From: hrcoord@igc.apc.org (Human Rights Coordinator)
Newsgroups: soc.rights.human
Subject: Way Out of Karabakh Nightmare
Date: 21 Aug 92 19:14:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1476700403:000:5285
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!hrcoord    Aug 21 12:14:00 1992


From: Human Rights Coordinator <hrcoord>
Subject: Way Out of Karabakh Nightmare

/* Written  5:33 pm  Aug 20, 1992 by gn:peacemedia in
cdp:gn.peacemedia */
`LOVE HAS NO GUARANTEES': KARABAKH NIGHTMARE

an interview with Luilla Grigoryan from her hospital bed in
Yerevan, Armenia, August 13, 1992

by Peter Jarman

[Peace Media Service] Ludmilla Grigoryan, an Armenian mother and a
hospital consultant from Stepanakert in the war)worn enclave of
Nagorno Karabakh just within Azerbaijan, has three daughters, 15,
13 and 7 years old. The youngest bounced up and down on a bed at
the foot of Ludmilla's. The little girl bore many scars on her
face, arms and legs of splinters from the grad rocket that hit her
home in the mid)morning of August 5th. Neighbors rescued her and
her mother from under the rubble of her home. 30 were killed that
day, and 74 injured.

Her mother was not only more scarred, but had been blinded.
Surgeons had restored the sight of one eye. That of the other may
be restored. Ludmilla half propped herself up on a pillow and held
a handkerchief to the bad eye. In the next ward were three
completely blinded young men from the war.

A photo of her husband stood close to her. He and Ludmilla seemed
to be in their mid)forties. But he is dead. Killed three months
ago in the Armenian onslaught on the Azeri town of Lachin that
lies on the short strategic road or umbilical cord that connects
the enclave to Armenia.

The dream of Ludmilla and her husband was that Karabakh should be
joined to Armenia by more than a road: they wanted there to be one
nation. Karabakh nearly became Armenian territory in the early
1920s after the victory of the Communists in the civil war. But
Stalin intervened and made Karabakh an autonomous region within
the newly created republic of Azerbaijan. The Azeris also have a
prior claim to Karabakh.

In 1988 about 200 thousand people lived in the beautiful fertile
mountainous (Nagorny in Russian) Karabakh, the Alps of the
Transcaucasus. Four fifths were Armenian, one fifth Azeri. Then
the Armenians, feeling that they were being discriminated against
and feeling that the Soviet domination from Moscow was lessening,
cried out for their independence from Azerbaijan.

Four years later a civil war is raging between Armenians and
Azeris that not only confined to Karabakh but is sporadically
bursting out right along the Armenian)Azeri border. At least 4000
are dead, 10000 severely injured, and 600 thousand displaced from
their homes. No end to the fighting is now in sight, nor the
slightest move from Azerbaijan to allow the sovereignty of
Karabakh, about 3% of its territory and population, to be
questioned.

The terrible experience of Ludmilla has transformed her outlook.
"When I leave this hospital, I want to go on a mission to meet
Azeri women to plead for a peaceful way out of our trauma. I want
to express a love for them too, a love that has no guarantees."

Ludmilla is the chairperson of the Karabakh Helsinki Citizens'
Assembly, HCA, a movement conceived in Prague in the mid
1980sbetween their Charter 77 human rights activists and members
of Western peace movements. The HCA was fully born after the
velvet or nonviolent revolution in Czechoslovakia of November 1989
in which the people gave the political power to the Charter 77
leaders thus ending 50 years of totalitarian rule. The HCA is now
both a citizens' parliament upholding the human rights and the
security and cooperation provisions of the governmental Helsinki
process, and a movement releasing the commitment of citizens
across Europe to the development of peaceful democracies that may
realize these provisions. The Assembly or citizens' parliament met
in Prague in 1990 and Bratislava in 1992.

Ludmilla was to have participated in the inauguration of the HCA
branch in Armenia on the day that I was by her hospital bed.
Another of the three Karabakh HCA members took four members from
the West to Karabakh by helicopter that day. They found a Wild
West scene in Stepanakert, the capital, with most men in self made
uniforms, 40 thousand refugees from Armenian villages recently
captured by Azeris camping precariously in the city streets.

"We need time to solve this problem," said Ludmilla speaking with
difficulty, "not weapons." On his way to Lachin her husband said
that they had found 4000 rocket launchers aimed at Stepanakert in
the neighboring Azeri village of Shusha from which all their
inhabitants had fled. I met some of these refugees in a camp near
the Azeri capital of Baku the previous day. The men were about to
return to battle determined to regain lost Azeri territory like
Shusha and Lachin. Some said they were not going to stop until
every Armenian was out of Karabakh.

The dream of Ludmilla and her husband, the cries for independence,
have turned into a nightmare. With international assistance, a
ceasefire may be arranged with peacekeeping forces. But I have
another hope in nonviolent peacekeepers when Ludmilla rises from
her bed and unites with Azeri women who long also for peace and
justice.

= end =

Peter Jarman, Moscow correspondent of the Quaker weekly The Friend
in Britain and of Peace Media Service in the Netherlands,
accompanied the HCA mission to Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia,
August 8)15, 1992.