Путеводитель по Кавказу спровоцировал

[Sari Galin]

Lonely Planet Georgia Armenia Azerbaijan

...but when I returned to Azerbaijan for my flight home from Baku I had a very different experience. My luggage was searched by hand just as before, but this time the customs agent – he wasn’t a soldier – completely lost his cool when he found my Lonely Planet book.

“Armenia!” he bellowed and stabbed his index finger at the title. Then he turned to me and narrowed his lizard-like eyes.

“Armenia,” I said and made a thumbs-down gesture to signal my disapproval in sign language.

I have nothing against Armenia or Armenians. Their close alliance with Russia is a bit dubious, especially now, but it’s also understandable in its historical and regional context. Armenians, like everyone else in the geopolitically volcanic Caucasus region, feel threatened and turn to Russia for protection. My thumbs-down verdict was manufactured for my own good to appease the Azeri official who was understandably furious at Armenia but absurdly paranoid about me and my Lonely Planet.

The Armenian military occupies Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region and has de-facto annexed it and the surrounding area to itself. The conflict is morally ambiguous at best, and hypercomplex as ethnic-nationalist disputes usually are. It’s an obscure conflict that I’d rather not get sucked into as a partisan. But I wasn’t about to say or even suggest anything of the sort to this pissed off and armed Azerbaijani official and let him believe I felt any differently about the whole thing than he did.

Not that it helped.

He summoned a half dozen colleagues on his radio, waved the book in their faces when they showed up, and said God-only-knows what about me and his suspicions about what I might be up to.

“Do any of you speak English?” I said.

None apparently did.

“Can you help me?” I said to a nearby Azerbaijani civilian whom I hoped might be able to translate.

“I speak little English,” he said. That was enough.

“That book,” I said, “is for tourists.” I tried to keep it simple. “Hotels. Restaurants.”

“Ah,” he said and nodded. Then he translated for the officials.

The man who discovered the book screamed at him and he backed down.

“For tourists,” I said to the officials, hoping they might get a clue. “Hotels. Restaurants.” I threw my hands up in the air to show I was frustrated with them instead of afraid. I had nothing to hide, and they needed to know that.

They passed the book around, thumbed through it, and paused and stared intently when they flipped to some of the pages with maps. Then they deliberated amongst themselves for several minutes before finally handing the book back to me. “Welcome to Azerbaijan,” said the chief officer as he firmly shook my hand. They departed and left me alone.

“So much trouble,” said the Azeri civilian who witnessed all this, “over that little book.”