Institute for War and Peace Reporting IWPR, UK
Aug 14 2009

KARABAKH ARTIST OVERCOMES SUFFERING

Refugee tells IWPR how she survived war and tragedy to sing of love.

By Karine Ohanian in Stepanarkert

When Julietta Arustamian fled her town, she left behind the music she
knew. She had already fought prejudice against her â?` a woman
â?` becoming a performer, now she would have to build a new
life, learn to sing in a new language, and survive the war that drove
her from her home.

Amazingly, she has done all those things and more. She has been
widowed, and brought up her child alone, but still managed to become
one of Nagorny Karabakhâ??s top singers.

Her life was turned upside down in 1988, when Armenians living in
Karabakh began to agitate for more political freedoms. Karabakh was
part of Soviet Azerbaijan and the Azeri majority, angered by the
Armenian demands, rampaged through Armenian parts of cities.

â??I can remember how I was on public transport and everyone
was looking at my eyes, which were obviously those of an Armenian. And
at that moment I physically felt the tension. Nothing had changed, but
they had picked me out. Then a policeman we knew came to us and told
my father there would be a pogrom, that he could not protect
us,â?? she told IWPR.

They fled that night and, although they went back to collect some
belongings a month later, they never lived in her home town of
Minchegaur again.

She was only 25 but was already well-known in Minchegaur as a variety
performer. She had learned to play her sisterâ??s guitar, and
played her own songs when sitting with friends on the beach by the
Caspian Sea: a strong contrast from mountainous, land-locked, arid
Karabakh, which still rules itself but has not been recognised as an
independent state.

â??For me Minchegaur means a permanent longing for the
sea. Although there was a reservoir at Kura, it is water that I miss
since we moved,â?? she said.

She learned much of her music from her father, who helped her set up a
folk troupe in Karabakh after their arrival. Other musicians have not
been so lucky. Strangely, the refugees have not banded together to
make music, but all operate independently.

The lack of support has stopped some artists from being able to adapt
to a country where only Armenian is spoken. When they lived in
Azerbaijan, they would sing both in Armenian and Azeri, and they
normally spoke in Russian.

Vilen Mikaelian is the artistic director of the childrenâ??s
theatre in Stepanakert. He came with his father, a famous folk
musician, as refugees from the town of Sumgait but only he managed to
rekindle his art in the new land.

â??It was a completely different way of playing, with songs
we were not used to playing in Azerbaijan. We had to learn the whole
programme all over again, the style was completely new. And in old age
it is very hard to relearn everything. For us young people it was much
easier to adapt. And it was then that my father decided to leave
professional music, but every day at home he would play his favourite
tunes,â?? Mikaelian said.

Arustamian faced the same problems when she was starting out in her
new home. She was bringing up a young child, and trying to adapt to an
Armenian-language environment while her husband was at the front
fighting Bakuâ??s army, which was trying to regain control
over Nagorny Karabakh.

â??I can remember how I wrote my first song in the Armenian
language. I was educated in Russian, and did not study Armenian at
school. There was war in Karabakh then, and I thought we needed a song
which could help our boys in the same way as â?`Wait for me, and
Iâ??ll returnâ??,â?? she said, quoting a
famous Soviet poem beloved of soldiers in the Second World War.

â??On January 25, 1994 I sat down and wrote my song
â?`Come back’. My two-year-old daughter was my first audience,
the first person to judge my songs. We were normally at home on our
own, because my husband was fighting and not at home very often. And
all morning I don’t know why I just sang this song, repeating it over
and over. When I sang it to my mother, she was very upset, and asked
me why I had written such a song, saying there was no need to. And
later, later it turned out that my Sergei never heard it, because he
never did come back. That was the day he died.’

As time passed, she married again, and her songs ceased to be so
sad. She even won first place in the Karabakh Bards’ Competition in
2002. But she fears that she needed the turbulence of the past to
realise her potential, and that now the age of her music has passed.

`I think that as a singer I have not survived, although I have
survived as a person. But art, to write music, you need to suffer, you
need a soul that is suffering. Sometimes I think that I should be sent
to prison, and there would only be my instrument and some paper, and I
could finally say everything that has stored up in my heart,’ she
said.

Karine Ohanian is a freelance reporter in Stepanarkert and a member of
IWPR’s Cross Caucasus Journalism Network.