“I BELIEVE THAT JUSTICE WILL WIN”

Azg/arm
21 Jan 05

About 250.000 Armenians living in Baku had to flee from the Azeri
capital as a result of the massacres in Baku. The Armenians that
greatly contributed to the construction of Baku were deprived of the
right to live there and were left homeless. 311.000 of 500.000
refugees from Azerbaijan still live in Armenia. Most of them live in
the hostels, very often in hardship. Dozens of people fled from Baku
live in the hostel of the second block of Nor Norq.

Yevgenia Tsaturovna, 84, fled from Baku with her daughter and two
grandchildren on January 18, 1990. Before that, she was hiding in her
flat,but her neighbors warned her about the intrusion of the
Azeris. “The Azeris were telling us to open the door, otherwise they
would break it. I couldn’t even take my clothes. They began beating
and pushing us and threw out into the street,” Yevgenia Tsaturovna
remembers. The family thrown into the cold of the wintry and cold
January street found shelter at the police department. Afterwards,
they left for Armenia. When Yevgenia Tsaturovna settled down in
Armenia her misfortunes didn’t stop. Her daughter died of cancer when
she was only 43. One of her grandchildren left for Russia.

At present, Mrs. Yevgenia receives pension amounting to 3900 AMD and
humanitarian aid from Paros benevolent organization. “They say they
are going to deprive me of the aid from Paros. I don’t know what I
will do then,” she says. The old woman is very ill, she can’t even
move. Lydia Amiriants, her neighbor, takes care of her. Lydia was also
born in Baku and became a refugee. “We left Baku in 1988. My brother
was a colonel and, seeing that the situation is becoming unbearable,
helped me and my son leave the capital of the Azeris. They even didn’t
sell bread to us, knowing that we are Armenians,” Lydia Amiriants
says, adding that even after such an attitude and the massacres in
Sumgait most of the people didn’t believe that the Azeris will
organize massacres in the capital, too. She said that already in 1988
the Azeris ruined her house. “Itook the photo of its ruins and
represented it to various instances. But they all just laughed at my
efforts,” she said, adding: “The justice hasn’t won its victory yet,
but I believe that otherwise, the life would lose its meaning.”

By Arevik Badalian