Spotlight Artsakh

What is it like to find yourself on a heavily militarized contact line? How does it feel to see an adversary, a mere 400 meters away, who was the reason you became a refugee? Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, a refugee from Baku, writes about her emotional journey to the line and back.

Vardges Baghryan, a journalist from Artsakh recounts his personal memories from the Karabakh Movement and the war. He recalls the siege on the village of Karintak and how the future freedom and independence of the people of Artsakh was forged.

Deciding never to use the word Genocide and then coming face-to-face with it again in a new context; between reading biographies of the victims of the Sumgait Pogrom over and over again and the urge to see who now occupies the homes of the Armenians of Baku and Sumgait, writer Lusine Hovhannesyan unexpectedly discovers a common yet obvious thread.

Harutyun Marutyan writes that the Karabakh Movement was not only the first of the Eastern European revolutions, but it played a considerable role in the democratization of Soviet society, was pivotal in the deconstruction of the Soviet Union and consequently in the elimination of the threat of communism.

Journalist Lusine Hovhannesyan recounts her personal memories as a university student during the first days of the Karabakh Movement. She writes, “We became beautiful and fell in love easily like young men and women living out their last days at the barricades and we sang songs of resilience in the streets of Yerevan.”

Long before the first rallies and clashes over the territory of Nagorno Karabakh, there were several signs of the coming storm writes Mikayel Zolyan. One of these was the “war of memory,” waged not by soldiers, but in the sphere of historiography.

In this exceptionally honest and candid article, Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan writes about his impressions from the first few months of the Karabakh Movement 30 years ago, with words he did not have nor could find at the time.

The Karabakh Movement was a crystallizing moment in the collective and historical memory of the Armenian nation. In this first in a series of articles about the Movement, EVN Report presents a chronology of the events of 1988 which eventually paved the way to independence.

The Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) is slowly trying to climb its way out of isolation and one of the ways it hopes to achieve this is to produce and export ‘black gold' to the world. EVN Report visited the sprawling caviar production facility nestled in a quiet valley in this unrecognized state often referred to simply as a ‘conflict zone.’

How nations in conflict deal with loss is a reflection of how they also confront issues of war and peace. In the recent escalation near the Contact Line in Karabakh (Artsakh), an Azerbaijani child was killed. Using the bloodied image of the child by Azerbaijani authorities as a tool for propaganda speaks volumes.