Angelo Antolino

Armenia - The pending Peace

Djivan looks like an old, tough highlander, but his eyes light up with joy when he opens his house to the visitors crossing the village. «This is the house of two war heroes», he says as he walks through the garden. Two of Djivan’s four sons died in the 1991-1994 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. «This is why we call them heroes», he explains as he pours a glass of homemade spirit for his guests, «because only those who die in war are heroes». Djivan remembers when, in 1992, the Azerbaijan army occupied the village and all the men had to raise their rifles to fight «the Turks». «My son died down there», he says pointing out a grove in the middle of the valley, «and it is there that I want to build my new house.» In the Soviet period Nagorno-Karabakh was a province of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan with a large Armenian majority: Gorbachev’s Perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the USSR led the Karabakh people to call for more autonomy and, at the beginning of the nineties, to declare themselves independent. This gave rise to a conflict in which Azerbaijan, in an attempt to recover the lost territories, fought the Karabakh people and formations of Armenian volunteers who intervened to help the small twin republic. The war lasted from 1991 to 1994 and caused the death of over 30 thousand people: while the world was looking at the Balkans, in the Caucasus hundreds of thousands of Azeri and Armenian refugees were forced to leave their homes to escape from the war… (continua)