LIVES STILL AFFECTED BY AZERI-ARMENIAN WAR
By Matthew Collin

St Petersburg Times, Russia, Russia
Dec 12 2006

I met Ashot in a village just outside the Armenian capital, Yerevan,
at the house of his father, Vladimir, a writer who fled the Azeri
capital, Baku, with his family in the early 1990s, amid the upsurge
of violence between Azeris and Armenians.

Vladimir was leafing through an album of old photographs decorated
with mementos of a lost life in cosmopolitan Baku, where his mother
sang show tunes during the lazy, lovingly remembered Brezhnev era.

All that is gone now. These days, Vladimir’s family members are
"internally displaced persons," although probably never to be
replaced. And Baku is no longer the city Vladimir remembers. Ethnic
Armenians haven’t been welcome for years. His family now lives in a
one-room cottage near a rusty automobile dump. They’re lucky. Some
of the war escapees in this village live in a disused prison.

Then Ashot walked in – 16 years old, hair meticulously gelled, bright
but bashful. He’s a singer too, he said, although it took a bit of
bullying by his father to coax a tune out of him. When it came, it was
unexpectedly in Azeri, a language he doesn’t even speak. It turned out
he had learned it by heart from his grandmother without knowing what
the words meant. So an Armenian boy whose family was driven out by
the Azeris was singing an old Azeri song in a refugee hovel in Armenia.

A few weeks later, I was in the oil boomtown of Baku, listening to
a very different tune: the call to prayer from a city-center mosque.

Standing next to me was Vahid, 20, who comes here every week for
Friday prayers. He said he was studying business and wanted to work
for BP, the key player in the Azeri black gold rush. But he feared he
wouldn’t have enough money to bribe his way through what he said was
a corrupt education system and to afford the private English lessons
he would need to get a job with an international company.

While I waited to speak to the imam, Vahid kept talking. His father
runs a plastics factory, which he managed to build up from nothing in
the few years since the family arrived in Baku. "Arrived from where?"

I asked. From Armenia in the 1990s, he said.

Although they traveled in opposite directions, both Vahid and Ashot
– along with nearly a million others – were displaced by the same
war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the continued absence of a
final peace agreement between the two countries, it’s a conflict that
continues to affect the lives and futures of both young men more than
a decade later – and the lives of many others too young to remember it.

Matthew Collin is a journalist based in Tbilisi.