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MAPS LIE, MEMORIES DO NOT
Pembroke Observer
December 3, 2008 Wednesday
Ontario
-The final destination on my recent seven-country epic tour of
the volatile Caucasus was Baku, Azerbaijan. One of my commitments
during this short visit was to give a lecture at the Azeri Ministry
of Foreign Affairs University. About four dozen former ambassadors,
faculty members and students attended my presentation.
While it is admittedly a challenge to try and define the complex
political, strategic situation in the Caucasus to a North
American readership, it is decidedly much dodgier when you attempt the
same thing with an audience composed of active participants from the
region. Given the level of tension that still exists between Azerbaijan
and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, almost
every word you could utter has potential to be contentious. In 1991,
when Azerbaijan declared independence from the collapsing Soviet Union,
the ethnic Armenian majority in the province of Nagorno-Karabakh held
its own referendum in which it unilaterally declared the region to
be independent from Azerbaijan.
While inter-ethnic violence had already begun to increase in this
region at an alarming rate during the late 1980s, the declared
secession of Nagorno-Karabakh sparked an all-out war between the Azeris
and Armenians. To support the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh,
troops from the neighbouring Republic of Armenia first forced a
land corridor
into the disputed province. Then, over the course of two bloody years
of combat, the
Armenians captured and ethnically cleansed seven additional Azeri
provinces around
Nagorno-
Karabakh to create what they call a 'security zone.'
At the beginning of my lecture, I mentioned my travels to
Nagorno-Karabakh's capital city, Stepanakert. As soon as I said the
word, a low grumble came from my audience, hands shot up and a bright,
young Aziri student rose to admonish me.
"You mean the city of Henkendi?" he asked.
I had to admit that I had never heard of that word, and from the
highway signs to maps to written accounts of the war, I had only ever
seen the name Stepanakert.
"Henkendi was the old Azeri- Turkic name of the capital, but the
Soviets changed it to Stepanakert in the 1920s," I was advised. On
Azeri maps published since their independence from the Soviet Union,
all place names have been replaced with the former Turkic ones. This
renaming process was also conducted by the Armenians, and, as it had
been very difficult to find accurate maps of the region in Canada,
I had acquired one in Yerevan.
This particular map had been produced in 2002 by the
Armenians and it included a separate handy chart which listed all
the former place names juxtaposed with the current ones. Despite the
catalogue of name changes, I was still unable to accurately correspond
some of my research to a location on the map. Outside of Baku at a
refugee camp, I had interviewed 28 Azeri survivors of the Feb. 26,
1992 massacre in the town of Khojaly. On that fateful night a combat
force of Armenians had routed the Azeri militia and completely cleansed
the Azeri enclave of all inhabitants. In the process, 613 Azeris were
killed -mostly civilians -including 83 small children. Thousands more
were injured or missing.
At the time, Human Rights Watch reported this incident to be "the
largest massacre to date in the conflict" and Azerbaijan subsequently
declared Feb. 26 to be a national day of mourning.
Following my lecture, I asked one of the Azeri students to find Khojaly
on my Armenian-produced map. After a protracted, head scratching
silence, he looked up bewildered and said, "it's not there -they've
simply erased it from existence."
There are always at least two sides to the history of every conflict,
but in the Caucasus that divide seems wider and deeper than most.
Pembroke Observer
December 3, 2008 Wednesday
Ontario
-The final destination on my recent seven-country epic tour of
the volatile Caucasus was Baku, Azerbaijan. One of my commitments
during this short visit was to give a lecture at the Azeri Ministry
of Foreign Affairs University. About four dozen former ambassadors,
faculty members and students attended my presentation.
While it is admittedly a challenge to try and define the complex
political, strategic situation in the Caucasus to a North
American readership, it is decidedly much dodgier when you attempt the
same thing with an audience composed of active participants from the
region. Given the level of tension that still exists between Azerbaijan
and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, almost
every word you could utter has potential to be contentious. In 1991,
when Azerbaijan declared independence from the collapsing Soviet Union,
the ethnic Armenian majority in the province of Nagorno-Karabakh held
its own referendum in which it unilaterally declared the region to
be independent from Azerbaijan.
While inter-ethnic violence had already begun to increase in this
region at an alarming rate during the late 1980s, the declared
secession of Nagorno-Karabakh sparked an all-out war between the Azeris
and Armenians. To support the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh,
troops from the neighbouring Republic of Armenia first forced a
land corridor
into the disputed province. Then, over the course of two bloody years
of combat, the
Armenians captured and ethnically cleansed seven additional Azeri
provinces around
Nagorno-
Karabakh to create what they call a 'security zone.'
At the beginning of my lecture, I mentioned my travels to
Nagorno-Karabakh's capital city, Stepanakert. As soon as I said the
word, a low grumble came from my audience, hands shot up and a bright,
young Aziri student rose to admonish me.
"You mean the city of Henkendi?" he asked.
I had to admit that I had never heard of that word, and from the
highway signs to maps to written accounts of the war, I had only ever
seen the name Stepanakert.
"Henkendi was the old Azeri- Turkic name of the capital, but the
Soviets changed it to Stepanakert in the 1920s," I was advised. On
Azeri maps published since their independence from the Soviet Union,
all place names have been replaced with the former Turkic ones. This
renaming process was also conducted by the Armenians, and, as it had
been very difficult to find accurate maps of the region in Canada,
I had acquired one in Yerevan.
This particular map had been produced in 2002 by the
Armenians and it included a separate handy chart which listed all
the former place names juxtaposed with the current ones. Despite the
catalogue of name changes, I was still unable to accurately correspond
some of my research to a location on the map. Outside of Baku at a
refugee camp, I had interviewed 28 Azeri survivors of the Feb. 26,
1992 massacre in the town of Khojaly. On that fateful night a combat
force of Armenians had routed the Azeri militia and completely cleansed
the Azeri enclave of all inhabitants. In the process, 613 Azeris were
killed -mostly civilians -including 83 small children. Thousands more
were injured or missing.
At the time, Human Rights Watch reported this incident to be "the
largest massacre to date in the conflict" and Azerbaijan subsequently
declared Feb. 26 to be a national day of mourning.
Following my lecture, I asked one of the Azeri students to find Khojaly
on my Armenian-produced map. After a protracted, head scratching
silence, he looked up bewildered and said, "it's not there -they've
simply erased it from existence."
There are always at least two sides to the history of every conflict,
but in the Caucasus that divide seems wider and deeper than most.