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The Unrecognized Islands Of Caucasus

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  • The Unrecognized Islands Of Caucasus

    THE UNRECOGNIZED ISLANDS OF CAUCASUS

    Mother Jones
    http://motherjones.com/photoessays/2012/02/magnum-foundation-caucasus-ossetia-karabakh-abkhazia/opener
    April 11 2012
    Cuba

    Civilian & Soldier Alike Navigate a Region Torn Apart by Years of War

    Photographs by Karen Mirzoyan/Magnum Foundation Text by Hannah
    Levintova

    Five months ago, the people of South Ossetia, a Georgian breakaway
    province, cast votes for their next president. Russia--the territory's
    controlling nation--had endorsed a candidate, but the majority went
    instead to former education minister (and anti-corruption advocate)
    Alla Dzhioeva. But her presidency was short-lived: The Supreme
    Court declared the election invalid, citing polling violations,
    and set a do-over election date--from which Dzhioeva was barred
    from participating. This week, Leonid Tibilov, a former KGB agent,
    won the new election.

    South Ossetia is one of three contested republics in the Caucasus
    region. Its election chaos illustrates the impasse faced by these
    territories: All are trying to form autonomous nations, yet they
    can't build government without a stamp of approval from one of the
    only countries in the world that recognizes their nationhood. Their
    independence depends on Russia's support.

    The Caucasus region, which straddles the Europe/Asia border, houses a
    medley of religions and ethnicities, from the Indo-European Ossetians
    to the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azerbaijanis. During the
    USSR era, all that barely mattered; the Soviet identity subsumed
    regional and sectarian differences. But since the Soviet Union's fall
    in 1991, rival factions, finally able to assert their singularity,
    have clashed over competing claims to overlapping homelands.

    The first to rise up was Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani territory,
    which is populated largely by Armenians, declared its independence in
    the thick of the USSR's December 1991 dissolution. A few months later,
    South Ossetia--where several Indo-Iranian dialects are spoken--won
    partial autonomy from Georgia in a bloody war. And they prevailed
    mostly because Georgia was distracted by the separatist movement
    in Abkhazia, another breakaway province, which gained independence
    in a 1992 conflict that claimed nearly 10,000 lives and displaced a
    quarter million people.

    Today, these territories exist in a legal no-man's land, largely
    unrecognized by other nations, and often dependent on neighboring
    states, primarily Russia, for survival. Over two decades, they've
    balanced self-protection with haphazard nation-building. Armed clashes
    with anti-secessionist forces are frequent, though rarely publicized
    in Western media.

    Photographer Karen Mirzoyan spent three years exploring these
    territories, to expose and understand their singular struggles.

    "My aim was to document the transitional state of these unrecognized
    republics in the region," he explains. "In the beginning, my task
    seemed simple. What I did not take into account was that over a period
    of three years, not only my story, but my way of seeing, was subject
    to transformation." He continues:

    Most frequently I was simply sitting with people over a table,
    drinking, sharing food and the stories of our lives. I often told
    them about my family, my aspirations, of my upcoming wedding...in
    return, they loved and understood me as much as I'd come to love and
    understand them.

    I did not want to compromise a single detail, the smallest nuance
    of the stories shared for the privilege of turning on a microphone,
    reaching for my camera or even taking out a pen. So, I was not working,
    I was not acting as a photojournalist...because when interaction is
    so warm and intimate, I feel it would be unfair to just take these
    heart-told stories and package them for retail.

    Nevertheless, Mirzoyan did take occasional photographs. But he didn't
    depend on them: Mirzoyan also recorded sounds, wrote in notebooks,
    or sketched subjects who didn't want to be photographed. "I confess
    to photography being my excuse, my rationalization for these repeated
    trips," he explains. "[But] my aim is not to document. I just wanted
    to see for myself, to listen and understand."

    This slideshow presents an excerpt of Mirzoyan's attempt at
    understanding life in the Caucasus' transitional pockets.


    From: Baghdasarian
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