HISTORY LESSONS IN ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN
By Hayhuki Barseghyan, Shahla Sultanova
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
CRS Issue 631
Feb 27 2012
UK
In each country, school textbooks teach one version of history that
sustains animosity towards the other.
Schoolchildren in Armenia and Azerbaijan are too young to remember
the Nagorny Karabakh conflict which created so much hostility between
their countries. But their school textbooks feed them an unbalanced
view of history that some experts believe will only harden attitudes
for the future.
For decades, when both the republics were part of a single Soviet
state, many Armenians lived in Azerbaijan – predominantly in Nagorny
Karabakh – while large numbers of Azerbaijanis lived in Armenia.
In the late 1980s, Armenians in Karabakh began campaigning for
separation from Azerbaijan. Open warfare began in 1988 and only ended
in 1994 with a ceasefire that left Armenians in control of Nagorny
Karabakh and adjoining areas. No formal peace treaty was signed, and
international attempts to resolve Karabakh’s status have so far failed.
By the end of the conflict, the ethnic Azeris of Karabakh and Armenia
itself had become refugees in Azerbaijan, and the Armenians had fled
in the other direction. So two populations that were once mixed became
homogenous, each with a decreasing awareness of the other.
As the two nations developed separately over the past two decades,
each established its own narrative of events not just around the
Karabakh conflict but going back decades, even centuries. This is
reflected in the very different content of school history books in
Azerbaijan and Armenia, which colours the way children view both the
other side and their own past.
ENEMIES AND HEROES
Ashkhen, an Armenian in the 12th grade – the final year of school –
says she has studied the causes of the Karabakh conflict and the way
it unfolded, as well as the names of Armenian war heroes. She has
concluded that peace with the Azerbaijanis will not come any time soon.
“They have to give up their claims to our lands,” she said. “Only
when several generations have passed will it be possible for Azeris
and Armenians to stop being enemies.”
Guljennet Huseynli, a 16-year-old Azeri schoolgirl in Baku, can list
the sites of atrocities committed by Armenian forces in the conflict,
although she is too young to remember it herself.
“How can we forget it? They killed our babies in Khojaly and Shusha,”
she said, referring to events of the early 1990s. “My parents lost
their friends and classmates in the war. They witnessed a huge influx
of refugees to Baku. I’m learning about the bloody acts which the
Armenians committed against my nation at school from teachers and
textbooks.”
Khojaly is a case in point – an event in January 1992, during
the Karabakh war, which is remembered in Azerbaijan as a massacre
of hundreds of civilians fleeing the town – a tragedy of iconic
importance. The Armenians’ memory is that it was one of the unfortunate
incidents of war, with a lower bodycount than their opponents claim.
In their most recent attempt to forge an agreement, Armenian president
Serzh Sargsyan met his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the
Russian town of Sochi last month. One of the points they agreed on
in a joint statement issued together with Russian president Dmitry
Medvedev was that intellectuals needed to start engaging in dialogue
in an attempt to bridge the gap between their two countries.
Many young Armenians, however, say they want nothing to do with their
contemporaries in Azerbaijan.
Anna, 21, has plenty of internet contacts in various countries,
but avoids interacting with Azeris.
“You can’t talk to them without a conflict arising. We start arguing
about history, blame each other for things, attempt to convince each
other, but we always end up with the same opinions that we started
out with,” she said. “An Azeri schoolboy once wrote to me and started
accusing me of various things, denying the existence of a genocide
[against Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16], and calling Armenians
‘occupiers’. I was naïve enough to say that he had studied poorly at
school, and suggested he read what it says in the textbook.”
The boy replied by quoting chunks of Azeri school books that supported
his argument, such as one passage from a year-ten history text
describing Armenians as “our eternal enemies” and detailing their
offences in the early 1900s.
Tofig Veliyev, head of the Slavic history department at Baku State
University, is the author of this textbook, and insists he had to
use negative language in order to tell the truth.
“Those phrases give an accurate picture of the Armenians,” Veliyev
said. “I would be falsifying history unless I described them like
that.”
Similar language is found in the year 11 history book, which covers the
Karabakh war period, and describes the Armenian forces as “fascists”
who perpetrated various crimes.
Hasan Naghizade, a year 11 student in Baku, said it was right for
history to be presented in this way.
“The author is Azerbaijani. Of course he’s going to incite animosity.
That’s the way it should be,” he said. “They definitely don’t want
to prepare us for peace. We don’t need peace. The Armenians have
committed a lot of bloody acts against us. Peace would be disrespectful
to those who died in the war.”
Azerbaijan’s education ministry approved the current set of history
books in 2000. Faig Shahbazli, head of the ministry’s publications
department, says the books were commissioned from historians and then
checked for content.
One stipulation was that the texts should not contain discriminatory
language. “Textbooks should promote democracy and tolerance, not
hatred,” Shahbazli said.
But he added that words like “terrorist”, “bandit”, “fascist” and
“enemy” did not breach that principle.
“Those words reflect facts. They do not provoke intolerance of
Armenians. They don’t suggest the Armenian nation committed crimes;
they merely indicate the nationality of those who did,” he said,
adding that children were capable of distinguishing between individual
wrongdoing and a nation as a whole.
Armenian’s education ministry conducts competitions for new textbooks
every four to five years, with historians and publishers entering
joint bids to be approved by ministry experts.
In Armenia, adolescents learn about the “War of Liberation” for
Karabakh – which they call Artsakh – in year nine. The conflict is
framed within the context of a long history from ancient Armenian
statehood through to the “perestroika” period of the late 1980s, when
nationalist aspirations began being voiced by various Soviet groups.
“The spread of liberation movements in the Soviet Union was a direct
result of the politics of perestroika,” the book says. “The Artsakh
Armenians were the first to rise up in defence of their national
dignity. They would not accept that their historical lands had been
forcibly united with Azerbaijan.”
This textbook is careful to avoid criticism of the Azeri nation as
a whole, reserving it for the government in Baku.
Some say the book lays out the facts too drily, and would like to
see it strike a more patriotic tone.
“There’s no national spirit in this material,” complained Anahit, 19.
“Student should feel a sense of national pride in the valorous
compatriots and in this magnificent victory won by the Armenians. This
is lost in a dry recounting of events,” she said.
Mikael Zolyan, a political analyst in Yerevan, has studied textbooks
from all three countries in the South Caucasus, including Georgia.
He said Armenian books were phrased relatively neutrally, and lacked
the emotional language found elsewhere, he said. But they were still
far from ideal as they presented history from an entirely Armenian
perspective.
“You can’t expect anything else from history textbooks, but it would
be right to present the other side’s point of view, even if it’s
mistaken,” he said.
Arif Yunusov, an Azeri historian who has written on the Karabakh war,
appealed to the authors of all textbooks to refrain from inflammatory
language and to try about their influence on the younger generation.
Bellicose rhetoric makes a resumption of conflict more likely, he said.
“It is racism to portray Armenians the way they do in the [Azerbaijani]
textbooks,” he said. “Those kids will grow up with hatred, not
tolerance. How are we going to achieve peace then?”
OLD GRIEVANCES, MODERN NARRATIVES
It is not just recent history that leaves Armenians and Azerbaijanis
with entrenched opposing views.
Another major difference concerns the mass killings of Armenians in
Ottoman Turkey during the First World War.
Schoolchildren study these events in year eight, and read accounts of
the Ottoman authorities driving Armenians into the desert and killing
1.5 million of them in a deliberate act of genocide.
Ruben Sahakyan, the historian who wrote the section on the killings,
said he tried to avoid provoking emotional reactions.
“You must present only the facts, so that children can analyse them
for themselves,” he said. “If you introduce emotional factors, you
lose objectivity.”
Sahakyan argued that the Azerbaijanis were perpetuating historical
myths created in Soviet times, whereas Armenian academics had spent
the early years after independence in 1991 attempting to correct
the record.
“We are writing real history, without exaggerations,” he said.
Turkey denies genocide and disputes the number of dead, and its stance
is shared by its close ally Azerbaijan.
Veliyev, for example, said the reason Azeri children did not learn
about the Armenian genocide is because it did not take place.
“It never happened. Why should we teach our children an invented
history?” he asked.
Another set of historical issues about which Azerbaijani and Armenian
teachers offer differing accounts is the period following the Russian
Revolution and attempts to create nation-states in the South Caucasus.
In outlining the events of 1918, when Armenians and Azerbaijani forces
battled for control of Baku, textbooks from Yerevan confine themselves
to describing the short-lived independent Armenian state that was
later subsumed within the Soviet Union. Azerbaijanis, meanwhile,
read accounts of massacres committed by Armenians in Baku.
Baku school pupil Guljennet links the Karabakh war to 1918, suggesting
a pattern of events that means Azerbaijanis must always be on their
guard.
“Armenians killed Azerbaijanis at the beginning of the [20th] century.
We forgot it and became friends. And what happened? They killed us
again. Is there any guarantee they won’t do it in future?” she said.
Sahakyan dismissed such accounts as inventions.
“The Azerbaijanis have set themselves the task of making Baku an Azeri
city, so in order to explain why Armenians were numerically superior
there, they have invented mass killings that did not actually happen,”
he said.
Armenian Academy of Sciences member Vladimir Barkhudaryan led the
group of writers who produced the first post-independence history book,
and continues to edit textbooks today. He argues that the reason why
Armenian textbooks pay little attention to certain events is that
they are not judged important.
“Insignificant events such as those that took place in Khojaly and in
Baku in 1918 cannot be included. Schools have a clear timetable for
the number of lessons into which the study of history has to fit. If
you include this small changes in the book, it would be a huge tome,”
he said.
CALLS FOR ALL-EMBRACING, RIGOROUS HISTORY
In Azerbaijan, historian Yunusov said the selective approaches
taken to events in Baku in 1918 illustrated the problem of drawing
up a commonly-accepted narrative of the past. He said Azerbaijani
historians talked only about March 1918, when many Azeris died, while
their Armenian counterparts focused on September the same year when
the Turkish army entered Baku and killed many Armenians.
He said this was wrong, and recommended instead that each side include
the grievances of the other when compiling historical textbooks.
“Both sides use history as a political game. Armenian and Azerbaijani
historians each claim to represent the public interest. But the
historian should not be a provocateur; he should not represent
the public interest. He should just present the historical facts,”
Yunusov said.
In Armenia, Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan, an analyst with the Mitq think
tank, was similarly despairing of the spectacle of historians engaged
in mutual recriminations.
“The [textbook] material must not agitate to create a victim mentality,
but instead point to the mistakes that were made and the methods for
avoiding them in future,” he said.
Melik-Shahnazaryan called for more intellectual rigour and analysis
in historical accounts.
“You end up with a load of facts that you can’t connect together,”
he said.
Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre in Yerevan,
agreed that the general intellectual standard of Armenian school
books could be better.
“Even the more recently produced textbooks have generally not been up
to the minimum professional standard,” he said. “That’s particularly
true of history books, which despite the higher expectations placed on
them with the end of Soviet state control and ideology, tend to deliver
only a meager and random selection of historical topics,” he said.
Hayhuki Barseghyan is a reporter for the Armenian weekly Ankakh and
its website Shahla Sultanova is a freelance journalist
in Azerbaijan.
http://iwpr.net/report-news/history-lessons-armenia-and-azerbaijan
www.ankah.com.