What Karabagh Has to Offer: Twelve Years after the Ceasefire
by Armine Aleksanyan
Reprinted from ARARAT (Spring 2006)
As you walk down the clean and neatly paved streets of Stepanakert, the capital city of Karabagh, it becomes hard to believe that only some twelve years ago there was a war and about ninety percent of the town was destroyed.
In today's Stepanakert one can hardly find traces of war, as its buildings stand intact and the town is lost in cafes and green. And the nicely dressed people rushing to work or university, the elderly sitting in parks gazing at the passersby, children behaving naughtily-all these give a feeling of tranquility, something so typical of small towns. And no hint of war.
However, it is enough to enter any business establishment, university, or office, and at the entrance hall you'll see the "board of honor" with pictures of martyrs of the recent war. Every nonresidential building has one of those boards in every office; every school, every university has lost some of its students and employees...There is also the Memorial Complex where most of the martyrs rest. Every newlywed goes there after the church ceremony to pay homage to those thanks to whom they can live and marry and bring up a new generation of children, who in turn can grow up in a family complete with Mom and Dad.
There are also two other places that whisper of war. The Stepanakert Rehabilitation Center and the Prosthesis Center were established just after the war ended. The first center is for people with spinal cord injuries, and the latter is for making artificial limbs. People that know the path to those two places also know the costs of war very well, for they are constantly reminded of its consequences in their everyday lives. They see Stepanakert very differently than most of us do. Many of them do not leave their homes, as the country is far from offering any facilities for people with special needs. They seem to be nonexistent in this place. But if you go to the rehabilitation center, you'll see them playing tennis or chess, taking computer classes or following drawing lessons. One of the major tasks of the center is integrating them into society. But much remains to be done in this direction and the state must develop policies to deal with the problems of those with special needs. Only then will the seemingly peaceful city truly become peaceful.
The situation outside the capital is very different. If you drive out of Stepanakert for a couple of kilometers you'll definitely feel the presence of the war ghost here. Although government programs target the provinces too, unlike the capital, they remain heavily damaged by the recent fighting.
Even before you reach any village, you'll see signs on the roads asking you to be aware of mines. Mines and unexploded ordinances remain one of the most acute problems the country faces today. Every year, especially during the farming season there are human casualties. According to emergency
services, in 2004, there were 28 incidents, with 10 lethal outcomes; this year out of 25 incidents,
6 cases were fatal. The British HALO Trust is doing considerable work in training local staff and clearing the mines, but a lot remains to be done.
Ghost towns and villages mark the landscape as you drive into the depths of the countryside. For a non-local, it would be hard to distinguish whether these are abandoned Azeri or Armenian settlements, as the latter ones are not in any better condition than the former. Some of the inhabited villages are in dire shape, with people living in makeshift houses or semi-reconstructed ones, where polyethylene is a synonym for window glass and soil has been serving as a house floor long enough that the residents have gotten used to it. No need to even talk about bathroom facilities. But at least people are happy to have a place they can call home, even if their original homes remain on the other side of the border. As they say, no one gives out sweets during war, a war in this case that took lives of more than thirty thousand on both sides and deprived nearly every household of one of its members in this tiny country-proudly called by its people the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh.
This independent but unrecognized Nagorno Karabakh Republic is only fourteen years old, but it has already shown considerable progress in many spheres of life. It has created all the attributes of a state, and its people has elected a president and parliament in elections that were described by foreign observers as free and transparent. One of the international observers, a representative of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group monitoring the most recent parliamentary elections held this July, went as far as to call the latter "better than the last British elections." These are encouraging words for a country that, though still in an international political limbo, aspires to build a democracy by European standards and hopes to integrate into the European community one day. Not obliged by any commitments to the international community, Karabagh of its own volition has assigned itself the task of changing its legislation to bring it into accord with European standards.
Nothing is ideal in this world, of course. And democracy "à la Karabagh" is not an exception. It would be a lie if anyone tried to convince you that there is no shadow economy or corruption, and that the judicial system works impeccably well here. It may well be the most corrupt such system. And although local society has a share of responsibility for this (it is the bribe-giver after all), it is also true that before we get rid of this old Caucasian habit of bribe-giving, God knows what else must change.
However, let's not forget that the Karabagh natives managed to get rid of a post-war syndrome and did not allow the military to seize state power. Such attempts indeed were made. The assassination attempt on the president masterminded by the country's then defense minister failed, and all plans for a military-run democracy vanished with it.
To get a sense of Karabagh democracy, you should probably read some of the election-time posters. My favorite one is "There is no alternative to democracy!" You think democracy is about alternatives? You may well be right, but the opposite is also true. It is in Karabagh, anyway.
Who else can better support democracy than civil society? So the number of NGOs has grown considerably. And although the saying "Quantity does not guarantee quality" is quite appropriate here, some work is being done by a group of them. It is fair to mention that out of some 69 officially registered NGOs, only around 8 or 10 are doing work. Some emerged merely for "grant-catching" (but were not very successful, as in an unrecognized country this turns out to be a hard business), while many others exist only on paper. It is pleasing to note that the youth organizations sometimes show more active engagement in state affairs than others.
Story continued in the full issue of ARARAT
[ARARAT]
