Last June, I returned to my Greenfield home after spending two years in Armenia as a Peace Corps volunteer. I lived in the town of Goris, situated about 30 miles from the Nogorno-Karabahk region, which is at present recovering from several days of a heavy artillery exchange between Armenia and Azerbaijian.
Who is really aware of these places, occupying a small and distant corner of the world? Until the moment I got my Peace Corps invitation and checked Google Maps, I did not know where these places were, much less what their history and cultures consisted of.
I learned that they had been at war from 1991 to 1994, which ended with a ceasefire rather than a peace treaty. This means that for 25 years, every Armenian boy has served mandatory military service after high school, patrolling the borders and occasionally exchanging gunfire with his Azeri counterparts. Armenia is a country about the size of Maryland with a population of less than 3 million. Azerbaijian is over double the size and triple the population. Still, these are small places, truly obscure from a western vantage point, and there’s so much big news to pay attention to. Three days of shelling in this tiny place hardly lays a claim to our attention.
My job in Goris was to train English teachers, and many of these teachers were solid, stoic women who came of age in the Soviet era and spoke English with an accent reminiscent of Natasha from the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” show. Once, as I sat lesson planning with one of these women, Nina (self described as “sometimes rude”) began telling me about her father, his life as an engineer, his many international friends and contacts, and before I knew what was happening, she began crying. “My father always loved watermelon,” she said.
It is true that with language and cultural barriers, it was often difficult for me to follow what was happening, but this seemed particularly random. “Watermelon was his favorite food, and his Azeri friends brought watermelon to the funeral,” she choked out the words. This tough old woman — who had survived earthquakes, war and the economic collapse of her country — was not crying because of the war or its dead, but because they had once had Azeri friends and now they had only Azeri enemies.
As the English specialist, another part of my work was visiting the village schools. In the village of Shurnuhk, all 21 of the school’s students met me on the road and walked me joyously up the hill to their school. I asked questions along the way. “Why did that little pig keep running past us?” That was the one surviving pig from an illness that killed all the other village pigs the year before, and he was free to do whatever he wanted. “How had all these houses become ruins?” “Why didn’t people live in them and maintain them?” One of the two high school seniors told me, “Those are Azeri houses.”
“Azeris lived here?” I was genuinely surprised, not knowing there had been Azeri communities in Armenia. But apparently Azeris and Armenians had lived together in Shurnuhk until the war. After the Azeris left, their houses crumbled, unused — stone monuments of a broken harmony.
The war and ongoing hostilities between these two countries is often overlooked because of the more looming tragedy of the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks in 1915. Between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed and much Armenian territory subsumed in the Ottoman Turkification effort. The border between Turkey and Armenia remains closed due to the tension caused by the failure of Turkey (and many other nations, including the U.S.) to recognize the genocide, which means that on two of its four national borders, Armenia faces hostile neighbors who desire that it cease to exist altogether. As major news sources have reported, in this recent escalation, the Turkish President Erdogan wished victory to Azerbaijian.
He will get his wish.
He will get his wish, that is, if the international community does not seek to establish peace between Armenia and Azerbaijian, if this skirmish becomes a hot and ongoing war. Armenia will lose. They are a very proud people, and they will not back down easily, but Azerbaijian has many times more men, weapons, and military spending potential. It will not be a war so much as slaughter, and Armenian survivors will join the other refugees fleeing from this destabilized part of the world.
Armenia is a small place, and that is exactly why it deserves our attention. They want peace, and if the world can work together there to achieve it, we’ve established a break in the routine of war that seems to dominate our news and world.
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Jenny Abeles is a writer and educator living in Greenfield. Inspired by her Peace Corps service, she is developing a course at Holyoke Community College called “Literature and Global Justice.” She is also writing a werewolf novel.