Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
June 18 2009
SPECIAL REPORT: KARABAKH REFUGEES
EDITOR’S NOTE
By Oliver Bullough, Caucasus Editor
The warring sides in Nagorny Karabakh signed their ceasefire just over
15 years ago, freezing a conflict that had displaced half a million
Armenians and at least 800,000 Azeris.
In the decade and a half since, no progress has been made over the
status of Karabakh, where the Armenian rulers have proclaimed an
independent state, nor over the regions of western Azerbaijan occupied
by Armenian forces.
The foreign media have largely ignored Karabakh and the plight of the
displaced civilians, and it does not even win the column inches that
the likes of Abkhazia receive.
As the United Nations refugee agency representative in Azerbaijan
warned us in an interview for this special package of stories,
abandoning the refugees will make them prey to despair and misery.
IWPR decided to go into the refugees’ homes in Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Karabakh itself to report on how they were living, what they wanted,
and what they expected. There was precious little hope for the future
among them, but they had found their own ways to survive.
LIVES FROZEN BY CONFLICT
With no sign of Karabakh stand-off being resolved, refugees will
remain in legal and economic limbo, their lives frozen by the frozen
conflict.
By Karine Ohanian in Stepanakert, Seymur Kyazimov in Baku and Gegham
Vardanian in Yerevan
Some 15 years have passed since a ceasefire was signed in the Nagorny
Karabakh conflict, yet the people forced out of their homes by the
fighting have still not found peace. They still suffer from
homesickness, poverty, discomfort and legal difficulties.
Refugees in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Karabakh ` a majority-Armenian
territory that broke free of Azeri control with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and unilaterally declared independence ` have told IWPR
how they feel abandoned in the student hostels, old hotels, schools
and offices they now call home.
`Refugees today would like to forget that they are refugees, but this
does not happen. What we lived through is unforgettable,’ Sarasar
Sarian, an Armenian from Baku now living in Karabakh, told IWPR.
Ethnic tensions between Armenians and Azeris boiled over in the late
1980s, when the Karabakh Armenians petitioned Moscow to detach their
region from Azerbaijan and cede it to Armenia. Reciprocal
demonstrations in Baku turned violent, leading to violence in Karabakh
and Armenia. Riots between the two communities forced hundreds of
thousands of civilians to flee each others’ countries, although at
that time they were all citizens of the Soviet Union.
With independence in 1991 came war. At the ceasefire in May 1994,
Armenian forces were occupying 14 per cent of Azerbaijan proper. At
least 800,000 Azeris had fled to Azerbaijan from Armenia and parts of
their own country seeking safety.
Since the war is not technically over, these people are still
desperately hoping one day they can return to their homes.
`The problems of the forced migrants will be resolved when they return
to their homes. The government of Azerbaijan is already drawing up a
`Plan of Return’,’ said Sanan Huseynov, head spokesman for
Azerbaijan’s State Committee for the Affairs of Refuges and Forced
Migrants, in an interview with IWPR.
He said the government was building accommodation for the refugees,
and had set up whole villages in the Beylagan, Khajavend and Goranboy
regions.
`Forced migrants live in some military bases. There are around 11,000
middle schools, half of which are occupied by forced migrants. We also
plan to resettle {them] by 2011. In Baku, there are also some places
where forced migrants continue to live in terrible conditions. We are
building new houses,’ he said.
Before 1991, Baku was a city with a very large Armenian population,
many of whom spoke only Russian between themselves , a legacy of the
Russian language’s role as the lingua franca of the former Soviet
Union. As a rich city, with a booming oil industry, it had attracted
immigrants from all across the South Caucasus and beyond.
Fleeing Azerbaijan, these 500,000 Armenians primarily moved to Armenia
proper, which is to the west of Azerbaijan. Many of them settled in
Karabakh, however, where they took the place of Azeri refugees fleeing
eastwards.
Since Karabakh’s independence has not been recognised by other
countries, they are technically not refugees, but internally displaced
people, IDPs ` a source of considerable bitterness, since that cuts
them off from much international aid.
`In this question, the international community is guilty of double
standards. Because we live in an unrecognised republic, international
organisations ` like the Danish Refugee Council or the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), do not recognised us as
refugees, and we do not have the right to receive international
humanitarian aid, which goes to refugees in Azerbaijan,’ said Sarian,
the Armenian refugee from Baku, who heads the Social Organisation of
Refugees of Karabakh.
`We are not opposed to them receiving help, but we have also lost our
homes and property. Can you really politicise this humanitarian aid?’
UNHCR, which has to help refugees while negotiating the complex legal
tangle of the South Caucasus’ frozen conflict, told IWPR that such
IDPs were the responsibility of the Azerbaijan government.
`For the IDPs from Nagorny Karabakh, it is clear that they have the
right to return to their places of origin with safety and dignity,’
said Arun Sala-Ngarm, UNHCR’s newly-appointed representative in
Azerbaijan, in an interview with IWPR.
Victoria Taliskhanova, UNHCR assistant programme officer, said the
agency was now focussed on trying to help refugees raise their
standard of living and access to services available to ordinary
citizens.
`The main aim of our donors is an improvement in forced migrants’
social conditions, the creation of conditions for education and work,
the prevention of sexual or gender-based violence, the support of
sport and education and so on,’ she said.
And on the Armenian side, the concerns are similar. Armenia and
Azerbaijan still lack diplomatic ties. Since Azerbaijan has been
supported by its ally Turkey, that has left Armenia in an almost total
blockade, effectively only with access through Georgia to the outside
world.
Some 360,000 of the half-million Armenians who fled Azerbaijan ended
up in Armenia, and most of them are poor even by the standards of
their impoverished country. A survey in 2007 showed that less than ten
per cent of them managed to take their wealth or property out of
Azerbaijan with them, most having fled just with what they were
carrying.
`The social problems of refugees are extremely urgent. The housing
problem is still not resolved, and added to that refugees can only
find work with great difficulty,’ said Nikolai Babajanian, himself a
Baku Armenian who lived in a hut for 14 years until he managed to
obtain a one-room flat.
The Yerevan government is steadily trying to build housing for
refugees, but the process is slow, and refugees are often forced to
find housing by themselves. In the first years of the influx, Armenian
arrivals were able to exchange their houses with Azeris going in the
opposite direction, and most of them are now relatively well-off.
`We have our own land, we farm livestock, we sow and we reap, and we
live okay,’ said Albert Dalakian, who fled Baku and has lived for 20
years now in an Azeri’s house in the village of Ranchpar.
`We don’t live badly,’ said his wife Sveta, `our children help
us. Just every year we have to spend 150,000 dram (around 400 dollars)
on fuel. If they solve the problem with gas, than life will be a lot
easier.’
But they were the lucky ones. There are 1,000 refugees in the village,
and many of them did not manage to exchange their houses before they
left Baku. Larisa Astsaturova, for example, lives in very cramped
accommodation.
`I live with my mother and two children. I am waiting for the
government to provide some separate accommodation, but I already don’t
have much hope for this,’ she said.
She may be right not to hope. Analysts see no signs that the Karabakh
stand-off could be resolved any time soon, meaning that the refugees
in both countries ` and in the territory itself ` will remain in legal
and economic limbo, their lives frozen by the frozen conflict.
`Even if it does come to some kind of regulation, Armenians will never
believe that Azerbaijan will secure their security, independent of
whatever is written in the document,’ said David Petrosian, the
political commentator of the news agency Noyan Tapan.
`Most refugees are now citizens of Armenia, and I have not noticed
that they want to go back to Baku or Gyanja.’
Many of the refugees recognise that their children have now grown up
in a different country to their own, meaning they would be unlikely to
feel comfortable even if they did go back.
`But us Baku people, we live in our own groups and we talk in Russian,
but my children speak Armenian, they study in Armenian schools and
universities, and talk amongst themselves in Armenian,’ said Gayane
Martirosian, who said she is now getting used to life in the village.
`If they did not remind us that we should speak in Armenian, we would
not even remember that we are refugees.’
It would appear, therefore, that despite the insistence on all sides
that refugees have the legal right to return to their homes, the
people themselves are already getting used to the fact that they will
not now do so. Baku Armenians are gradually adapting to life in
Karabakh and in Armenia, while rural Azeris forced to live in Baku are
learning city ways.
`I still cook this cake we call `Baku’. A lot of people come and ask
for the recipe, but I don’t give it to them. I tell them that I am
always happy to cook this cake, but only a Baku woman can cook it
properly,’ said Svetlana Gharibian, who has lived in Karabakh since
1993 but who still gives her home address in Baku if you ask her where
she is from.
Karine Ohanian is a freelance journalist in Stepanakert and a
participant in IWPR’s Cross Caucasus Journalism Network. Seymur
Kyazimov is a freelance journalist in Baku. Gegham is the editor of
the website of Internews and a CCJN participant.
The terminology used in the article is chosen by the editors, not the
reporters.