Spies, Free Trade and BordersBY ADAM SMITH ALBION

Trabzon, Turkey February 1995

SPIESEven before I arrived in Turkey, I had been advised of various socialhazards that can come of trying to live as a foreigner among Turks.Students of the country who had experience of immersion here, whilenoting that Turks’ suspicion toward outsiders is balanced by a fa-mous tradition of hospitality, prepared me for one contingency inparticular. Therefore, it should elicit no more than a soft chuckle anda knowing smile from an assortment of readers from Princeton toTulsa and from London to Santa Monica to learn that if I may ap-propriate Jane Austen’s words--- it is a truth universally acknowl-edged in Trabzon that I am a spy.

I have met other spies uncovered by sharp-eyed Turks. In Sivas, east-ern Anatolia, the Seljuk colonnades of the Sifaiye medresesi havebeen converted into carpet shops, one ofwhich is undergoing restora-tion. Inside I encountered two (ex-East) Germans wearing overallsand carving wooden beams on workbenches. Andrea and Stefandropped out of art school in 1992, got married, left Germany, boughta donkey, and (eschewing bus or rail transport) have walked theAlps, the Carpathians and the Rodopi mountains during the eighteenmonths since they set out.

"Our goal is to walk to India," he said; "we can develop as artiststhere."

"We don’t like the new Germany we don’t care about money," shesaid. "We’ve stayed in Sivas two months to decorate our friend’sshop as a favor. We sleep here."

Afterwards I drank tea with the rug-sellers in the courtyard. "Haveyou met Andrea and Stefan?" one asked significantly. Yes, I said, Iliked them. "We like them too and invite them over for iftar [Rama-zan dinner] sometimes," he said. "But we’re on our guard, of course."Why? A sly look among the group. "Why, because they’re spies, youknow." Murmurs of agreement all round. "In Sivas?" I said, aston-ished. He looked hurt. "Of course, why not? What’s wrong with Si-vas?" Nothing I said could shake their conviction that the two itiner-ant artists were Bonn’s operatives.

If souls as unlikely as Andrea and Stefan have been unmasked asagents, certainly I could not go undetected for long. A front pagestory in Zaman newspaper on 6 February, after I had been in Trabzonfor three months, put people onto my scent. (Zaman is allied-to the Is-lamic Refah Party which controls Trabzon’s Town Hall and is a well-read and respected daily here.) Entitled "Is Turkey the CIA’s NewTarget?", it was the first in a small avalanche of articles, televisioncommentaries and radio talk shows focusing on the exciting possibil-ity that the armies of agents made redundant by the end of the Cold

Adam Albion is an Institute Fellow writing about Turkey’s regional role andgrowing importance in the Black Sea and theformer Soviet bloc. He is based inthe port city of Trabzon, on the Black Sea.

War had not been retired but redeployed, and werepresently converging on Turkey as the new geopoliticalfocal point.

The snowball that started this was an interview onCNN’s "Global View" with Donald Jameson, a rankingex-CIA official for 23 years until his retirement in 1973.According to Turkish accounts, he was asked, "Nowthat the Kremlin is no more [sic!] where would you saythe most important region in the world is for intelli-gence organizations today?" He replied, "If I were headof the CIA, I would be directing my attention towardTurkey."

It does not require a profound understanding of Tur-key to see why this answer quickened the pulse of bothpro- and anti-Westerners here. "Islamicists" saw in itadditional proof that the U.S. is out to undermine Tur-key. The concurrent Paris-Washington spy scandal fedfuel to that fire. "Westemizers," meanwhile, laboringunder the Turkish inferiority complex that longs for theWest’s attention, seemed actually flattered that the CIAmight want to wiretap their country. Washington’ssending in a network of agents would confirm that Tur-key is central to U.S. interests, after all. No one seemedbothered to notice that Mr. Jameson had not been elabo-rating CIA policy and was not head of the CIA, but hadonly said "If I were..." a distinction worth noting inany assessment of whether Mr. Jameson’s opinions areworth a spit in the Bosporus toward guessing that or-ganization’s true intentions toward Turkey.

The popular weekly magazine Aktiiel re-interviewedJameson as part of its cover story, "Ajanlarin g6ziiTtirkiye’de" --"Spies’ Eyes on Turkey" (16-22 Febru-ary). He explained that during the CNN interview hehad not had undercover activities in mind, or been sug-gesting that spies be poured into the country. He feltrather that Turkey should be more thoroughly re-searched using freely available sources. Ex-CIA chiefWilliam Colby also spoke to Akttiel. After reeling off alist of points that make Turkey important "from an ana-lytic point of view" ("for example the rise of Islamicfundamentalism, the situation with the Kurds, the Cy-prus problem, sanctions on Iraq, Turkey’s relationswith Central Asia, the petrol pipeline carrying Cauca-sus petrol and certainly the plight of Muslims in theBalkans’), he too averred that studying these topics"did not require covert operations, using open-accessmaterial would be sufficient." Graham Fuller at RANDbluntly told the magazine, "To say the U.S. is sendingin agents is nonsense."

The Aktiiel journalist brushes these denials aside re-marking that if that’s all it took to gather information,there would be no need for Secret Services andwrites as follows:

Prompted by the heavy traffic of foreigners identifyingthemselves as businessmen, diplomats, journalists andtourists who have visited east and southeast Anatoliain recent months, the National Security Council has

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urged MIT [the Turkish Secret Service] and the Interiorand Foreign Ministries to be cautious. Its request that"measures be taken against intelligence-gathering ac-tivities" points to the seriousness of the situation.

(When I read "foreigners identifying themselves asbusinessmen, diplomats, journalists and tourists," andimagine the impression the words might make on aTurkish reader, I cannot help thinking of the aircraft-spotting charts distributed to civilians during WorldWar II to help them recognize and report enemyairplanes...)

By the time it became general knowledge that Turkeymight be seething with agents, I began feeling as if eve-ryone had been furnished with a home spy-detectionkit. My friends at the Town Hall turned theirs on meand watched as the needles on the dials jumped. Icould see the machines working, the cogs and wheelsturning: "That young man with too much time on hishands, who sits in the corridors watching us, or walksalong the docks carrying a pendl, with an improbablebackground and implausible finandal support, mustbe a spy." My news agent tried to tease me into con-fessing I worked for the Pentagon! English teachersat Tomer Language School good-naturedly told methat I was a mysterious person whose story had notbeen fully told, for sure. Walking the streets in Trab-zon, my whistling-song for the month became "Theeyes of Texas are upon you/All the live-long day,"substituting "Langley" for "Texas’...When my land-lord, after much hesitation and embarrassment, turnedto me for my opinion about this spy business, whichwe had just seen discussed on television, his wife has-tened to assure me that, whatever the truth of it, noth-ing would impair our personal friendship. Nor has it.But at iftar dinners, if a new guest asks after my preciseoccupation--- funded to poke around in Turkey byAmerican philanthropy--- ho ho[-- no links to U.S.government or to federal agencies, of course not-- hoho!-- monthly reports, conceived and written withoutdirection ho ho! Adam, pray desist, for you arekilling us.

One evening, down at the port, I saw pries of crates laidbeside a small mountain of tubes 60 meters long, and Itried to get the forklift loaders to tell me the destinationof the shipment and what was inside. On a good daythey would have told me at once; on a bad day theywould have told me after a short period of suspense;but today, "There’s not an answer to every questionyou’re too curious you must be a CIA spy!" theysaid, leaving me biting my lip in frustration and at theend of my patience with the spy taunts.

FREE TRADE ZONE---A SUMMING-UPTrabzon Free Trade Zone is one of five created in Tur-key since the Free Zones law was passed in 1985, and isa qualified success. It offers 5,500 square meters ofwarehousing with crane bays and a contemporary-looking blue-glass office-building positioned between

the Customs Office and the Port Authorities. It isowned, managed and developed privately as a jointventure between Turkish, Japanese and Anglo-Iraniancorporations. The operating company they establishedhandles the leasing of offices, the allotment of ware-house space and so on; to set up in the zone you needpermission from the Treasury in Ankara. I think of thezone as a modem kind of caravansaray.

Free zones are intended to encourage tax-free trade:there are no customs/import duties, corporate taxes orincome taxes, beyond a 0.5% levy on purchases on for-eign goods, meant to go into a fund to advertise Turk-ish free zones. There is no limit on capital and no needfor foreigners to find a Turkish partner. Finally, there isa unique provision, not shared with any other freezones around the world to my knowledge, permittingsales out of the zone to domestic markets. To see thisprovision in action, watch as ten plodding journeymenfrom the food company Okur descend on one of thestorage rooms. There, three or four nights a month, inthe poor light they erect their machine like Morlocks.Funnel, conveyor belt and roils of plastic sheeting areconnected. Sacks are torn open-- they read "Shaista,Pakistan" --the machine gobbles them, the plasticsheets are puffed open like bladders, an evil guillotinedetaches them, and at the end of the conveyor belt aboy indifferently fiJls a crate with 500g bags of rice,now marked "Bana Rice Made in Turkey." No cus-toms duty, no excise taxes for repackaging, direct tothe supermarket.

According to the official figures, since its opening inJune 1992 until November 1994, $59 million of trade hasflowed through the free zone, very evenly divided be-tween imports and exports and steadily rising fromyear to year. But it is undeniable that for some monthsnow the port has been dead. With a capacity of 2,000vessels a year, five Dumbar Capple cranes, a modemcontainer terminal and 360 port workers (90 employedin the free zone), the port is shockingly underused.

Now 51% of it might go under the hammer as part ofPrime Minister Tansu iller’s privatization plan, whichwill not relieve its woes. In the harbor at Batumi andPoti the ships were waiting in line this winter to loadand unload. Georgian port fees are much lower andthere are rail links into Russia leading to Central Asia.Trabzon, on the other hand, is dependent on road trans-port and sea links that pass through Georgia anyway,unless goods are headed to Iran. Plans are afoot tocreate a free zone in Poti: I have seen the draft operat-ing agreements, laws and regulations, and contract in-tended to be signed between an operating companyand the Georgian Economics Ministry. The projectawaits Western capital. Furthermore, trade with Arme-nia must pass through Georgia as long as Turkey effec-tively boycotts Armenia by sealing the border. This,Ankara has pledged to do until Yerevan disgorges itsgains in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Incidentally, the International Federation of Red Crossand Red Crescent Societies also operate out of theTrabzon Free Zone. Even as I write, a ship is beingloaded with 130 tons of food and medicine bound forAbkhazia. One regularly encounters aid packages des-tined for Georgia about the port: the largest recentshipment read "Humanitarian Aid, European Commu-nity. Pasta of Durum Wheat Meal: Penne Mezzanelli."lBetween 1991 and 1994, $52 million of aid was distrib-uted to Azerbaijan (population: 7.4 million) and $7 mil-lion to the Azeri enclave of Nakhjivan in Armenia

NOTES1) was intrigued to know, What does aid consist of?. This is the list ofcontents from a British Red Cross gift box, destined for Georgia, writ-ten in Russian:

Wheat flour 6 kg Sugar 1.8 kgRice 2.7 kg Canned fish 0.8 kgFrench beans 1.8 kg Dry yeast 0.2 kgMacaroni foods 2 kg Detergents 0.8 kgVegetable oil 2 litres Soap 0.6 kg

Are those the proper proportions for a healthy diet (minus soaps)?

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(pop.: 306,000). But nothing goes to Yerevan. For twoyears, Turkey has forbidden humanitarian aid to reachArmenia from its territory.

Trabzon’s advantage, for the moment, is that the role oflaw prevails and business proceeds normally, neither ofwhich things can be said for Georgia and environs.However, that very lawlessness dissuades people fromusing Trabzon as a business bridge into the CIS, al-though the canny ones thrive. One early morning Iwatched potatoes being loaded onto a 50-meter longship from Sochi that looked like the world’s saddestbust-up tugboat. It was the vehicular equivalent of theworkhouse boy in Nicholas Nickleby who is crashedinto sullen misery at a dismal schoolhouse in Yorkshire.Supervising the operation was the man Dickens wouldhave chosen for the villain, chain-smoking and apply-ing a toothpick at the same time. His rumpled brownsuit and unshaven cheeks bespoke the dawn flight fromIstanbul. He was Mr. Avin, regional manager of Akde-niz Trading. How was business? "Siiper," he saidcurtly. I was taken aback: the standard Turkish re-sponse is "Fena degil--- not bad, can’t complain, Godwilling!" I eyed this arrogant man more narrowly whilehe bad-temperedly scrutinized the workmen.

What was he loading? "1,000 tons of pasta, 70 tons ofpotatoes." Was there good profit in it? "Listen my lad[’oglumq," he said, "pasta costs 20,000TL (50 cents) /kgin Turkey and goes for 50,000TL in Siberia--minus6,000TL for transportation and customs. Potatoes cost13,000TL/kg here and go for 20,000TL in Siberia-- mi-nus 3,000TL. I send 2,000 tons of pasta and 500 tons ofpotatoes a month. You work it out."

I did- under his watchful and glittering eye alongthe margin of my morning newspaper: it came to $1.25million profit per month! Is it possible?

"I also send 40 tons of oranges and 17 tons of lemonseach month, which don’t do badly," he continued, grat-flied by my expressions of surprise and jealousy. "Andthat wood is mine [not ’ours’ ---’benim," not "bizim’]."He indicated an enormous pyramid of timber at theend of the docl He gave me the figures, this time indollars. "That’s 7,000 cubic meters of wood from Sibe-ria, where it costs $70/m3.After the train to Sochi andthe boat to Trabzon, it sells in Turkey for $180, at aprofit to me of $70/m3."

I asked, if there were such sterling opportunities formoney-making, why trade in Trabzon was moribund?He said: "Because the Turks are lazy. They don’t lookout for the main chance. Of course there are risks in-volved. You have to learn to face them or circumventthem. Once a shipment worth $80,000 that I sent toSochi was simply confiscated by the mafia. I had tonegotiate with them. I had to compensate them withan equal value of timber. Only then would they re-lease my goods. Most Turks wouldn’t know how todo that." With that he plunged among the Russianloaders- in Victorian times he would have been the4 ASA-5

sort to "lay about a bit" with his riding-crop andwe said good day.

BORDERSProfessor Yutaka Akino of Tsukuba University has aclaim to being Japan’s foremost ex-Sovietologist.Weighing 2201b and still playing country-level rugbyin his 40’s, he is not your typical academic. A friendfrom my East West studies days in Prague, turned upwithout warning in Trabzon this month (thus winninga bet that he wouldn’t) driving a rental car. We re-solved to spend three days messing about on borders,the way that the Water Rat liked messing about inboats--- a favorite game we used to play in Trans-Carpathia where five countries (Poland, Slovakia,Ukraine, Hungary and Romania) come within a fewhundred kilometers of one another. Four countriescrowd together on Turkey’s northwest edges, too:Georgia, Armenia, Nakhjivan (the Azerbaijan enclave)and Iran.

Georgia. To reach the Georgian border at Sarp fromTrabzon takes two to three hours. The drive takes youalong the foot of the Pontus mountains with the BlackSea on your left. Small rivulets and impromptu water-falls skid down the rocks by the road, part of the drain-age coming down from the mountains. The road, espe-cially close to the frontier, is appallingly rotted anduntended.

Unless and until the Posof gate is opened, Sarp is theonly land-route into Georgia. The Sarp crossing wasopened in August 1988. Since 1991 and the USSR’s col-lapse the trade volume has grown ten to twenty-fold inboth directions, although the Trabzon Chamber ofCommerce thinks it may have peaked. In 1994 theTurks exported something like $8 million of clothesand food, and imported about $30 million of raw mate-rials such as iron, copper, aluminium, cement, ferti-lizer, coal, leather and timber. These offidal figuresmust be too low, however, given that it is an open se-cret that Sarp customs offidals are cashing in on somevigorous smuggling. I once met a man in Hopa whoboasted his brother had channeled Soviet rifles, in-frared night-scope equipment, and rocket-grenadelaunchers to the Bosnian Muslims, bought for a song inGeorgia and passed out through Sarp. He was suggest-ing that AK47’s cost $100, and 7.65mm Kalashnikovbullets cost about 5 cents apiece. It is unimportantwhether his claim was true; the point is that it wascredible, and even if his brother hadn’t done it, some-body else’s had.

The Turkish offidals declared the papers (triptique) forour rental car out of order and, despite a call to Avis,we were obliged to park it and walk across. There areno Georgians on the Georgian frontier: security is com-pletely in the hands of Russian soldiers and borderpolice. That in itself is not a bad index of how indepen-dent Georgia is from Moscow. The Russian presence isa vivid sign of the heavy price Eduard Shevardnadze

had to pay for Russian help in defeating PresidentZviad Gamsakhurdia and pacifying Abkhazia. Theyare the tip of the iceberg: Moscow maintains 20,000 sol-diers in five bases and three ports in Georgia, not in-cluding 3,000 peacekeepers in Abkhazia, which is effec-tively a Russian province now. The first thing you seeupon entering Georgia is Russians: no Georgian isspoken, so Georgians returning home are obliged tospeak Russian; no picture of the head of state in Tbilisi;no Georgian flags or seals; Red Army uniforms; Sovietweapons. Your visa, purchased at the Georgian consu-late, is written in the cursive Georgian script. But it isstamped by a Russian hand, while the stamp itself isspelt in Cyrillic letters and reads "Sarp, USSR."

Once past border control, a spindly character wearinga windcheater and a bright gold smile scuttled out ofnowhere between Yutaka and myself and guided us bythe elbows into an abandoned-looking building. Hewas Georgian. At a dark window, unmarked save for asign with the single word "Bank," we each had to paya $10 "customs fee." We protested that we were notcarrying anything, not even a plastic bag. The manwith the gold teeth did not stop smiling, but produceda grubby, undecipherable identification, passed it un-der our eyes, pocketed it, shrugged a few times, recom-mended the window again as the proper object of ourattention, and busied himself with his fingernails. Asticker simply reading "Batumi, $10" was put into ourpassports as a receipt and then stamped "The NewGeorgian Bank." Only then were we free to go.

In Batumi we paid $3 for bread and blood sausage shotthrough with garlic in a restaurant that was empty butfor us and a party of four drinking beer. The paste-board menu outside the door must have excited allsorts of hopeless appetites among passers-by, whoseaverage monthly income is just over a dollar. The na-tional interim currency has become worthless (2 mil-lion Georgian Coupons $1). Georgians can buy noth-ing with the scrip except bread; all other transactionsare conducted in roubles, or dollars. After a stroll alongthe water and through the market we paid $5 for the25-minute taxi-ride back to the border, arriving at sun-set. It was 5:30pm.

We began walking across the frontier, only to bebrusquely repulsed. We were informed that one maywalk into Georgia, but one may not walk out onemust ride. We were momentarily flabbergasted. Andno hitchin the official continued, like an umpire dic-tating the rules of a game. It was like a medieval scholi-ast’s puzzle, whereby he has to write 800 lines of hex-ameters describing Mars’s love for Venus, onlyseverely handicapped by the restriction that he maynot use the letter "p." Yutaka and I looked over thegate toward the spot where the car was parked, practi-cally visible 100 meters away. I could see he liked thesituation. Challenges like these are Yutaka’s happiestmoments. For myself, I will be content if can describecalmly and without rancor how we spent the nexteleven hours trying to bridge those 100 meters.

By the time we found Batumi’s central bus station itwas dark. Driving into Batumi again I noticed howmany windows were black or lit by candlelight. Geor-gia’s energy plight is so desperate that Turkey is sup-posed to have been supplying 30 thousand kilowatts ofelectricity a day since late last year. Before that, I heardthat sometimes all lights in Tbilisi were off except forShevardnadze’s office. The empty bus station was lit bya single bulb in a single window. The clerk refused tosell us a ticket to Sarp. We had to purchase a full-wayfare to Trabzon for $10. I began to understand the pro-hibition against crossing the frontier on foot.

We mounted the bus--- Karadeniz Tur, a Turkish com-pany-- and waited an hour. Finally we drove towardSarp but turned off half-way into a complex of build-ings resembling garages. The thirty passengers wereherded toward two windows in a tiny shed which eve-ryone was forced to squeeze into. At the first windowone bought a customs declaration form for $1, after ar-guing with the official which form one needed. At thesecond window one paid again for a stamp and signa-ture approving the declaration, involving more argu-ment whether certain articles had been justly valued,etc. This laborious process lasted 90 minutes.

The bus now drove into one of the garages, barelylonger than the bus itself. It was unlit and empty savefor a door leading into a small office. From the inside itlooked like a miniature airplane hangar, or, more ap-propriately, the slaughtering-room for cattle in a fac-tory I visited near Kayseri, where they made pastirma,the Turks’ answer to prosciutto. The garage door wasslid shut behind us with a clang. There was no food, nodrink, no facilities. The time was 21:00.

At 21:20 our passports were collected. The principal of-ficial, a Georgian, wore a pea-jacket and SherlockHolmes cap. He had two factotums. I watched as thethree of them opened all the passports to the photo-graph page and, with Alexandrine pedantry, arrangedthem neatly on a small table, aligning them to the cor-ners and ensuring the rows were straight. At 21:50 theycalled the first passenger, shutting the door behindhim. He emerged at 22:00, without his passport. Thenext session also took ten minutes. I wondered what itcould be about.

It wasn’t long before someone emerged angry andgrumbling, and it became clear that I was witnessingextortion. Each interview was a negotiation to deter-mine how much that passenger would pay to be per-mitted to pass. To get the exit stamp, one had to run thegamut of these three fleering officials. Blunt refusal topay would simply land you in the street with the gateslammed behind you. I have witnessed bribery before,but never tallaged so callously. It turned midnight andthe procession in and out of the office grimly contin-ued. At times it was interrupted by bursts of activity bythe three, who came out of the office carrying flash-lights and, in separate sallies, searched first the luggagecompartments, then the overhead storage spaces, and

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finally pulled back the carpet to unscrew the panels onthe floor of the bus and tried to peer underneath, incase something had been hidden in the undercarriage. Iran to the Turkish driver of the bus and began wavingmy hands at what was going on. "Is this normal?" Icried. "Allah, no," he said, rolling his eyes to the ceil-ing, "these people are even crazier than most."

Bribes were paid in units of $10, depending on howmany ten-dollar "customs stickers" you were requiredto have affixed in your passport. These blue-and-yellow stickers were the same as Yutaka and I hadbought that afternoon. They were used as a kind of fig-leaf for the bribes. Nobody escaped with only one. Ayoung Georgian who said he exported steel got two. Ayoung Turk who said he imported copper got three.And the three Georgian girls who were exporting them-selves to Trabzon were penalized the most heavily,with four each. The bus driver was hauled into thethieves’ kitchen as well. On behalf of Karadeniz Tur, ina negotiation that lasted three rounds, each round end-ing in someone storming out of the office in a huff, hewas respectfully dunned for an amercement of $300. Hehaggled the figure down to $200 and paid.

Yutaka by this time had befriended a stunningly hand-some 50-year old Armenian woman who called herselfSuzanne. She was flirting with the idea of going drivingwith us and we came within an ace of taking her. Sheshowed me the photograph of herself in uniform fromher days as a policewoman in Yerevan. "At least in Ar-menia we have laws," she said, gesturing toward theoffice. Nowadays she said she had a fruit concern inHopa. She commuted once a month. When it was herturn to be summoned to the office, she too was made tobuy four stickers. According to her account: She: "Why$40?" They: "You know why." She: "It’s too much!"They: "Come on, you’re a beautiful woman, you’ll earnit back in no time." She was justly outraged-- and in-ured to patience.

Yutaka and I were left for the end. My interview was ananti-climax. I immediately told the boss in pea-jacketand cap that we had already paid the customs tax uponentering Georgia. He flicked through the pages for awhile, pondered, handed me both passports, and dis-missed me. Thus, like homeopathic medicine, the smallpain of paying $10 earlier had saved us greater painlater. It was 3:45am. The bus started up. We reached theborder and had completed Turkish formalities by4:45am. We started up our car. I felt woozy with hallu-cinations of prosciutto ham and the Franco-Germanborder that can be driven without downshifting. Wewere on the highway to Kars as the darkness began tothin around us.

Armenia. Past Igdir, the last village in Turkey is calledCitttik kOyi. t sits on the Aras (Araxes) river, which isthe border with Armenia. There is no crossing there, oreven a bridge in fact, the border between the coun-tries has been closed for most of this century butthere is a military base, so we headed for that. Yutaka

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is the living embodiment of St. Just’s dictum "Ons’engage et puis, on voit." After debating how to ap-proach the base, we forced the car up a steep bank anddrove parallel to the river along the wall of barbedwire until a party of Turkish soldiers ran up andstarted shouting. We offered our passports. I explainedthat we were journalists (ICWA correspondent cardcame in handy) and had been hoping to drive into Ar-menia but were lost. The leader of the party looked atus rather aghast as he tried to decide, doubtless,whether this story was innocent lunacy or wicked im-posture. The upshot was that we were taken into thebase to see the commander, which had been the goalall along.

The pervading atmosphere at the base was one of sus-picion and caution toward Armenia. The two sides donot interact at all. They watch one another through bi-noculars. A sergeant was ushered into the room to tes-tify that he estimated from his observations there weretwo Russian soldiers to every one Armenian. There arebelieved to be 9,000 Russian soldiers patrolling Arme-nia’s frontiers with Turkey and Iran. Russian securityends at Armenia’s border, the same way that it extendsto Georgia’s, but President Levon Ter-Petrossian hasnot had to compromise with Moscow over Armenia’sindependence as much as Shevardnadze has over Geor-gia’s, as reflected in the border guard arrangements. Bythe end, we cheerfully shook hands with the com-mander, and the sergeant took us to inspect the fron-tier. We gazed over the river toward the Armenian ob-servation post from a reedy patch, trying not to beconspicuous. The sun lit up an Armenian church, dra-matically framed against a mountain hardly three ki-lometers away.

Driving out we gave a lift to the muhtar, or villageheadman. Ahmet Giil had bright eyes but was prema-turely grey. He wanted the border opened "We cansee the people, but we can’t talk to them" with onereservation, however: "We don’t want to make it easierfor the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) to enter Turkeyfrom their bases in Armenia." He made us stop the carto show us where his father had been killed by theroadside at night in 1993. "My father was Kurdish, mymother tongue is Kurdish, and they shot him. To hellwith the PKK."

Barely 35 kilometers away, at Alican, there is the"protocol" crossing between Armenia and Turkey fordiplomats and VIPS. The atmosphere is totally differ-ent, so relaxed as to be informal. There was no punc-tilio. The lad in the pillbox invited us to park insidethe gate. A sergeant strolled over to shake our hands.When we asked to see the border, he said "Sure." Abridge stretches across the river, perhaps 70 meterslong. We walked to the mid-point, demarcated by ared line. "Do you have any contact with the Arme-nian and Russian soldiers?" "Sure, sometimes westand on either side of the line and have a conversa-tion." Yutaka had his picture taken straddling the linewhile an Armenian looked on, uninterested. Will the

border be opened sometime soon? "It depends on theimprovement of relations with Ankara, but we’re ex-pecting it, yes. Why not?"

All of which goes to show that the best confidence-building measures in the world are interactions be-tween individuals and freedom of communication.

Nakhjivan, Iran. Turkey meets Nakhjivan along a ten-kilometer border, squeezed between Armenia and Iranlike two fingers touching or, if one prefers, like Pyra-mus and Thisbe who had to kiss through a hole in thewall. Nakhjivan is an enclave of Azerbaijan, separatedfrom its home-state the way Kaliningrad is separatedfrom Russia. The Azeris trust and rely on the Turks foraid, diplomatic backing and moral support, all of whichthey usually receive. Turkey topped an Azeri poll pub-lished this month as the country most trusted whenjudged on political and economic factors, with 40.4%.(Other results are worth recapitulating: second cameRussia with 22.5%, joint third Ukraine and USA with19.1%. Among countries judged unpredictable in theirforeign policies and requiring caution, first came I.ranwith 28.1%, second USA with 27%, third Russia with25.8%.)

Just as the Russians in Kaliningrad see themselves asstarkly dependent on Russia for survival, the Nakhjiva-nis count on their brother Turks. When we reached thecrossing over the Aras, opened in May 1992, there wasa steady stream of travelers in both directions. Thereare no Russians on the border, of course. There are novisa restrictions: Turks must pay $25 and Nakhjivaniscome for free, carrying minimal baggage. I asked somemen standing in line at customs, and looking as if theywere waiting outside an employment office, whatmight happen if Turkey did not support them. "Arme-nia would invade--- it’s as simple as that." "If Armeniadid invade, would Turkey attack?" "Definitely." Ilooked questioningly at a Turkish soldier: what did hethink? "Yes." Would he be willing to fight for Nakhji-van? "All Turks would." Everyone’s mood was goodalthough it was dirty and hot. When Yutaka and I triedto bluster our way into Nakhjivan without a visa, theAzeri soldiers grinned and sent us on our way with aslap on the back.

Finally we drove the long semi-circular road that skirtsMt. Ararat to reach the Iranian border at Giirbulak viaDogubayazit. A few kilometers from the crossing pointwe saw two US-made M-48 tanks sitting on the road-side. In stark contrast to Nakhjivan, the border herewas practically deserted. There was no motion, no ac-tivity. A Belgian truck was parked without a driver.The two cafes were closed for Ramazan. I found a dol-mus driver, who was understandably disappointed tolearn we had our own car. "Four years ago this placewas always busy. Now there’s practically nothing." Hewalked away and it was quiet. As we drove away Mt.Ararat was in front of us. My enduring memory will beMt. Ararat on that perfect day. Soaring above 5,000 me-ters, lone and white against an empty azure sky, themost beautiful thing you ever saw. UI

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