FAMILY STILL WAITING FOR MISSING SOLDIER 12 YEARS ON
By Irina Hovannisian

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Sept 25 2006

Greta Karapetian has a dream, and it speaks volumes about her pain
and desperation. She would give up everything, including her life,
to catch a final glimpse of her soldier son who went missing in the
dying weeks of the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

"I will wait for him even on my death bed," she says in tears. "Let
my heart stop, let me die the moment my boy comes back and I see him
for the last time."

Ashot Karapetian, who was 27 at the time of his disappearance in April
1994, is one of about 950 Armenian servicemen and civilian hostages
that remain unaccounted for more than 12 years after a Russian-mediate
truce stop fierce fighting in and around Karabakh.

Over 200 of them were citizens of Armenia proper. Most have been
formally declared dead by Armenian courts at the request of their
families who have lost any hope of finding their loved ones.

Others still hope for a miracle, embittered by what they see as
government indifference to the fate of the missing soldiers and
civilians. Karapetian’s elderly parents say no military or government
official has visited them in the last 12 years and are surprised to
see journalists taking interest in their plight.

"Nobody cares about my son," says Ashot’s father Avetik. "I have
written to [Defense Minister] Serzh [Sarkisian], to [President Robert]
Kocharian, to everyone. They replied that they keep looking for.

"But who are they looking for? Don’t they know what happened to those
men? They know, but won’t tell us."

Karapetian himself spent several months touring Karabakh and trying
to gather information about his son a decade ago, but to no avail.

Ashot was in a group of five soldiers who went missing in a pitched
battle with Azerbaijani forces southeast of Karabakh on April 20,
1994, less than a month before the war was stopped. One of them,
Artak Avetisian, is said to have been seen in a critical condition
by some of his comrades on that day. But his whereabouts have been
unknown since then.

Avetisian’s parents believe he is most probably dead and had the
Armenian authorities officially certify that recently. The formality
allowed them to start receiving a measly state benefit of 3,000 drams
($8) a month.

"I pinned my hopes on them for five or six years, but nothing was
done," Avetisian’s father Hrant says, referring to the government and
the military. "All I heard was ‘don’t worry, he’ll come back one day.’"

The Armenian Defense Ministry insists, however, that it has done its
best to locate and repatriate prisoners of war. Colonel Ashot Balian,
a member of a ministry commission dealing with them, claimed last April
that hundreds of Armenians remain alive in Azerbaijani captivity. "We
have information that they are used as slave labor in Azerbaijan,"
Balian told RFE/RL. "The Azerbaijani authorities keep moving them
around and leaving no traces of them."

"We still hope that our missing sons will return to their families
one day," he said.

The Azerbaijani authorities have denied holding any Armenian prisoners
and allege, for their part, that as many as five thousand Azerbaijani
captives are being held in Armenia and Karabakh. Defense Minister
Sarkisian dismissed the claims as "unfounded" during an April meeting
the visiting chairman of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC), Jacob Kellenberger.

The Red Cross, which has offices in both Baku and Yerevan, is the main
international institution that arranges Armenian-Azerbaijani prisoner
exchanges and repatriations. Both conflicting armies continue to turn
to it for assistance after reporting soldier disappearances.

Prisoner exchanges have also been arranged by private individuals,
usually via Georgia. They have strong connections in Armenia and
Azerbaijan and earn lump sums in the process. According to an informed
member of the Yerkrapah Union of Armenian veterans of the Karabakh war,
who asked not to be identified, some families have paid the middlemen
between $40,000 and $150,000 to get their sons out of captivity. "If
the parents have money and know where their son is kept, their chances
are big," he told RFE/RL.

The Karapetians neither have money, nor know Ashot’s whereabouts.

What they have instead is a bitter grudge against the far more
prosperous Armenian officials who they feel could have done more
to bring their son back home. "Our boys went to fight and die to
swell their pockets and the coffers of Swiss banks," says Avetik
Karapetian. "If, God forbid, there is another war, who will fight
for this country? Let them, their children fight."