I would advise to read this book to noone, maybe only to knowledgeable people, who know the real situation and won't be misled by the tricky description of the author. Why? Just to see the real face of Armenian nationalism in its veil of "national democracy".

The problem with ethnic issues is that often the only people that care about them are people of that ethnicity -- therefore, this author is going to be called biased and unbiased by the 2 sides. I found this book an interesting account of how the issue of Karabagh was used by the National Democratic Movement (a loaded term -- basically, the people who were pro-democracy in the end of the USSR who also happened to all be of the ethnicity) in promoting their own goals. I read this book twice in an academic setting and found it to be one of the best on the subject.

The conflict over the Armenian territory of Artsakh, also known as Garapakh (hence the title of the book), has been intractable since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet few today remember how the conflict originated, how Joseph Stalin's purges and ethnic engineering shaped the region, and how the Mountain Turks (called "Azeris" since WWI), the Armenians, and indeed most of the Soviet Union's subjects were used in the often arbitrary Stalinist decisions. In this mostly objective work, the origins of the conflict are traced in such a way as to explain why feelings in that region of the world are so strong, why the Mountain Turks want Artsakh from the Armenians, and the relation between the Genocide of the innocent Armenians in 1915 by murderous Turkey itself still has ramifications in the present.

The book presents several Armenian myths as a reality. Shortly after Armenians migrated to Transcaucasia from Middle East (during the Ottoman Empire and Russian rules), the entire nation of Armenians became a victim of so-called "historians". They invented several myths, such as "the most ancient nation", "the first Christian nation", and "Great Armenia, from sea to sea". All those myths were intended to create in hearts of ordinary Armenian men and women a hatred towards their neighbors, on whose lands they settled, and encourage ethnic wars and massacres of non-Armenian population. Their goal was to "clear the land from Turks, Kurds, Jews and others", and create an "ethnically cleans state". However, they needed some "historical facts", in order to justify their crimes. And this book - is one of those myths, presented as a "historical facts".

The authors can get credit, however, for creativity in using a name of "Azerbaijani historian", to backup their writings. Of course, the poor "Azerbaijani historian" had no idea that his name would be used centuries later to sign somebody's hateful fantasies.

The book present a classic tool of Armenian propaganda. The facts are distorted, the true writings of Mirza Jamal Javanshir have been changed by the "translator" Bournoutian to fit his version of Karabakh's history. This ancient Azerbaijani land, the home of the greatest Azerbaijani writers, poets, musicians and statesmen, where ancient Albanians (ancestors of Azerbaijanis) first accepted Christianity, has been portrayed as a "part of Great Armenia". To make his "annotations" credible, the "translator" uses the name of Azerbaijani historian, in order to further mislead the readers. The author/ "translator"...END

For a long time I wanted to get a view on Karabakh from a perspective of an Azeri historian. I would like to note that unlike many now day's historians, Mirza Jamal did not pursue political ends in exploring the history of the region. His was simply writing history for the sake of history not political implications. This made him unbiased towards Armenians and Aeries.

I highly recommend this book especially if you would like to get an unbiased glance of Azeri historian on region of Karabakh.

The book distorts the facts, full of lies

This book is fascinating, straight to the point, based on real facts, accurate, profound and moving. Those who review it otherwise are fools undoubtebly!

As the title suggests, this book is a historical novel drawing on current and contemporary Armenian experience. The `pogrom' however refers to the savage attacks and massacres of the Armenians of Sumgait, an industrial city near Baku, perpetrated by maraudering Azerbaijani gangs in February 1988.

This is by no means a cool, detached, journalistic account of the three days of hell experienced by the Armenians of Sumgait. Shahinyan' s book is passionate and often dramatic and moving portrayal of the tragedy as it unfolds. It traces the policy of genocide that guided the Azerbaijani brutalities, from their inception at the highest levels of party and government authority in Baku and Moscow, as a conspiracy by anti-Perestroika forces to discredit and destroy Gorbachev by " teaching the too independently minded Armenians a good lesson" while at the same time "solving the Karabagh problem by keeping it for Azerbaijan." We meet the local Baku conspirators, the pampered and corrupt bureaucrats, at work planning their criminal deeds, working out the details of how where and when the massacrers should begin and, later still, the common street criminals who carry out the plan by cold-blooded murder, rape and looting.

The novel's main hero is Aramais, the elderly hardworking shoe repairer who lives and works in Sumgait. He is a survivor from yet another genocide in another place: The 1915 Turkish Genocide of the Armenians! His life is vividly portrayed as the story unfolds; we get vivid and shocking flashbacks to his childhood memories of massacre and deportation in Western Armenia, of Turkish soldiers raping, killing and pillaging, while he is protecting a young Armenian girl from the intoxicated and hysterical Azeri mob. During various flashbacks we get to know his wife Susana and short glimpses of the bitter experience of deportation of both their parents and their death in exile in Bulgaria. We see him in action in the Second World War, earning a medal for bravery. Shahinyan is remarkably Solzhenitsin-like in his portrayal of life in Stalinist labor camps, its brutality, waste and sheer stupidity, as experienced by Aramais after the war. But again and again it is the flashbacks to 195 and Aramais's experiences of genocide then and now that draw the unmistakable parallel and similarities between the two events: That on both occasions they were planned state policy to massacre, pillage and deport the Armenians from their ancestral lands when they stood up for their rights and freedom -- the Pan-Turkist easy "solution to the Armenian problem" as applied to western Armenia in 1915 and to Karabagh now, in 1988!

And we see some of the young protagonists of this resistance struggle for survival and freedom in the suffocatingly tense atmosphere of Sumgait: Aramais's son Arshik and his young sweetheart Bella, for example. We meet Dr. Mesropyan, Bella' s father and one of the top surgeons in Azerbaijan, in his vain endeavor to meet the party chief in Sumgait in order to stop the conspiracy! Also are portrayed many Armenian families hiding with fear behind their fortified doors in their homes, saying to Arshik "we don't know anywhere safe to go to!" And we witness with Arshik many scenes of burnt-out and looted Armenian homes and ruined lives as he desperately seeks them out to warn.

Above all it is his treatment of the setting in Sumgait that deserves praise. He is a master of suspense as well as dramatic and abrupt climaxes. He is meticulously vivid and realistic in his detailed portrayal of all the characters, both heroes and villains. The result is masterly and panoramic sketch of Soviet life in general and Sumgait in particular; the ordinary people in their daily lives of pain and little pleasures, their friendships, petty prejudices, and the gradual buildup of hysteria, against the backdrop of a crumbling society, and its utterly corrupt and immoral elite in its last dying days. This is a profoundly and thoroughly pessimistic book reflecting the tortured soul of the author in its quest for answers to deeply disturbing questions about man' s social existence in general and Armenian suffering in particular.

A highly readable and enjoyable book (despite its unfortunate editing errors!) with some intelligent insights into aspects of Armenian and Soviet history -- the origins of the Karabagh problem, the collusion between Kemalist Turkey and Stalinist Russia and the loss of Nakhichevan (and the Azeri success in ethnically cleansing it of its majority Armenian population) as well as issues relating to Western Armenia. Thoroughly recommended reading for all interested in contemporary Armenian literature and history.

there is a lot of picture and designs that help me to develope my understanding how is the rug is done

thoughtout the book author ignores the possibility of extremist armenians in Sumgait starting the "pogroms". It's amazing how the journalists and camera men were placed on the top of nearby building ready to take pictures. Everything was detonated by Armenian women who as if "azeri-muslim-wife" runs into the crowd and claim to be raped by ceretain Armenians that she gives the adress of. This is the truth, not the pre-set armenian "fake-pogroms"... very bias, of course the author is Armenian...

Events are misrepresented, history is distorted, truth is hidden in this book. Extremly biased, one-sided. The author "forgot" the fact that two ethnic Armenians (Grigorian and Oganov) were arrested in Sumgait, Azerbaijan for killing at least 6 other Armenians. No word about massacres of Azerbaijanis in Armenia that actually started the whole conflict.

The Sumgait Tragedy is a compilation of personal testimonies of Armenians forced by violence to flee their homes in Azerbaijan, confronts us with the reality of loss and suffering behind the labels and statistics. An example of "history from below," the volume focuses on the ideas and behavior of ordinary people, and on the impact historical events and ideologies have on their daily lives. This collection is the most important document on these events yet published in English. The importance of Sumgait Tragedy becomes more acute after the genocidal events in Kosovo in 1999.

Interviewed by an independent journalist Samvel Shahmuratian in the months immediately following the events described how from February 27 to 29 1988 Azerbaijani marauding mobs in Sumgait, a city of 250,000 near Baku, destroyed hundreds of Armenian apartments and shops, burned and smashed dozens of cars, and beat, burned, stabbed, and raped to death Armenian men, women and children.

The pogroms were a symptom of a developing but still insecure Azerbaijani nationalism, which is characterized by increasing intolerance for the claims of ethnic minorities living in the republic. "Having lived in the city for 38 years," one witness recalls, "I had somehow imperceptibly become accustomed to the discrimination, as though it were a natural state of affairs." Azerbaijani hostility toward the Armenian population, which is generically close to anti-Semitism in its form and is profoundly racist, intensified as the movement escalated among the Armenian population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region in Azerbaijan to join Armenia.

The increasing tension in Sumgait culminated in a series of rallies in the center of the city, during which speakers asserted the Karabagh was and would remain Azerbaijani. The rallies culminated in a demand to drive Armenians off Azerbaijani soil, kill and rape them. On the 27th and 28th, the rallies dissolved into the mass violence described in the book.

The confusion and doubt that still exist over the number of victims raise the question of whether the local and investigatory authorities deliberately minimized the extent of the pogrom. Dr. Nora Dudwick, who was in Yerevan and then in Baku during this period, recall how on February 27 when rallies in Sumgait had already turned into violence, "Vremya," the Moscow evening news program, broadcasted interviews with Armenian and Azerbaijani workers attesting to the "perfect friendship" between their peoples. Over the next few days, alarming rumors spread that 10 Armenians and almost as many soldiers had been killed in Sumgait. When the true scale of the violence became known in Armenia, the official death count of 32 (including 26 Armenians) met with complete incredulity, and rumors spread that casualties are actually in the hundreds. These rumors were later confirmed.

The KGB investigators and newspaper "Pravda," the notorious organ of the USSR Communist Party, chose to ignore the background of the events, deliberately misrepresenting and trivializing the events, as well as the pattern of organization and provocation revealed in the attacks, treating them instead as a group of "isolated" crimes. The brave effort of Shahmuratian to compile more accurate casualty figures is no mere numbers game. Rather, it is part of an intense effort to establish the true scope of events, and to ascertain the extent to which the pogroms, which began in Sumgait and eventually spread throughout Azerbaijan, were deliberately orchestrated in Baku and Moscow to drive the Armenians from Azerbaijan, and crush the movement for freedom and self-determination in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The compilation of this and other historical material on the conflict with Azerbaijan reflects a determination among Armenians to prevent the reality of the present from being denied, distorted or trivialized in future. The 1915 Genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire once seemed a self-evident and indisputable fact, and was described as such on the front pages of the international press. The subsequent minimization of those events by Turkish "scholars" has taught the Armenian people the importance of documenting and preserving the history so that such a denial cannot happen again.

This is the first guide to represent all three caucasian nations in one book. However it does not take into account the sensitivity of some of the issues among the three nations and could have been much more accurate. Nagorno Karabakh is still de jure a part of Azerbaijan and including it in armenian section contributes even more to widening the gap between the two nations. Nagorno Karabakh indeed is a very sensitive subject and i would urge the unsophisticated visitor to do some extensive research prior to making conclusions. I am not surprised to find the armenian reviewer insulting the Georgian and the Azeri one. What can you do: armenian extreme national chauvinism blinds them. Indeed, if you look at the map of caucasus and do some research you will notice that armenia has problems with each one of its neighbors except for Iran. This is the kind of discussion that LP book leads us towards and to avoid it i urge everyone interested in the region to turn to Elliot book.

I normally like LP books. But for this region you should instead buy the Bradt Guide (for Georgia) or the one from Trailblazer (for Azerbaijan & Georgia). The reasons are clear from all the other reviews here!

The Lonely Planet Guide to "Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan" is the first mainstream travel guide to the physically beautiful South Caucasus Region of the world. Who, but Lonely Planet, would tackle such an interesting, volatile, and ultimately majestic part of the world. The book is split into four separate sections (the three Republics and the Armenian Region of Nagorno Karabagh). It follows a fairly standard Lonely Planet formula of being an attractive asthetic product complete with pictures, a language guide, and history.

That being said, I believe that the book needs a mixture of tweaking and more insight in some areas. The one glaring problem with the book is the lack of information provided in the Armenian section. The Georgian section of the book has nearly double the coverage of Armenia. This may be attributed to the fact that one of the authors penning the Georgian section, Keti Japaridze, is an ethnic Georgian. My guess is that she had a bit more insight, and ultimately material, to offer in this book. Even so, the Georgian section fails to give credit where credit is due. For instance, the inventor of the Georgian alphabet, an Armenian named Mesrop Mashtots is not mentioned as being the architect of the Georgian alphabet. (He also invented the Armenian and Ethiopian alphabets). Nor is there any mention of Armenians being the main influence for their church architecture and much of their folk art. This exclusion of proper historical perspective may be attributed to an author writing for the "home team" as they say. Otherwise, the entry is an entertaining travel guide to one of the more picturesque countries one may ever visit.

As mentioned before, the Armenia section is scant. A mere 54 pages, it covers the basics yet lacks any real depth to make it compelling stuff. It touches all the bases and has some useful information in terms of all the things that one would expect from a guidebook including food, lodging, attractions, and modes of transportation. However, it comes up short compared the lengthy Georgian section. In any event, it is the only guidebook out there on this ancient nation and I suspect in future editions more will be added. Perhaps an Armenian could be used as a consultant to provide more insight and attractions in a country that boasts the culture, history,and scenery as their trademarks. In my opinion, Armenia is the most majestic location of the three Republics with the least to worry about in terms of safety, accessability, or hospitality.

Azerbaijan is given ample coverage, but once again succumbs to a lack of any real historican accuracy in it's overview. The least friendly or appealing of the three destinations, Azerbaijan nevertheless is an interesting place to visit. The guide keeps pointing out fact about " Azeri history and its people" as if they as an ethnicity go back before the early 1900's. This, of course is inaccurate. The ethnicity know as Azeri's or Azerbaijan for that matter, never existed before the creation of the Soviet Republic in 1923. Knowing this, some of the historical excerpts are preposterous. However, as with the Armenian section, it is a first attempt to promote and present the Caucasus as a destination spot for travellers. From that perspective, the Azerbaijani section is adequate to good.

This book is a good start for people interested in a truly facinating look at three unique countries. Some serious historical oversights and omissions hinder this book. It seems the Armenians get slighted in this edition terms of content and historical accuracy when dealing with presence and influents in both Georgian and Azerbiajani culture. ( Armenians had a prominent role in the architectural and cultural advancement of both Baku and Tblisi). However, these things usually happen in first editions of lands never really explored in mainstream travel books. So, I can cut these folks some slack. Nevertheless, this book is better than what we previously had, which was nothing.

Updated on 5-18-02: To my critics on this books published in this section, particulary Mr. Fuad and the person dubiously named Khaka: "I am usually pretty open minded and fair when it comes to either a historical debate or a challenge, but, seeing as though you can't string together two words that are either spelled correctly or even pass the basic guidelines of competantcy, I'll leave you be. Also, the problem with people such as yourself (whoever you are) is that you can't seem to fathom the idea of historical accuracy. Now run along Khaka (I bet it sucks to have a name like that) and Fuad. "

can't do better in faking information, historical fact and contemporary events... certainly not a book for a historical research...

This book is the collection of lies. The writer has no idea about what is going on in that region. It is his imagination. Too bad that these kind of books still are being published.

have never in my life seen a bigger lie..... Very sad that people nowadays change history in their own aims.

Mr. Van Der Leeuw's book is incredibly clear in one thing - his enviable ability to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. The worst breech of one's responsibility as a scholar is the inability to record objective reality, a failure that is in itself remarkable in the book. Aside from all the overt signs of successful braiwashing that the author has apparently undergone by his Azeri counterparts, he makes such glaring historical and political errors in the book that even a person with no background in history or political science (such as myself) will immediately pick up on them. The range of errors is almost anecdotal, I have never read a book that makes so many on such few pages. I would recommend that Mr. Van Der Leeuw consults a few relatively objective sources - beginning with a simple Britannica consultation about basic facts in the region and revises the book, unless amusement and harmless ironization is the objective of his writing.

When I read the book from the beginning I realized that the authors main goal is trying to justify the reasons why Azerbaijan should be an autonomous state.

Always referring to Persia at that time as Iran, and not mention that Azerbaijan has always being for thousands of year's part of Persia. The facts were misleading, because the author is trying to use its nationalistic point of view in order again to justify the separation of Azerbaijan from Iran.
He fails to say that, the Azeri population is well mixed among Iranians. They are very well integrated in society, and they are vital to the function of Iranian society.
He ignores all the facts, and fails to bring the future affects of what will happen if Azerbaijan is separated from Iran.

I have one comment for my non-Iranian friend, dream on, you can leave Iran and all your Azeri friends can go and live in Turkey, but not even a single inch of Iran will be given to you non-Iranian, hate promoting separatists.

Any work on Caucasus is based on Soviet authors .They got scientific rewards for DISTORTION OF CAUCASIAN HISTORY.Local authors KNOW the truth, but write lies.Poor non caucasian authors are led astray by their lies and decieve the readers.THE UNO, the OSCE are decieved and will be ashamed of their resolutions on Abkhazians because they are the Georgians, but are treated as nongeorgians.The aim of the liers was to weaken the Georgians being the only indigenous nation in south Caucasus.The Armenians are imposed immigrants from non caucasian territories of Iran and Turkey,and the Azerbaijan ethnos was invented in 1936 and consist of Tartar, Turkish, Jevanhsir, Lezgin,Kurdish and other mostly nomadic tribes of vast Eurasian territories.A non caucasian cannot write a proper book about Caucasus.A truthful bookes were published in Tbilisi in Georgian:PROF. TEIMURAS MIBCHUANI-"ABKHAZIANS",1996,200pages, Prof. GERONTI GASVIANI, "ABKHAZIANS",1998,Prof. BADRI GOGIA AND JEMAL GAMAKHARIA "ABKHAZIA-DOCUMENTS ON ALL LANGUAGES TRANSLATED INTO RUSSIAN,TBILISI,614 pages,my booklet is being printed in ENGLISH,RUSSIAN AND GEORGIAN in TBILISI AND IN NEW YORK - "CAUCASUS AND PROF. IVANE JAVAKHISHVILI". Dr. NATELA POPKHADZE,TBILISI,GEORGIA