What does a national border mean for a man and his cows on the quest for better grazing land? That's the question that, in the run-up to next week's OSCE meeting in Dublin, illustrates both the absurdities and the dangers of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for both Azerbaijan and Armenia.
On November 30, Armenia handed over to Azerbaijan its lost herder, Telman Aliyev (no relation to President Ilham Aliyev), a 41-year-old father of two, who, earlier this month, had led his cow companions across one of the world's tensest front lines, and into the hostile meadows of Armenia. The sound of the enemy hooves sent an alarm signal to Armenian border forces, and Aliyev the herder was promptly captured. Local officials did not specify if he or his charges put up any resistance.
Baku, insisting that Aliyev the herder has hearing and speech impairments, subsequently asked the Red Cross for help.
Yet though Aliyev is now returned to the safe green grass of home, the Azerbaijani side did not come off as particularly appreciative of the swift resolution of the cowherd crisis.
Azerbaijani officials said that Armenia had violated international standards for prisoner exchange by showing up at the handover site with an armed force. The fate and the whereabouts of Aliyev’s herd are not known.
That said, village folk in the South Caucasus often tend simply to ignore or to be ignorant of the region's many de-jure and de-facto borders.
Scavenging for cross-border herbage has caused trouble before. Last year, in neighboring Georgia, South Ossetian and/or Russian soldiers arrested four Georgians, and shot and wounded two others, who had wandered into breakaway, Russian-guarded South Ossetia to pick greenery for a pickling project.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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