"New narratives necessary for Armenia-Azerbaijan peace" Article by Commonspace.eu

Dutch news website Commonspace.eu has published an article by Onnik Krikorian on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations. Caliber.Az reprints the piece.

From the editors: Onnik Krikorian is a journalist, photojournalist and consultant from the UK who has been covering the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict since 1994.

This summer, Krikorian visited a restaurant in Marneuli, Georgia, a town with a majority ethnic Azerbaijani population.

Azerbaijani could be heard spoken at every table but one. There, two middle-aged women sat with two children aged 9 and 7 years old speaking Armenian. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The municipality is home to just over 107,000 people – 83.8 per cent ethnic Azerbaijani with 8.6 and 7 per cent respectively comprising ethnic Georgians and Armenians.

There are even co-inhabited ethnic Armenian-Azerbaijani villages and last month a festival was held at one to celebrate multicultural diversity. That village, Khojorni, is just 10 kilometres from the main road that most travelling from Armenia to Georgia take en route to Tbilisi. In nearby Sadakhlo, even an Armenian woman from Noyemberyan serves customers at a roadside cafe in what is an ethnic Azerbaijani village.

Though not diminishing the severity of the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, nor the importance of the need to heal wounds freshly reopened over the past three years, few outside Georgia get to hear about this reality. In contrast, many unfortunately know that on a visit to Moscow in 2003 then-Armenian President Robert Kocharyan spoke of “ethnic incompatibility” between the two groups despite the absurdity of such claims.

Yes, the situation is specific to Georgia, but the fact that ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis can and do coexist or even co-inhabit the same locations, just as they did in Armenia and Azerbaijan before the first Karabakh war, demonstrates how this is arguably a political and not an ethnic or religious conflict. The situation has instead worsened in an information space full of existential threat narratives with little to counter them or offer by way of an alternative.

Political will from the top will thus be necessary to address this, but there have been precedents. Perhaps most famously, this was demonstrated at the European Games held in Baku in 2015 when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev awarded a silver medal to a Ukrainian athlete of ethnic Armenian descent. The crowd jeered and whistled until Aliyev raised his hand to stop them. The crowd did just that and instead broke into applause.

But as momentum towards peace increases, this must be the norm and not the exception. Perhaps now, there are possible signs that this could happen. Though recorded in late November, Euronews recently aired an interview with the Azerbaijani leader in which he ended by saying that if Armenians and Azerbaijanis can live together in third countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia then they can do the same in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

That might sound unlikely to many, but it is nonetheless inevitable. No nations remain enemies forever. Indeed, last week, Armenian National Assembly Speaker Alen Simonyan also highlighted that. “I don’t rule out that Armenians will […] live in Azerbaijan,” he told media. “[and] Azerbaijanis will come [and] live in Armenia.”

It won’t be quick, and it won’t be easy, but it will be better if the framing of relations between the two countries is transformed sooner rather than later. Some civil society organisations have attempted to do this in the past but their reach remains negligible, especially among mainstream society. The mainstream mass media will be important here while tangible and visible confidence-building measures will be necessary where it matters – on the ground and involving everyday folk. Hopefully, that can finally occur next year if an agreement is signed. But it should become a new reality even if it isn’t yet.