound produced by the clack of two pool balls breaks the monotony of the music, while the five of us no longer have to shout to make ourselves heard over the former Wham vocalist.
What do you think about the Nagorno-Karabakh situation and the events in Agdam? I ask Goltz.
The American stares at me with his icy eyes and begins to answer, starting from the premise I mentioned at the start of the chapter, but in harsher tones than those he uses in his book, I ve never referred to it as NagornoKarabakh. I call it Mountainous Karabakh or Upper Karabakh. Nagorno is a Russian adjective that means mountainous. But all the refugees come from the valley: the term mystifies everything. Because if you refer to Karabakh as Nagorno, you start to wonder how there can be a valley and then where do all the refugees come from? This is one of the great Armenian victories: to dictate the terms we use to discuss the conflict.
I d never thought abou