Christian Minority In Azerbaijan Gets Rid Of Armenian Eye Sore
By Simon Ostrovsky
Agence France Presse
February 17, 2005
When a Christian people in this predominantly Muslim republic ground
away the Armenian inscriptions from the walls of a church and tombs
last month to erase evidence linking them to Azerbaijan’s foe, they
thought they had the interests of their small community in mind.
But now the tiny Christian church in the former Soviet republic of
Azerbaijan has become the focus of a big scandal as the Udi minority
struggles to find its identity in an ideological minefield. The church,
which has not been used since Azerbaijan became part of the Soviet
Union, has become the center of a dispute between the Norwegian backers
of the reconstruction, who consider the alterations to be vandalism,
and the Udi community.
“We have no God, our people lost their religion under communism and
this church is our only hope of reviving it,” said Georgi Kechaari,
one of the village elders who doubles as the ethnic group’s historian.
“But we live in Azerbaijan, and when people came into the church and
saw Armenian letters, they automatically associated us with Armenians,”
he said.
The Udi, who once used the Armenian alphabet, have struggled to
separate their legacy from that of their fellow Christians, the
Armenians, who fought a war with Azerbaijan and have been vilified
here.
Erupting just before the break-up of the Soviet Union, the war
cost both countries tens of thousands of lives but Azerbaijan lost
Nagorno-Karabakh – an ethnic Armenian enclave – and seven other
surrounding regions which have been under Armenian control since the
two countries signed an uneasy ceasefire agreement in 1994. Since
then nearly everything associated with Armenia in Azerbaijan has been
wiped away, although hundreds of thousands of Armenians lived here
before the war.
Armenian-sounding city names have been changed, streets named after
Armenians have been replaced with politically correct Azeri surnames,
while Soviet history glorifying Armenian communist activists has
been rewritten in school textbooks. But the white stone church in
Nij, some two centuries old, had not been tampered with until the
Udi undertook to reconstruct it with help from the state financed
Norwegian Humanitarian Enterprise (NHE).
“It was a beautiful inscription, 200 years old, it even survived the
war,” Norway’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan Steinar Gil told AFP. “This
is an act of vandalism and Norway in no way wants to be associated
with it.”
But the Udis insist they erased the inscriptions to right a historic
wrong. Kechaari alleged that the Armenian inscriptions, which stated
that the Church was built in 1823, were fakes put there by Armenians
in the 1920s so that they could make historical claims to it.
The Udis are the last surviving tribe of the Caucasus Albanians,
a group unrelated to the Mediterranean Albanians, whose Christian
kingdom ruled this region in medieval times before Turkic hordes swept
in from Central Asia in the 13th and 15th centuries. They number
under 10,000 people and Nij is the only predominantly Udi village
to survive to this day, and although they call themselves Christian,
there is little that Christians from other parts of the world would
find in common with them.
The Udis have not had a pastor for nearly a century and celebrate
Islamic holidays together with their Muslim neighbors. But while the
Udis soul search for an identity, Azerbaijan has used their legacy
to strengthen its claims to Karabakh.
Armenians argue that the multitude of churches in the occupied region
proves that they as a Christian people can lay a historic claim to it.
But Azeris, who consider themselves to be the descendants of Albanians
who were assimilated into a Turkic group, say the area is rightfully
theirs because the churches were actually built by their ancestors
the Albanians.
To the Udi, who used Armenian script when their church was built,
toeing the official Azeri line has become more of a priority
than historical accuracy. The perception that they are one with
the Armenians has meant that there has been little trust from the
authorities; Udi men for example were only allowed to start serving
in the Azeri Army two years ago.
But their use of power tools to fit the status quo took their Norwegian
sponsors by surprise. “They think they have erased a reminder of
being Armenian … instead they have taken away the chance to have a
good image when the church is inaugurated,” the director of the NHE
in Azerbaijan, Alf Henry Rasmussen said, adding that a visit to the
church by Norway’s prime minister will probably now be cancelled.
“Everyone will stare at the missing stones, I’m not quite sure if we
can continue our work there,” Rasmussen said.