20 January 2009
 
Nineteen Years

(Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage)
 
It is inauguration day in Washington, and the place is locked-down, and jammed to the gills. Route 50 is eerily empty. At this hour it is normally a solid wave of steel and plastic headed into the capital. It is not, this morning.
 
You can feel something in the air. I am not going out of the house unless there is a fire.
 
A really big fire. Yet something is tugging at me. I wonder if I might head over to Fort Myer and walk in the back gate of Arlington Cemetery to General Lee’s old home on the hill, with the commanding view of the city across the river. I’ll have to let you know how that goes.
 
In the meantime, I am going to let the day play out in all its historic majesty.
 
In the meantime, I had time to consider the whole Baku massacre thing as part of the puzzle that the new President will take up. There is so much out there he will be expected to understand, immediately, and to act with certainty and conviction.
 
It is the anniversary today, and forgive me if we get to the new President through the events in Baku. One of our old pals has given up commerce, joined the Peace Corps, and headed off to South Asia to do something useful.
 
I am not going to do that. But this discussion touched a nerve. One of my classmate's from Harvard JFK '02 is Fakhraddin Gurbanov, who recently became Azerbaijan's Ambassador to the Court of St. James in London. I pulled the yearbook and wandered down the years. Harvard Yard, or in this case, the complex at 79 John F. Kennedy Street, is quite a cross-roads for people from all sorts of odd places.
 
"Fariq" was a quiet man with a blinding white smile,  gentle manners and sharp, alert dark eyes he sometimes concealed behind sunglasses in aviator frames. He was starting to go bald, and kept the hair on the side close-cropped. He was a nice guy, and I liked him a lot. I assume he was a Muslim, but I never asked. It did not seem relevant.

 
(Fariq, 2002)
 
He came up through the old Soviet systems- he is a '75 alumni of the Azerbaijani State Institute of Foreign Languages- and was a solid apparatchik. After graduation, he was Executive Secretary and Chairman for the Committee of Youth Organizations in Baku a year later. He called it by the found diminutive “Baky,” like a Kentuckian might talk about broad leaf tobacco.
 
He served in those positions for fourteen years, and then when the Wall came down, decided to sever his ties with the Communist Part and resume his academic career. In 1990, he was studying at the Institute of Political Sciences in Baku. 
 
That is how he missed direct culpability in the security service riot that killed more than a hundred Azeris. Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of the tragedy, and he was there when Soviet troops entered Baku without warning and committed terrible massacre over the night from January 19th to 20th, 1990.
 
Suppression of the separatist movement in the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh caused protest to break out, demanding that the government to resign. Gorbachev sent in the troops to protect the local pro-Moscow government and crack down on the protesters.
 
Solders from the USSR defense and interior ministries, as well as KGB, conducted joint operation in Baku in massive force, deploying 66,000 troops.
 
The Red Army opened fire on peaceful people, killing one hundred and thirty-four people and wounding six times that number. There were more than twenty women and children among the victims.
 
Ayaz Mutalibov was the local communist strongman, and Fariq knew him. He initially supported an August 1991 coup against the Gorbachev regime, but once it failed, he swiftly moved to protect himself from Moscow's wrath by announcing his resignation as first secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party. A month later, Mutalibov was elected president without electoral opposition, although certain questions about propriety were raised.  
The day of independence was at hand. I recall working some of the issues in the Pentagon regarding what was about to become the Former Soviet Union as the old empire began its astonishing collapse. Azerbaijan began the process October 18, when the Supreme Soviet passed a law on state independence, ratifying that body's August declaration of independence. In December, a Soviet-style plurality of over 99 percent of voters cast ballots for independence. The constitution was duly amended to reflect the country's new status, and the Azeri Supreme Soviet appealed to the UN for recognition.
 
In December, Mutalibov signed accords on Azerbaijan's membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the down-at-the-heels Soviet equivalent of the British Commonwealth, even as he pushed Azeri forces to intervene in the Askeran region of Nagorno Karabakh, an overwhelmingly Christian Armenian province on the northern border of Iran.
 
Everyone in the region, newly independent or not, seems to like to tee-off on the Armenians.
 
By February, Azeri forces occupied almost half of Karabakh’s territory and the capital of Stepanakert was being shelled day and night. On February 26th, 1992, six hundred people, mostly non-combatant Armenians were reported murdered as they attempted to flee the fighting near a village called Khojalu. The official story was that the atrocity was caused by the Armenians themselves, though rumors spread that the killings had been orchestrated by a senior Azeri official.
 
It appears that the innocents got caught in a moment of confusion between CIS regular troops and irregular Azeri forces.
 
I wish I had known at the time what to ask. I imagine President Obama will have a few of those moments in the days to come.
 
Fariq had joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1990, directing the Office of Information for two years, right through the time of make-believe stories on the events in NK. He was then in the Office of Protocol from 1992 to 1993. He then came here to DC for his first overseas posting, and stayed. He was First Secretary and Consul at the Azerbaijani Embassy for eight years and was president of the Consular Corps here in ‘96.
 
In '01, his term was up and the terror attacks had changed everything. He became Ambassador-at-Large for the Western Hemisphere, which gave him some time and a chance to get back to school. That is how I came to be at Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage ("Best burgers in Boston!") with the Ambassador in '02. The Kennedy School had conveniently outed me as a CIA employee. I was not- my salary came from elsewhere, and Langley just paid for the education. But my identity and affiliation was published in all the course materials, so there was no use in pretending. I had some great times up there in Cambridge, a spook unmasked.
 
We completed the Senior Managers in Government course in August, and frankly, by the end of week three, we were both bored with the food, plentiful though it was. We decided to skip the usual goat-rope at the grad school, and Fariq and I went downtown for several lime rickies.
 
If you recall the book "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," you can see the place. That was the much ballyhooed novel by Harvard freshman Kaavya Viswanathan that later turned out to have several “borrowed” chunks. The book is sort of a “Legally Blonde” done in South Asian. It was required reading at the Kennedy School until they found out about the plagiarism. The Cottage itself is an institution of long standing, with no copying, and like the menu says, "A Boston landmark since 1960,” even if it is in Cambridge.
 
At the end of the book, the Legally Brunette heroine finally gets accepted by The Greatest College in the World and finds herself sitting at Bartley's with a group of fellow John Harvards. As she bites into her “George Bush” burger, cheesy grease and BBQ sauce drip down her chin, and she is filled with happiness beyond anything she had ever experienced. Reading that, Fakkie and I knew that we wanted to eat like Republicans, too, and decided to trek to Mr. Bartley's.
 
We had a couple stiff rickies at the Ambassador’s digs over at Grad School housing were we were billeted, and then drank our way downtown. The Cottage is an unassuming place, but it is always jammed. We were lucky to get stools at the counter, and watched the stolid Beantown guys in the kitchen slapping raw meat paddies around. I had a Bud long neck, I don’t know why. The Ambassador had a cup of strong coffee to get back in the ballgame- he wanted to be sharp for later- he said he had some shit to do.
 
In the spirit of the initial surge toward the 2004 elections, I ordered the John Kerry burger- "He voted this the best burger before he voted against it.” It was an awesome swiss cheeseburger with mushrooms, tomato, lettuce, and fries.
 
The Ambassador took his time picking, since t here were so many choices. He looked seriously at the “Ted Kennedy,” which the hand-written menu on the chalk-board describes as “a plump, liberal amount of burger with cheddar cheese, mushrooms and French fries.
 
He considered the The Professor Skip Gates, “a sharply dressed burger for a sharply dressed man,” with teriyaki burger with grilled pineapple and the Cottage’s famous onion rings.  The Larry Summers “the Harvard President-women can eat, too!” sounded good- a Swiss burger with lettuce, tomato, honey mustard, with Freedom fries. The Arnold Schwarzenegger looked to be too much- “this is no girly burger” and is a double Swiss burger with double fries.
 
In the end, Fariq went with something that might have been called the Viagra Burger, which promised to “Rise to the Occasion.” He liked that because of the extra load he was carrying about the oil and gas treaties back home, and the tensions about the big pipeline.
 
I had my Kerry with plenty of Heinz ketchup.20It was AMAZING. Total love at first bite! The meat was tender and juicy, and the whole thing was cheesy, savory, and deliciously greasy. Our burgers were cooked to a perfect medium-rare, which is a very rare occurrence, as it is not something that happens very often in restaurants. Normally, they are more medium well. A few bites in, my chin was dripping with meat juice and ketchup and chunks of half-chewed mushrooms.  I don’t think I have ever been happier with cooked beef.
           
For dessert we had the maple bread pudding and a lime rickie...yum!
 
The Ambassador said he had never been happier, either, and it was infinitely better than having the state security forces open fire on you. The interlude and it almost made him forget the unpleasantness of the Gorbachev era back home. He said it was a truly transcendental burger experience.
 
We have not got together since, though we keep in touch. Fariq has been busy. With no official representation in Canada, the Azerbaijani embassy in Washington concerned itself with Canadian affairs, and Fakkie was responsible for these matters at the chancery.
 
His involvement with Canadian-Azerbaijani relations must have been a good reason for his October 2003 appointment to the Azerbaijani mission in Ottawa, where he had been Charge d'Affaires. He was Azerbaijan's first resident ambassador to Hockey Land, and so successful that he was tapped to be Ambassador to the court of St. James in London in ’07. We Harvard men have a knack for this sort of shit.
 
Last I heard, he was in the press coverage of the big conference in Aberdeen, Scotland, dedicated to the investment opportunities in the Caspian region. It was co-sponsored by the British Trade and Investment Agency, the British-Azerbaijan Society and the Municipality of Aberdeen City. He provided the Scottish companies with information about the new investment opportunities in the Caspian region. Don’t believe what you read in the papers. Everything is fine.
 
Fariq informed the participants about the economic projects underway in Azerbaijan. He spoke about the large-scale programs and great infrastructure projects implemented by the government for the development of non-oil sector. He specifically mentioned the dairy and beef production sector, with the goal of making the Republic a world leader in cheeseburger production, along with gas and oil.
 
The Ambassador normally sends out a short note on the anniversary of the massacre by the Russians, but I haven’t seen one yet. If I get it this afternoon, I’ll pass it along.
 
But you know, Fariq has not gone home yet, and that may mean he is one of the smartest Azerbaijanis of all. I hear the Russians are back, and no one knows what that means for Baku, or for the Armenians.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com