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“We all seek man, God’s beloved creature. We seek: in ourselves, in the people we love, but also in our enemies … What we find and experience instead – over and over again – are fear, anger and hatred. This is also the case in recent days in my ancient homeland, Armenia, in Karabakh. There is war. For many centuries, different peoples have coexisted in the Caucasus and we continue to do so today: We, as Christians The oldest in the world have had to experience much pain and destruction in this sometimes inhospitable landscape, but they always tried to find paradise among the stones, that is why we live the confession of our God, for whom we all have a family. (from the Armenian bishop’s peace prayer in Vienna in October 2020)
Where the heck had come, in January 1989, in the middle of the Caucasus, St. Ararat in front of me, welcoming Austria behind me? A few weeks ago an earthquake devastated a third of Armenia. Debris also fell on the capital, Yerevan. There was almost no electricity, no water, no public transportation, and no food. In the midst of this gloom, tens of thousands gathered in the square in front of the opera and chanted “Getse Karabach!”, “Getse Artsach!”, Or “Sumgait!”
As soon as I arrived at the completely chaotic airport with the cryptic name Swartnots (Place of Angels), I heard something concrete about Nagorno-Karabakh for the first time. An enclave in neighboring Azerbaijan, mostly inhabited by Armenians since 2000. I came to the square in front of the opera directly from the earthquake region and found myself among people who remembered the victims of a massacre in Sumgait a year ago that the Azeris had perpetrated against their fellow Armenians. I am among the icy inhabitants of the capital, who prayed at the same time for the victims of the earthquake and for their enemies then and now, who in times of emergency in the neighboring country did everything in their power to expel the population. of Karabakh.
Where did I get, for crying out loud? Obviously, there were people who, after seven decades of communism and the first genocide of the last century, took Christianity seriously in a grotesque and deadly way. The threat to Karabakh was as catastrophic as the devastation in the icy north of the country, and both were literally devastating. Until now, little Armenia in the gigantic Soviet Union had been something like the “little Gallic town”, which with scathing humor – oh, those “Radio Yerevan” jokes – had saved itself through cruelty. of world history.
Dignity instead of war
Now the self-assured cultural people, what tourist pathos, were on the brink of another financial disaster. What value were culture and religion, why all the fuss? Did they keep what they promised? There was no way out, and the exorbitant help from outside was ridiculous. Why should Armenians put up with this? Just turn around and go, jump on the plane and have tea served by your aunt in London, or stay with your cousin in Marseille, go fishing and play at Aznavour reserve at night. Perhaps it would also be possible to take a taxi with the stepbrother in Los Angeles or to hold seminars on nuclear physics in Potsdam. As a provincial politician in Kazakhstan, there could still be a vacancy.
Nothing of that. Many had these opportunities and still do to this day, but only a few used them to dig for manuscripts or children’s toys in the rubble that still smelled like corpses, to love their enemies and to teach helpers. foreigners, including myself, how to prepare pomegranate cider. How could these people keep their balance in this absurd survival absurdity 30 years ago? Folklore, the few communist virtues, honor of work, march to a better world, etc., banal stubbornness, black humor and everything else, could not help to make the unbearable bearable. There was nothing to do with sentimentality and home kitsch.
Some 30 years later, here in Austria, the Armenian bishop found words similar to those used by the clergyman on the dusty Opernplatz during an ecumenical prayer for the people at war, adding a few lines to this absurd call to love one’s enemies belong to the cultural property of the Vienna Enlightenment, of Joseph Haydn’s “Creation”:
“Made with dignity and majesty, endowed with beauty and courage, man stands as king of nature …”
Well in Vienna it can be quite easy to be pathetic and very peacefully thinking of peace when the food is tasty and death is supposed to be a teacher from Germany long ago, how one prays with anxiety, worry and a bit of a lie. – Kitsch is always possible.
The Karabakh Committee
And again the question from 30 years ago comes to mind. How could these even three million people keep their balance in this madness? The first attempt to get at least a little closer to the answer to this question, for me, was the encounters with some members of the then newly formed Karabakh Committee, a lopsided group of politically active, adventurous intellectuals with a poetic touch, Spartan ecological motives. and guardians of the Treasures of culture and religion. This fairly manageable citizen movement was taken very seriously in the true sense of the word by the slowly collapsing Soviet Union, of all things in the chaos of glasnost and perestroika. For this reason, and at the latest after the first arrests and the first weeks in prison in Moscow, the members of the committee had to take themselves and others seriously, but above all: their compatriots took their political responsibility seriously and the held responsible.
Even if then and probably also today in Nagorno-Karabakh no one has time to sing Haydn’s aria on human dignity; Somehow, in its complexity, the committee embodied the balance between understanding and humility, flexible reason and pragmatism, humorous skepticism towards truth and beauty, and a belief that also knows how to live out its hope. In those times of chaos, there was not really a concept, a sophisticated and fully discussed program of how a society between hunger, hardship and massacre could be rebuilt so little by little, but: the committee advocated self-confidence, a new state and a dust free culture. without completely forgetting religion.
It is not difficult to guess, and even then, despite the fact that I was anything but a sensitive and sophisticated political scientist, many of these expectations were not met, especially not on the issue of Karabakh, but after all: the “post-Soviet village “It’s not Missing from the map, that’s the real feeling. After the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s, there were hopes for an economic rebound, rising tourism figures, in short: a new beginning that should also benefit neighboring regions. Current President Nicol Pashinyan, in particular, tried to open a new path two years before the outbreak of this war. Now the modernization and standardization project has collapsed.
Destabilization warning
But now there is no time for these sentimentalities: a comical and intelligent people are once again on the brink of their existence, and just because a few policy makers have nothing better to do with the instinct of Josef Stalin or the arrogance of Kemal Ataturk than playing a little geopolitics. While Azerbaijan believes it is on the road to victory, Yerevan warns of a long-term destabilization of the entire region. Officials analyze the situation as follows: The initiative and direction of the broad acts of war unleashed by Azerbaijan, Turkey and jihadists from Syria and Libya against Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenian: Artsach) since September 27 are based on the idea of ”one people, two states” under the leadership of Turkey back. Its president points to a march from Lebanon to the Caspian Sea, a long-term threat to all of these areas.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not care about the intentions of his NATO allies as he recruits thousands of jihadists and other radical terrorist groups and smuggles them into Azerbaijan as cannon fodder with the goal of further Islamization in the long run. He is aware that the positions of Russia and Iran, as well as the UN and the EU should not be ignored, so he plays with fire, which is a threat to international security. Erdogan has turned jihadists into agents of his foreign policy, and it is obvious that they will make their appearance elsewhere if the international community continues to be tolerant. Armistice or not: the real end of the Nagorno-Karabakh war is not yet in sight.
