2024-07-25 16:00:06
Shafag Mehraliyeva, program director for Media and Communication at ADA University, wrote down her impressions of the free city of Khankendi, her thoughts on the frozen fate of the city during the years of occupation and its reintegration into life.
Day.Az presents an article he shared on his Facebook page:
Wandering the streets of Khankendi is quite an enlightening experience. This experience teaches you more about time than about conflict or about geography. More precisely, how it has been frozen in the same place for 30 years.
All the calendars in the houses and institutional buildings where ethnic Armenians live in the city show the same page – the last days of September 2023. It was on this date that Azerbaijan’s 24-hour anti-terrorist operation against the separatists in Khankendi completely canceled the knot that held the Caucasus region in a vice for 30 years.
However, looking at these places, formerly known as Stepanakert, it is understood that neither Azerbaijan, nor Armenia, nor the Caucasus region – the poor Armenians who live here – are in the real grip. Whether they left or stayed, it was perhaps the best event that happened to them in the last 30 years.
A small footnote – in the popular 80s blockbuster “Back to the Future”, in the alternate future where the main character Marty McFly falls, a thief who crookedly collects lottery winnings declares himself almost the god of the city. He is presented on all screens as the savior of America. But when Marty McFly ventures outside the main part of the city, he sees houses with barred windows and doors and a panicked population inside.
You don’t have to go far from the main streets to notice that a similar atmosphere prevails in Khankendi. The leader of the separatists, Arayik Harutunya, was said to be “the biggest business owner of Artsakh” in online pages full of his glorious biography. The profits of his agricultural and processing businesses came entirely from the exploitation of natural resources in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. As the executive director of “Karabagh Gold” CJSC, the owner of the shares of the winery business in the settlement of Khymriz Bazar, Khojavend region, Araikin’s work was always going smoothly. He also placed the villa-residence where he lived in Khankadi behind the iron gate, located at a great distance from the mansion. How not? After all, those who tried to save their lives from the military conflict for years and wanted to leave Khankendi would suddenly come and see the conditions he was living in?!
In the areas inhabited by the urban population, there are no signs of any fundamental innovations in 30 years. Stepanakert, which developed as a result of its leader, national leader Heydar Aliyev’s importance to justice, tolerance, multiculturalism, and loyalty to Azerbaijani values during the period of the Azerbaijan SSR, has been living under iron bars over the same city for the past 30 years. The reason? Remember my note above about the Back to the Future scene? When the community realizes that those who are hiding from the screens with the name of “national hero” are only busy filling their own pockets, they try to protect what they have left, even from the neighbor who lives next to them. Currently, these bars are being removed from the windows with the restoration and construction works carried out by Azerbaijan in the city, old dilapidated buildings are being turned into new hotels, cafes, markets, and a university is being built.
The scenes unfolding from behind the bars are a description of a life full of impossibilities. Next to the “velichestvennoe zdanie Nationalo Sobraniya”, which was once described with praise in the Artsakh news headlines and is now a gorbagor, I entered the houses on the street named after Tumanyan: plastered walls, stoves to keep warm in the winter, furniture in the fashion of the 1970s and 80s, dirty bathrooms, dilapidated stairs. … It is as if time has frozen in the beginning years of the military conflict. While watching these scenes, I remembered the scene I saw in 2021 in the village of Dashalti at the foot of Shusha – the only sign of the 21st century was a solar battery installed by a French humanitarian organization on top of a few village houses. Even the signs on the wall said that this place was “administrative territory of Azerbaijan SSR”. Poverty rained down from every house in the village…
Along with residential houses, Khankendi’s schools were also frozen at the end of the 20th century. Taking a look at the “Cultural Center named after Charles Aznavour”, the “culture” promoted by Armenians to the young generation is clear as day. The European music culture, where the Armenian-born French chansonist Charles Aznavour built his career, was limited by the name of the Center. The books of the writer Zori Balayan, who claims that the ancient lands of Azerbaijan historically belong to Armenians, the spiritual father of terrorism against Azerbaijanis, the posters of Sayat Nova, who wrote and created in all three languages of the Caucasian peoples, the lover of the friendship of peoples, and the events posters that refer only to the Armenian heritage and (here) very interesting), the 1975 edition hidden under the recently published encyclopedia of Armenian culture, which caught my eye in the office of the director of the Culture Center, creates the book “Music of Transcaucasian Republics” with the stamp of the Ministry of Culture of the Azerbaijan SSR. The Soviet-era piano and chairs neatly stored in the Cultural Center are witnessed by the old ceiling of the assembly hall, which did not withstand the natural disaster – the hurricane that recently visited Khankendi. It seems that not only the youth of Azerbaijan, but the whole world spent their lives with smart devices, digital books, the world of modern knowledge that they get with one touch, Armenian youth were instructed to earn a piece of bread with tailoring and mastery, just like in the old days.
The images of this old and poor life of the population are completed by several buildings invested by Armenians in Khankendi: a church belonging to 2019, which looks like an architectural copy of the magnificent golden Tsminda Sameba church in Tbilisi, and the terrible “Armenian Genocide” monument overlooking Shusha and Khankendi from the strategic height of Karkijahan, which can make the Nazi school of architecture proud. .
Am I surprised? Never! As a graduate of political science, I remember well the basis for the survival of the dictatorship. US President Franklin Roosevelt put it concretely: “True human freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Hungry and unemployed people are the basis on which dictatorships are built.” To control such people, the dictator’s first tools are the propagation of extreme religion and the creation of fictional identity narratives.
When leaving Khankendi, I passed by the “Tatik and Papik” (grandparents) monument, which all Armenians consider a symbol of identity. I remembered seeing a live version of this monument a few minutes ago in the city – an elderly Armenian couple sitting leisurely and comfortably in front of their house. And I was happy for them.
Many years ago, in the political circles of Washington, the sentence that the co-chairman of the Minsk Group, who was negotiating in Yerevan, said to me in a low voice, once again sounded in my ears: “I have never seen such a people living in the past!”
Tatik and Papik, Azerbaijan not only freed its lands from the Armenian occupation, it opened the cloak of your time from the Armenian occupation. Welcome to the 21st century! Live!