Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Aug 25 2013
Nagorno-Karabakh war survivors urge Armenia, Azerbaijan for peace deal
25 August 2013 /LAMÄ°YA ADÄ°LGIZI, Ä°STANBUL
Despite coming from vastly different frames of reference, young
Armenian and Azerbaijani survivors of the Nagorno-Karabakh war are
calling on their governments to finally make a peace deal over a more
than 20-year-old territorial dispute.
They are urging their fellow citizens to communicate across borders
and break the ties of the past conflict because the dispute poses a
great threat to stability and interactions between nations in the
region and risks both states moving towards another bloody war in the
South Caucasus.
Anush Araqelyan, now 23, was only 9 months old when she lost her both
parents in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Originally from Kapan, formerly
known as Kafan, an Armenian city bordering Azerbaijan which was the
location of the first signs of the conflict in the late 1980s when
residents of both nations were involved in acts of violence, the
Araqelyan family was attacked on their way to the city, a tragedy that
left Araqelyan’s father and mother dead. Only her grandfather was able
to survive.
Araqelyan had believed that she would never be able to relate to any
Azerbaijani in her life and always held that there was no other
solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict but war.
The bloody conflict erupted between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Armenians
in 1991 over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, predominantly
Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijani borders. Armenian-backed
armed forces under the command of current President Serzh Sarksyan
seized 20 percent of Azerbaijani territories, including the enclave
itself and seven adjacent Azerbaijani-populated territories, killing
30,000 people. Hundreds of thousands fled their homes before a
cease-fire was signed in 1994, although there is as of yet no peace
treaty. Violence still flares up sporadically along the cease-fire
line in which not only troops, but also civilians on both sides, are
killed.
`I grew up with a feeling of hatred towards Azerbaijanis although I
had never met any of them before participating in the Caux Scholars
Program in Switzerland this summer,’ Araqelyan said in an interview
with Today’s Zaman, admitting that meeting Azerbaijani participants
was a tough challenge for her.
`The meeting with Azerbaijani participants played a key role for me. I
discovered another person within me, someone who dreams of living in
peace without any hatred, troubles, losses or war,’ she said.
The Caux Scholars Program, part of the Initiatives of Change global
summer conferences held each summer, brings together young people from
around the world to better understand the factors that prolong
conflicts as well as the need for dialogue and negotiation, which is
crucial to mitigating past conflicts and avoiding similar clashes in
the future.
The first week in Caux, a Swiss city situated in the mountains,
hosting conflict transformation and peace-building programs each
summer, was the most challenging experience for Araqelyan as she had
to overcome her feelings over the presence of Azerbaijanis. `I was
trying to avoid talking or having any conversation with them. However,
the last two weeks brought a major change in me as I started to see
their personalities, their attitudes and their feelings.’
Araqelyan says she experienced a personal transformation every minute
and every day while in Caux. She was happy as she was living without
fear or hatred and feeling very calm and peaceful. Interestingly, she
was becoming more and more afraid of returning to Armenia.
`I realized that it would be difficult to explain to my friends the
change in me since I would not be able understand it as well if I was
in their place. We usually call this change `brainwashing.’ That is
why it would be difficult to explain my transformation, which is not
`brainwashing’ but just a desire to live and to enjoy every
opportunity life gives us without hatred or fear,’ she notes.
Youth role alternative in conflict resolution
Araqelyan says the best solution to settling this conflict is hidden
within us `as only personal transformation can help us get rid of the
hatred we are living with.’ The only way to reach a peaceful
resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be through the
peaceful efforts of youths from both Armenia and Azerbaijan, Araqelyan
believes.
“Neither government is ready for a peace settlement and in this
situation nobody cares about the people; they only care about
territory rather than the people living there,” Araqelyan says.
On the other side of the conflict, Aynur Jafar, 32, agrees with
Araqelyan on the need for a peaceful solution to the conflict. Jafar
is an Azerbaijani internal displaced person (IDP) from a small,
predominantly Azerbaijani-populated village in Nagorno-Karabakh. She
urged Armenian youths to understand their Azerbaijani peers, saying:
`I don’t know what my village means to an Armenian, but to me that
village means a lot. That village is my grandfather’s grave, that
village is our house that was built through hard work by my father and
my mother, that village is my childhood, that village is my home. I am
just dreaming of the day when I will be able to return to my village;
each of my dreams end with tears,’ Jafar says in burst of emotion,
asking, `Is it worth it?’
Jafar is a representative of the Azerbaijani families who were forced
to leave their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh during the war in the early
’90s.
Reciting her personal story that dates back to the bloody
Nagorno-Karabakh war, Jafar says the war reached her village in
1991-1992 after the territories around Nagorno-Karabakh had been
seized by Armenian armed forces. `We were still resisting all the
shelling and firing over our heads, and we did not even consider
leaving our village at all. My mum was always telling us that we would
never abandon our house as it is our home, and we had toiled hard to
lay each stone of our house and no one could take it away from us,’
she recalls. She added that unfortunately, they were unable to resist
and left their village in mid-September of 1992 when the village was
completely occupied, and they were unable to even bring anything with
them.
Being a little child at the time, Jafar could not understand why they
had to leave their house where they had always lived, and she was
upset and furious as she did not want to leave her school and her
friends. Even after they fled to the capital city of Baku, she could
not stop thinking about her friends who she left behind without a
promising future.
`Leaving our home was not our choice. We only had two other choices:
We could either stay and be killed, or we would have been taken
hostage by the Armenian side, which would have been the most terrible
choice as we were hearing stories of people who were ill-treated and
tortured after being taken hostage by Armenians,’ Jafar says, adding,
`Life is so precious that we preferred leaving to dying.’
Recalling her feelings towards Armenians during the war years, Jafar
says it was the `feelings of a child towards a person who I believed
posed a danger to my life at any time. I truly feared Armenians as in
my mind at the time they were horrible creatures, especially after the
Khojaly massacre. It was not only fear that was inside me but also
hatred towards Armenians,’ she says, adding: `I saw a woman in
tattered clothes who was able to escape the massacre with her young
son while leaving behind the dead bodies of 10 family members. I still
cannot forget the dazed expression of that woman.’
The Khojaly massacre is one of the most tragic chapters in modern
Azerbaijani history when in the early hours of Feb. 26, 1992, Armenian
armed forces, directed by Armenian President Sarksyan, along with
Russia’s 366th armored battalion, killed at least 613 unarmed and
defenseless people — the majority of whom were women, children,
elderly, sick and disabled.
Negotiations between nations critical for peace
`While growing up, however, I started to understand everything much
more clearly, and my perception of Armenians changed, something which
my late mother played a huge role in,’ Jafar says.
`We had an old Armenian neighbor in Baku after we fled our home. While
I continued hating her, my mother was helping her by giving her some
of our food. When I asked my mother why she was helping our enemy, she
told me that it was a huge mistake to blame an old woman for a war
that is the result of political games or to hate her just because she
belongs to a certain ethnic group [Armenians],’ Jafar says, adding,
“My mom taught me life’s greatest lesson of love for humanity, and I
will always be grateful to her.”
“Hatred is a life-poisoning toxin, and no person or nation whose heart
beats with hatred can be happy or blessed. I don’t hate Armenians, I
just feel sorry for those Armenians who are looking for reasons to
hate Azerbaijanis,” Jafar says.
`We should not remain stuck in the past although it is very hard and
impossible to forget,’ she says, pointing out the role of the young
people on both sides who have grown up and been educated outside of
the propaganda machine of their countries.
`We need to negotiate; we need to talk as communication is the primary
and the most important step [towards peace and a solution]. We need to
admit the things that we have done towards each other — this is the
most critical and inevitable starting point of the settlement. Without
this, neither side can go any further,’ Jafar says. She adds that
people from both sides have to be involved in the negotiation process
to move the peace talks forward as neither government is interested in
peace but both are “using this situation in order to stay in power.’
After a cease-fire ended the bloody war in Nagorno-Karabakh, both
sides agreed to engage in internationally mediated negotiations under
the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), which has unfortunately not yielded any results.
Armenian President Sarksyan last week voiced support for his
Azerbaijani counterpart, Ä°lham Aliyev, in an upcoming presidential
election, saying that would be the best outcome for resolving the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-324348-nagorno-karabakh-war-survivors-urge-armenia-azerbaijan-for-peace-deal.html