MINELRES: Caucasus Reporting Service No. 318: excerpts

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WELCOME TO IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, No. 318, December 9, 2005

CAUCASUS NEWS UPDATE DECEMBER 9

AJARIA’S EX-LEADER CHARGED  Arrest warrant against Aslan Abashidze adds
to concerns that Tbilisi is not playing fair.  By Eteri Turadze in
Batumi

ARMENIA: HOME FROM HOME  Armenians who swapped villages – and countries
- with an Azerbaijani community still have fond memories of their homes
16 years later.  By Narine Avetyan in Dyunashogh

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........................


ARMENIA: HOME FROM HOME

Armenians who swapped villages – and countries - with an Azerbaijani
community still have fond memories of their homes 16 years later.

By Narine Avetyan in Dyunashogh

Perched close to Armenia’s border with Georgia lies the small village of
Dyunashogh. It’s a lonely place, whipped by bitter winds and often cut
off for weeks and months at a time when the one road leading to the
outside world is flooded by heavy rains.

This harsh life is made more difficult for people here by the knowledge
that Dyunashogh is not their original home. In fact, the entire
community used to live in Azerbaijan, in a village called Kerkenj in
northwestern Azerbaijan.

At the end of the Eighties, as the conflict over Nagorny Karabakh began
to unfold and relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan did a nosedive,
these Armenian villagers began to realise they were going to have to get
out of Azerbaijan, or be forced out. 

At the time, large numbers of people of the “wrong” ethnicity were
joining a two-way exodus from Azerbaijan and Armenia.  

But instead of fleeing and getting dispersed along the way, the people
Kerkenj sent a mission in early 1989 a mission to scout out a village in
Armenia whose Azerbaijani inhabitants were in a similar predicament.
They came to terms and hatched a fairly unique plan to swap villages. At
the time, the village now called Dyunashogh bore the Azerbaijani name
Kzylshafak.

“They looked at our village of Kerkenj, and then I went with them to
look at Kzylshafak. I had a look round and decided that it was
suitable,” said Rafik Martirosyan, who said, at the time of his visit,
the village looked like a good bet with numerous cattle and good land.

The deal was struck, but things looked rather less rosy than Martirosyan
remembered when they arrived in their new home. 

The Armenians of Kerkenj – a village of 220 homes to the conflict – say
they were able to bring very little with them, while the Azerbaijanis of
Kzylshafak took everything when they left. “Not a single head of cattle
was left behind,” said Martirosyan.

Life has continued to be difficult to this day. Many of the Armenians
remember the orchards and fields of their former home as a paradise on
earth and complain of the harsh climate in Dyunashogh. The name means
“snow shine”, which the refugees say is fitting.

Most work as farmers, producing milk, meat, wool and eggs and doing a
brisk trade across the Georgian border, exchanging their potatoes for
fruit and nuts. Weather, however, takes its toll on the crops they
produce, with 50-60 per cent sometimes falling victim to either drought
or heavy rain.

There is only one telephone in the village, at the post office, though
in the last couple of years villagers have been using a more accessible
and reliable Georgian mobile telephone service to communicate.

Thirteen-year-old Aram told IWPR his school hasn’t been repaired since
Soviet days. He said the floors of the classrooms have missing boards,
the holes covered by desks to avoid accidents. Oil heaters warm the
classrooms, and teachers of Armenian language and literature, chemistry
and biology are in short supply.

Though they came to this inhospitable climate so as to stay together as
a community, lack of opportunities in the village means that anyone goes
on to higher education seldom returns to Dyunashogh.

An attempt by the villagers to instil a sense of community and preserve
their lost heritage by giving Dyunashogh the name of their native
Kerkenj was unsuccessful. Authorities turned down the proposal because
of the non-Armenian origin of the name.  

In recent years, the village has had some new settlers, natives of
Armenia such as Alvard, who came here from the neighbouring village of
Metsavan. 

“In Metsavan it would be impossible to have as many animals as here.
There’s much more pastureland here,” he said. 

There are barriers between the Armenians who were born here and those
who came from Azerbaijan. They have different foods, customs and
dialects of Armenian. People originally from Kerkenj prefer their sons
to marry their old neighbours’ daughters rather than local Armenian
girls.

Martirosyan says the Azerbaijanis now living in Kerkenj tell him they
too are not entirely accepted. He’s heard that locals call them “Yeraz”,
after an unreliable car that used to be made in Soviet Armenia, but now
a pejorative shortening of “Yerevan Azerbaijanis”.

There has been contact between the two villages since they changed
places, and the Azerbaijanis who once lived in Dyunashogh/Kzylshafak
have even been back to visit.

“It’s easy for them. They cross into Irganchai [in Georgia], and from
there we escort them to the village, taking them over the border [into
Armenia],” said villager Sashik Vardanyan. “They come to their village,
have a look around, quench their nostalgia and go back again.”

However, none of the Armenians has yet been back to Azerbaijan.
Martirosyan, now 79, has many close friends there who’ve offered to take
him home again, but he has so far refused. 

“Many people there know me, and what if something unpleasant?” he said,
adding he does not want to endanger his Azerbaijani friends.

Instead, the villagers of Dyunashogh maintain ties with their former
home with the help of the Azerbaijanis living in the Georgian border
village of Irganchai who pass on messages and requests.

“Last year, at our request, they took photographs of Kerkenj and our
cemetery there, and sent them to us,” said Vardanyan, adding that in
return they sent photos of Dyunashogh.

Arsen Hakobyan, an expert on Armenian migrants from Azerbaijan, says
many people seek to keep some contact with their place of origin. He
said people often meet on neutral ground, such as in Russia, and
exchange videos of their former homes. “They refresh their memories of
their birthplace, and thus prevent the link with the places where they
were born and lived from being broken,” he said.

Hakobyan’s research has shown that “compact relocations” like the one
done by the villagers of Kerkenj happened in a few other cases. The
residents of Chardahlu in Azerbaijan swapped with Zorakan in Armenia,
for example. Armenians from Madrasa in Azerbaijan made plans for an
exchange with Shidlu in the Armenia’s Ararat district, but these were 
foiled by the 1988 earthquake. The Madrasa residents eventually got
together and founded a new village called Dprevan in the Aragots
region..

“The exchange was usually decided at community level, and the role
[played by officialdom] only ever went as high as district government
heads,” said Hakobyan.

When they exchanged their land, Kerkenj and Kzylshafak signed an
agreement promising to look after the graves they were forced to leave
behind.  

Though 16 years have now passed, that promise has been kept by both
sides, and in Dyunashogh, the Muslim cemetery is as well cared for as
the nearby Armenian Christian burial ground. 

In the Azerbaijani graveyard, tombstones covered in Arabic script sit
alongside later Soviet-era ones with Cyrillic inscriptions and a picture
of the deceased. 

“Last year, several stones from the outer wall of the cemetery were
dislodged,” 74-year-old villager Nazik Arutyunyan told IWPR. “The whole
village got together and built the wall up again. And a portrait on one
of the gravestones had fallen off, so the [village] chairman himself
mixed the cement and stuck it back on again.

“If we don’t look after their graves, they’re not going to look after
ours.”

Though returning home is a distant dream, Martirosyan knows where his
first stop will be if he ever find his way back to Kerkenj, “The first
thing I would do is to visit the graves of my family, and then I would
go and look at the memorial that I put up with my own hands to the
people of Kerkenj who died in the Second World War.”

Narine Avetyan is a journalist with the newspaper 168 Hours in Yerevan.

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IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service provides the international community
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ISSN: 1477-7959 Copyright (c) 2005 The Institute for War & Peace
Reporting 

CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE No.
318

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