BIRTH CONTROL

TOL Czech Republic
14 September 2007

Paying people to have babies in Nagorno-Karabakh overshadows the need
to resolve an old conflict.

If you want to have children, France is not a bad place to start. If
that enviable national sense of style, manner and sensuality aren’t
reasons enough to encourage love, the state provides generous
incentives to couples who perpetuate the Gallic stock.

Acknowledging a declining birth rate, Russia has also started offering
incentives to families that have a second or third child. And the
governor of the central Russian region of Ulyanovsk recently offered
cars or other prizes to couples who have a baby on the next Russian
national day, 12 June.

Not to be outdone, the tiny, breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh
is offering its own rewards to prolific parents. According to media
reports, the local authorities will pay $700 for the third child born
to a family, $1,000 for the fourth child, and raise the payments in
steps up to $3,000 for the 10th offspring. The Armenian news agency
ArmInfo reported this week that one Nagorno-Karabakh mother, Emilia
Poghosian, received $5,000 for giving birth to her 15th child.

But Nagorno-Karabakh is not France or Russia, and a parent would have
to have a certain amount of daring – or a lot of altruism – to want
to bring children into the world there. It is technically still in a
state of war with Azerbaijan. There are few jobs for young people and
access to the world beyond is limited to the narrow Lachin corridor,
a mountainous passage heavily fought over in the war between Armenia
and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Most students have to settle on
Armenia for a university education.

Nagorno-Karabakh relies almost entirely on its benefactor state,
Armenia, and Armenian diaspora communities for support. Funds raised
in the United States, France and other places with affluent and
influential Armenian communities have helped pay for roads, schools
and reconstruction projects. Some Armenians visiting their ethnic
cousins there lament that public facilities are better in the breakaway
region than their own country. Indeed, the capital Stepanakert has
a far more prosperous look than the closest Armenian town, Goris.

The self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh has about 140,000
residents who are technically stateless.

The region once had a significantly larger population, a mix of
ethnic Armenians and Azeris, when it was a semi-autonomous part of
the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The separatist war, one of
several triggered in the Caucasus as the Soviet Union disintegrated,
created one of the largest refugee exoduses since the second world
war as Azeris fled the region and other parts of Azerbaijan that were
seized by the Armenian army.

LINGERING HATRED

Antagonisms exist in the political realm, but also in personal
relations between Armenians and Azeris that keep the conflict alive,
more than a decade after a cease-fire went into effect. To highlight
the tense relations, Azeris and Armenians got into raucous arguments
at sessions of a recent economic gathering in Poland aimed at finding
common ground on trade and business cooperation.

Old-guard politicians routinely use Nagorno-Karabakh for political
advantage, perpetuating the nationalist sentiments that have undermined
peace efforts. And there seems to be no letup in the tragic state
of events.

Armenian Prime Minister Serge Sarkisian, the favorite to succeed
President Robert Kocharian, told the National Assembly this week that
the government would ensure a "balance of forces" in the region, while
the nation’s defense minister announced increased spending on weapons
and air power. Sarkisian, like the president, was a leader in the
Nagorno-Karabakh separatist movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Earlier this summer, Azeri President Ilham Aliev did little to defuse
tensions when he declared that his nation was living in a "state of
war" and called for more defense spending – this in a petroleum-rich
country where nearly half of people live in poverty.

In July, Nagorno-Karabakh’s leaders angered the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe and other mediators by holding
a presidential election full of verbal attacks on Azerbaijan and
opponents of an independent republic. Mediators fear that the
heated rhetoric of the election in Nagorno-Karabakh is a harbinger
for presidential elections scheduled next year in both Armenia and
Azerbaijan.

Amid all this political bombast, it remains to be seen whether
couples in Nagorno-Karabakh will jump at the chance to get paid to
have babies. No doubt leaders there think there is a pressing need to
address the demographic imbalances in the region. Friendly Armenia,
with barely 3 million people, has a declining growth rate while
arch-foe Azerbaijan, with 8.1 million, has a growing population.

The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan killed more than 30,000 people,
and each year more people are wounded or die in mine accidents along
the militarized border. The least the leaders of today could do
for the generations of tomorrow is to ensure that the killing ends
and conciliation begins. And that’s a far more lasting investment in
demographic stability than gimmicks to get people to produce children
into a troubled and uncertain environment.