Agence France Presse
April 24 2005
Leaving Iraq to settle for separatist Karabakh — an Armenian story
24/04/2005 AFP
LACHIN, Azerbaijan, April 24 (AFP) – 4h29 – Turkish massacres of
Armenians which began 90 years ago on Sunday have a lot to do with
why a pretty 29-year-old from Iraq is now living on one of the most
contested chunks of land on earth in the Caucasus.
An ethnic Armenian whose grandparents fled to Baghdad when Ottoman
forces began their campaign against Armenians in eastern Anatolia,
Anakhit Petrosyan once dreamed of coming to Armenia to work in the
Iraqi embassy in Yerevan.
But when a US bomb killed her father last year her plans changed and
like her grandparents before her, she fled her birthplace to settle
in the Lachin district of Azerbaijan which is controlled by
pro-Armenian forces of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh republic.
“I didn’t know much about Karabakh, all I knew was that there had
been a war here and these were our territories, we hoped to get help
here,” Petrosyan said.
Armenians around the world mark April 24 as the day Ottoman Turks
began the genocide of their people in 1915, something Turkey denies
ever happened.
But the events of the early 20th century are today overshadowed by
Armenia’s ongoing conflict with its other Turkic-speaking neighbor,
Azerbaijan.
In 1994, Armenia and its proxies captured Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic
Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, as well as seven surrounding
Azeri regions, through a gruelling six-year war that cost 25,000
lives and displaced about one million people, 250,000 of them
Armenians.
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity with Azerbaijan,
dealing a crippling economic blow to the former Soviet republic from
which is has yet to recover.
But Azerbaijan still claims the territories and 750,000 Azeri
refugees remain in camps on the ready to return.
A shaky ceasefire is often punctuated by increasingly frequent
shootings that have taken at least a dozen lives this year.
The escalation prompted the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) which is charged with mediating the conflict to
express concern about the breaches as well as recent public
statements about the possibility of war.
Azerbaijan charges that Karabakh and Armenian authorities have put in
place an Israeli-style settlement plan in the occupied regions
outside of Karabakh itself, so that they can lay future claims to
them.
The Azeri claim is highlighted by cases like Petrosyan’s who like
other Armenians from the diaspora outside the former Soviet Union
settled in the territory.
The focus of those concerns has been the mountainous area in which
Petrosyan and her family now live, the strategically important Lachin
corridor, renamed Verdzor by the Armenians, which represents the only
land route between Karabakh and Armenia.
Unlike Karabakh, which had a 75-percent ethnic Armenian population
before the war, Lachin was predominantly Azeri.
A recent OSCE mission sent to the separatist republic to verify
Azerbaijan’s claims said in its findings that up to 12,000 people,
mostly Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, had been resettled in the
area.
This is immediately obvious to any visitor to Lachin where the only
sign of it ever having been in Azerbaijan’s hands are the
eastern-style window portholes in some of its war-gutted
administration buildings.
Petrosyan, whose husband was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s and taken prisoner by US forces in the Gulf war in 1991 said
the possibility of another war with Azerbaijan would not deter her
from staying in Lachin.
“If we could fight for Iraq, then we can surely fight for our own
homeland,” she said.
Lachin’s authorities deny any “foreign” Armenians have settled in the
area, or in fact that any live there at all.
“We don’t see our job as settling as many people as possible, our aim
is to give the refugees a place to live and secure the corridor,”
said Gagik Kosakyan, the deputy head of Lachin’s administration.
Securing the corridor has meant rebuilding much of the area’s
infrastructure and housing, so much so that the area looks more
prosperous than the adjacent region within Armenia proper.
Armenian officials have said any settlement over Karabakh would have
to include an Azeri concession of Lachin, an area that saw some of
the heaviest fighting during the war because of its strategic
importance.
Kosakyan estimated that the separatist republic had invested one
million dollars (765,000 euros) a year to rehabilitate the region
since 1994, with many extra funds coming from Armenia’s influential
diaspora in the West.
And like many other refugees in the region informally polled by AFP
Petrosyan she said she was intent on staying. “They can say what they
want, but we know this is our land,” she said.