8/25/13 Today's Zaman, your gateway to Turkish daily news

Nagorno-Karabakh war
survivors urge Armenia,
Azerbaijan for peace deal
Despite coming from vastly different frames of reference, young Armenian and
Azerbaijani survivors of the Nagorno-Karabakh war are calling on their
governments to finally make a peace deal over a more than 20-year-old
territorial dispute.
They are urging their fellow citizens to communicate across borders and break
the ties of the past conflict because the dispute poses a great threat to stability
and interactions between nations in the region and risks both states moving
towards another bloody war in the South Caucasus.

Anush Araqelyan, now 23, was only 9 months old when she lost her both
parents in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Originally from Kapan, formerly known
as Kafan, an Armenian city bordering Azerbaijan which was the location of the
first signs of the conflict in the late 1980s when residents of both nations were
involved in acts of violence, the Araqelyan family was attacked on their way to
the city, a tragedy that left Araqelyan's father and mother dead. Only her
grandfather was able to survive.

Araqelyan had believed that she would never be able to relate to any
Azerbaijani in her life and always held that there was no other solution to the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict but war.

The bloody conflict erupted between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Armenians in

1991 over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, predominantly Armenian-
populated enclave within Azerbaijani borders. Armenian-backed armed forces
under the command of current President Serzh Sarksyan seized 20 percent of
Azerbaijani territories, including the enclave itself and seven adjacent
Azerbaijani-populated territories, killing 30,000 people. Hundreds of thousands
fled their homes before a cease-fire was signed in 1994, although there is as
of yet no peace treaty. Violence still flares up sporadically along the cease-fire
line in which not only troops, but also civilians on both sides, are killed.

“I grew up with a feeling of hatred towards Azerbaijanis although I had never

met any of them before participating in the Caux Scholars Program in

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Switzerland this summer,” Araqelyan said in an interview with Today's Zaman,

admitting that meeting Azerbaijani participants was a tough challenge for her.

“The meeting with Azerbaijani participants played a key role for me. I
discovered another person within me, someone who dreams of living in peace
without any hatred, troubles, losses or war,” she said.

The Caux Scholars Program, part of the Initiatives of Change global summer
conferences held each summer, brings together young people from around the
world to better understand the factors that prolong conflicts as well as the need
for dialogue and negotiation, which is crucial to mitigating past conflicts and
avoiding similar clashes in the future.

The first week in Caux, a Swiss city situated in the mountains, hosting conflict
transformation and peace-building programs each summer, was the most
challenging experience for Araqelyan as she had to overcome her feelings
over the presence of Azerbaijanis. “I was trying to avoid talking or having any
conversation with them. However, the last two weeks brought a major change in
me as I started to see their personalities, their attitudes and their feelings.”

Araqelyan says she experienced a personal transformation every minute and

every day while in Caux. She was happy as she was living without fear or
hatred and feeling very calm and peaceful. Interestingly, she was becoming
more and more afraid of returning to Armenia.

“I realized that it would be difficult to explain to my friends the change in me

since I would not be able understand it as well if I was in their place. We usually
call this change ‘brainwashing.' That is why it would be difficult to explain my
transformation, which is not ‘brainwashing' but just a desire to live and to enjoy
every opportunity life gives us without hatred or fear,” she notes.

Youth role alternative in conflict resolution

Araqelyan says the best solution to settling this conflict is hidden within us “as
only personal transformation can help us get rid of the hatred we are living
with.” The only way to reach a peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict will be through the peaceful efforts of youths from both Armenia and
Azerbaijan, Araqelyan believes.

"Neither government is ready for a peace settlement and in this situation

nobody cares about the people; they only care about territory rather than the
people living there," Araqelyan says.

On the other side of the conflict, Aynur Jafar, 32, agrees with Araqelyan on the
need for a peaceful solution to the conflict. Jafar is an Azerbaijani internal
displaced person (IDP) from a small, predominantly Azerbaijani-populated
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village in Nagorno-Karabakh. She urged Armenian youths to understand their

Azerbaijani peers, saying: “I don't know what my village means to an Armenian,
but to me that village means a lot. That village is my grandfather's grave, that
village is our house that was built through hard work by my father and my
mother, that village is my childhood, that village is my home. I am just dreaming
of the day when I will be able to return to my village; each of my dreams end
with tears,” Jafar says in burst of emotion, asking, “Is it worth it?”

Jafar is a representative of the Azerbaijani families who were forced to leave

their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh during the war in the early '90s.

Reciting her personal story that dates back to the bloody Nagorno-Karabakh
war, Jafar says the war reached her village in 1991-1992 after the territories
around Nagorno-Karabakh had been seized by Armenian armed forces. “We
were still resisting all the shelling and firing over our heads, and we did not
even consider leaving our village at all. My mum was always telling us that we
would never abandon our house as it is our home, and we had toiled hard to
lay each stone of our house and no one could take it away from us,” she
recalls. She added that unfortunately, they were unable to resist and left their
village in mid-September of 1992 when the village was completely occupied,
and they were unable to even bring anything with them.

Being a little child at the time, Jafar could not understand why they had to leave
their house where they had always lived, and she was upset and furious as she
did not want to leave her school and her friends. Even after they fled to the
capital city of Baku, she could not stop thinking about her friends who she left
behind without a promising future.

“Leaving our home was not our choice. We only had two other choices: We
could either stay and be killed, or we would have been taken hostage by the
Armenian side, which would have been the most terrible choice as we were
hearing stories of people who were ill-treated and tortured after being taken
hostage by Armenians,” Jafar says, adding, “Life is so precious that we
preferred leaving to dying.”

Recalling her feelings towards Armenians during the war years, Jafar says it
was the “feelings of a child towards a person who I believed posed a danger to
my life at any time. I truly feared Armenians as in my mind at the time they were
horrible creatures, especially after the Khojaly massacre. It was not only fear
that was inside me but also hatred towards Armenians,” she says, adding: “I
saw a woman in tattered clothes who was able to escape the massacre with her
young son while leaving behind the dead bodies of 10 family members. I still
cannot forget the dazed expression of that woman.”

The Khojaly massacre is one of the most tragic chapters in modern Azerbaijani

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history when in the early hours of Feb. 26, 1992, Armenian armed forces,
directed by Armenian President Sarksyan, along with Russia's 366th armored
battalion, killed at least 613 unarmed and defenseless people -- the majority of
whom were women, children, elderly, sick and disabled.

Negotiations between nations critical for peace

“While growing up, however, I started to understand everything much more
clearly, and my perception of Armenians changed, something which my late
mother played a huge role in,” Jafar says.

“We had an old Armenian neighbor in Baku after we fled our home. While I
continued hating her, my mother was helping her by giving her some of our
food. When I asked my mother why she was helping our enemy, she told me
that it was a huge mistake to blame an old woman for a war that is the result of
political games or to hate her just because she belongs to a certain ethnic
group [Armenians],” Jafar says, adding, "My mom taught me life's greatest
lesson of love for humanity, and I will always be grateful to her."

"Hatred is a life-poisoning toxin, and no person or nation whose heart beats

with hatred can be happy or blessed. I don't hate Armenians, I just feel sorry
for those Armenians who are looking for reasons to hate Azerbaijanis," Jafar
says.

“We should not remain stuck in the past although it is very hard and impossible
to forget,” she says, pointing out the role of the young people on both sides
who have grown up and been educated outside of the propaganda machine of
their countries.

“We need to negotiate; we need to talk as communication is the primary and

the most important step [towards peace and a solution]. We need to admit the
things that we have done towards each other -- this is the most critical and
inevitable starting point of the settlement. Without this, neither side can go any
further,” Jafar says. She adds that people from both sides have to be involved
in the negotiation process to move the peace talks forward as neither
government is interested in peace but both are "using this situation in order to
stay in power.”

After a cease-fire ended the bloody war in Nagorno-Karabakh, both sides

agreed to engage in internationally mediated negotiations under the Minsk
Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
which has unfortunately not yielded any results. Armenian President Sarksyan
last week voiced support for his Azerbaijani counterpart, İlham Aliyev, in an
upcoming presidential election, saying that would be the best outcome for
resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
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M uhabir: L A M İ Y A A D İ L G I ZI , İ ST A N BU L

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