YEREVAN SCHOOL KICKS OFF ‘DAYS OF AZERBAIJAN’
By Astghik Bedevian
Radio LIberty, Czech Rep.
Dec 17 2007
A public school in Yerevan began on Monday a four-day series of events
designed to promote Armenian-Azerbaijani reconciliation by enabling
its students and teachers to hold discussions with visiting public
figures from Azerbaijan.
The Days of Azerbaijan at the Mkhitar Sebastatsi Educational Complex
will also feature presentations by the visiting Azerbaijanis and their
Armenian partners as well as an arts exhibition and the screening
of a documentary film on the conflict between the two South Caucasus
nations. The events are sponsored by the British Embassy in Armenia
and the Armenian Center for Peace Initiatives, a non-governmental
organization.
The Azerbaijani delegation that arrived in Yerevan on the occasion
includes three human rights campaigners, a journalist, a writer and
an NGO activist.
"This is just an attempt to give our students and teachers a better
idea of our neighbors and to discuss our outstanding problems in the
process," Ashot Bleyan, the Mkhitar Sebastatsi director, told RFE/RL.
He expressed hope that such initiatives will make Armenian society
"more tolerant."
A former education minister and prominent critic of the
current Armenian government, Bleyan has long been championing
Armenian-Azerbaijani dialogue. He went as far as to pay a high-profile
visit to Baku in 1992 at the height of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The
trip was condemned as high treason by Armenian nationalist groups
who continue to accuse Bleyan of favoring Karabakh’s "sellout."
Seymur Bayjan, an Azerbaijani writer who will lecture Mkhitar
Sebastatsi students on his country’s contemporary literature on
Tuesday, complained that despite occasional contacts between small
groups of Armenians and Azerbaijanis the two nations as a whole are
still not prepared for peace. "A single cannon shell can reverse all
these peace initiatives," he told RFE/RL.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, welcomed the Mkhitar
Sebastatsi initiative, saying that it will have a positive impact on
the long-running Karabakh peace talks. "We believe that this initiative
is vivid proof of our commitment to peace and dialogue," said the
ministry spokesman, Vladimir Karapetian. "Such events … should have
a continuation in all the countries included in the program."
It was an apparent reference to the fact the holding of similar
Armenian-Azerbaijani contacts in Baku has been practically impossible
in recent years due to a government policy that considers the very
presence of Armenian citizens on Azerbaijani soil an affront to
Azerbaijan’s honor and territorial integrity.