A number of people have asked me if I could describe something of what I observed when, early in October, I travelled in the Caucasus with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in particular what we saw of the unfolding crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh – or rather, its implications for Armenia, since it was of course impossible to go to Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Incidentally, this is something of a misnomer, since the area is simply referred to as ‘Karabakh’ by the Azeris, and as ‘Artsakh’ by the Armenians. Not only things and places, but names too are contested here. What I am writing here represents only a personal point of view, of course.
The trip had originally been planned around two ecumenical commitments, ‘bookending’ the week – Rome on 30 September to attend the Prayer Vigil organised by the Taizé brothers in St Peter’s Square on the eve of the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, and Armenia later in the week to fulfil a long-issued invitation from the Armenian Apostolic Church to the Archbishop. His immediate predecessors, Archbishops Carey and Williams, had gone to Armenia, but hitherto Archbishop Justin had not been able to do so. But the context of the trip changed dramatically on 19 September when Azerbaijan, provoked so it claimed by attacks on its citizens, invaded the ‘breakaway’ republic of Karabakh/Artsakh. Within a matter of days, the conflict was all but over, the entire Armenian population of the area fleeing to neighbouring Armenia.
So what had originally been intended as an ecumenical visit, centring on some days at the Armenian ‘Holy See’, at Etchmiadzin, a few miles west of Yerevan, inevitably now was overshadowed by the crisis in Karabakh/Artsakh and its consequences. We’d gone on briefly to Azerbaijan after Rome, and of course heard one side of the matter there, proceeded to Georgia for a couple of days, and then made the journey by minibus – a long drive – from Tbilisi to Yerevan. Arriving at Etchmiadzin in the evening, all we could gather in the darkness was a muted sense of the sheer scale of the Holy See. It was only next morning, when I opened the doors onto my balcony and saw, in the cold, clear air, the snow-capped peak of Ararat in the distance, and had a chance to walk around a little before breakfast, that I could appreciate the grandeur and, I think, holiness of that place, where it really did feel to me as if the veil between heaven and earth is a little thinner than almost anywhere else I’ve ever been. It is a place for silence, for contemplation, for prayer, even when, in the day, numbers of tourists are walking around. The old cathedral at its centre, nearing completion of a major restoration project, goes back at least 1500 years, though there was a cathedral on the site from at least the fourth century. Armenian Christianity is old, and great, and rich in its literature and traditions.
But we had too little chance to immerse ourselves in the richness of that tradition, given the inevitable visits and meetings which occupied our time. They included a visit to a picturesque, mountainous town some two hours outside Yerevan, where the Armenian Church had turned a youth centre, housed in what looked like a former Soviet, barracks-like building, into a refuge for displaced people from Karabakh/Artsakh. Some 80 or so were living there temporarily, the hope being that more permanent places of residence and even work could be found elsewhere in Armenia in due course. But this will be a huge challenge for the country. Some 120,000 people fled to Armenia in just over a week, leaving everything behind. Scale up in terms of size of population, and that is like 2 million people arriving in the UK in just over a week. The strain on health, employment, welfare and other services will be enormous, for years to come, for a country which is not rich in natural resources, and currently 43rd in the league table of European countries’ GDP.
The sense of disbelief, numbness, grief, desperation, even despair, was palpable. Once you set this catastrophe – for no other word is possible for the experience of the former Armenian population of Karabakh/Artsakh – in the context of the long history of conflict and terror in the region (which has run on both sides), it is difficult to see how these people will ever have the confidence to return to their homes. People spoke of being terrorized as they fled by random attacks, shootings, and bombings, even as some accounts from the other side emphasize the restraint exercised by the Azeri forces. Their fears are of an impending, wholesale destruction of their homes and of their cultural heritage, including their churches and their graveyards. This last point was something which hadn’t occurred to me, to my shame, until I heard it spoken about – the fear that where their families are buried will be bulldozed, their graves desecrated or destroyed altogether.
What has happened is a humanitarian disaster. The complexity of the conflict over the last thirty or more years is such that it would be profoundly unhelpful for me to try to apportion blame. But there is an urgent need here to put the human catastrophe back at the centre of all thinking about the future. Karabakh/Artsakh was a religiously, even ethnically mixed area for centuries. Something has to give here to enable the integrity and authenticity of ancient ways of life to be recognized and accepted. There is not just a battle for territory, but also for memory. Given that the international community, with just a few exceptions, always affirmed that Karabakh/Artsakh was part of the sovereign land of Azerbaijan, space needs to be found for a recognition of historic, communal identities. Literature we were given on religious pluralism and toleration in Azerbaijan made almost no mention of Armenian Christianity, but instead appeared to substitute for it the highly controversial theory of an ur-tradition, an ‘Albanian-Udi’ form of the faith which had been all but obliterated by the Armenian Church. The history of Armenian communities in Karabakh/Artsakh needs to be affirmed and valued, just as that of Azeri/Islamic communities in the same region. That would be a start.
We flew back via Paris on 7 October, with all this still fresh in our minds. Yet, even as we were waiting at Paris for our connecting flight, news was coming forward of the Hamas attack in Israel. Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh has been completely erased from most of the media. Please let’s not forget this war, and this people.
Ad fontes 