AN INTERVIEW WITH TIMOTHY STRAIGHT, NRC

 

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is a voluntary organization involved in international refugee work. For more than 50 years the organization has worked to provide humanitarian assistance to people fleeing from their homes and to defend their fundamental human rights.

 

This interview was held at the NRC office in Yerevan, Republic of Armenia, on 20 February 2004

ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN: When did you start working for the Norwegian Refugee Council?

TIMOTHY STRAIGHT: I’ve worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council for seven years now and the first three years were spent in Oslo working as the desk officer for Bosnia and Croatia. I had worked in Bosnia during the war for another Norwegian aid organization so it was my experience there that got me the job and they expanded it to Croatia.

Then I got kind of bored and restless and they asked me if I wanted to take this job. I came here in September 2000.

OJK: When did the NRC establish itself in Armenia?

TS: The NRC started working in Georgia in 1993 and then expanded to cover Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1995. We started with schools and then did some drinking water projects in the city of Sevan. We’ve cooperated with local NGOs, been involved with human rights education and also have the shelter project for refugees, which is basically what we do now.

We also have an IDP survey going on this year because we’re going to rehabilitate houses in the border regions of Armenia.

OJK: There are two international organizations that are mainly concerned with refugees? UNHCR and NRC?

TS: As their only mandate.

OJK: How do the two differ?

TS: Not much. I mean, we both have the same focus on refugees and we sometimes work together. We’ve been funded by UNHCR in other countries and we’ve also combined our money on certain projects here. We made a gentleman’s agreement that they would work in urban centers while we would concentrate on rural areas. We specialize in the nice little houses while they take incomplete buildings that were started during the soviet era. After they’re finished they’re then provided as apartments to refugees but let’s back up a little.

UNHCR’s funding has gradually been reduced and they’ve changed their focus from building shelters to concentrating on the rights of refugees. For example, the privatization of land and the houses issue. There wasn’t a system in place until we both pushed for the law that was passed last year. With our support, UNHCR is campaigning very hard to prevent eviction from collective centers whereas we’re working in Ararat and Lori and some villages here and there. However, what we’re beginning to realize is that those nice, neat little packages of refugees living in containers are getting fewer and fewer.

When we built sixty-six houses in Silikyan, for example, that was the last big pocket of refugees living in containers in Yerevan and when we finished fifty-two houses up in Gyumri we managed to accommodate all the refugees living in containers there. So, now that they’re all provided for we can cross Yerevan and Gyumri off the list. However, what we’re finding more and more is that there’s a village here with four families or another there with five. In Banavan, for example, a village next to the city of Ararat, there’s a project that we’ll be starting this year but it’s the urban collective centers that are the serious problem. These are big numbers and bad conditions.

OJK: When the refugees came to Armenia they settled in the regions or in urban centers like Massis that were once quite heavily inhabited by Azeris. Did many just simply move into these newly-abandoned homes?

TS: Officially, there are 36,000 Azeri-owned houses that are now occupied by Armenians and I have no reason to believe that this number isn’t correct. Those might sound like strange words today, fifteen or sixteen years later. That is, that they’re Azeri owned but that they’re occupied. Of course, these refugees fully consider them to be their houses. Legally, however, they’re not.

OJK: But in some cases, Armenians purchased the houses of Azeris.

TS: Or traded.

OJK: Do we know how many were obtained that way?

TS: I’m not sure but comparing it to the Bosnian situation, a lot of the deals that were made when the Serbs left Bosnia and the Bosniaks were thrown out of Serbia were made under duress and were later declared null and void. However, that was also a completely different situation. There was a lot of focus, a lot of pressure, a lot of money and, in fact, a lot of everything in Bosnia.

Here in Armenia, there’s not a lot of donor presence, not a lot of focus, not a lot of interest and there will be no progress or decision made on this issue until a peace deal is signed. Do they own those houses or not? What about those 36,000 houses that Armenians have been living in for up to sixteen years? Can they be legally titled to those families? What about compensation to the Azeris that used to own them? What about compensation for those Armenians with apartments in Baku?

None of that is going to be solved until there’s a peace agreement and it has to be part of any deal. You can’t make a durable peace agreement without addressing these issues and they’re horribly complicated. So, in as much as everybody says it’s important, yes it is, but we can’t do anything about it now. In cooperation with UNHCR all we can do is just say that there can’t be a peace agreement without addressing those issues.

OJK: When the NRC first arrived in Armenia was there a very noticeable problem with refugees in Armenia?

TS: No, because you have those thirty-six thousand houses. For example, you’ve seen Ptghavan. It was an Azeri village, or seventy percent of it was, and when the first wave of people came they took those houses. There were no houses for the second wave of refugees so they just moved into containers on the edge of town. It is less visible in that sense.

OJK: Is that the same with Bagratashen and the adjoining villages as well?

TS: Less so and many of the [Azeri] refugees that lived in Ptghavan now live in Georgia.

OJK: In Sadakhlo?

TS: In the next village which must be very frustrating. They can physically see their houses from Georgia every day. Their former houses, but anyway.

But yes, it was a less visible situation when we arrived in 1995. It was already something like eight years that they had been living in these containers which was far beyond their initial expectation. They expected that six months later they’d have a house but then the Soviet Union collapsed so it was less visible because the country was also doing a lot worse.

There were electricity problems, water problems, all kind of problems and the roads were miserable but now there is a gradual improvement in Yerevan at least so the contrast between the people living badly and the rest of the population is greater. However, in that group that is living very badly we also have a lot of locals who have fallen between the chairs as they say, or just haven’t managed. They’re living together with the refugees.

You can see a very nice new construction, the new AUA building, right across the street, and then somewhere else in the city you can see a very miserable collective center where only sixty percent of the inhabitants are refugees. Only? That’s a lot and as a result, we always face the challenge of what to do with the locals. You don’t want to say we can fix your life but not yours because somehow another injustice takes place.

In Banavan, for example, there are two collective centers. One is mainly comprised of refugees while the other is made up of locals. We’re going to build houses for thirteen refugees but there are nine local families and I’m tearing my hair out wondering what we’re going to do.

It’s not a problem to get the land from the Mayor of Ararat and the infrastructure is only another twenty meters of pipe but every time we’re there interviewing, making sure, making the right selection of refugee families, the locals are asking, what about us?

And I’m saying, I can’t promise anything. I don’t want to say no, the answer’s probably no and it is as of today, but as much as I would like to, what are we going to do? We can’t go in as the Norwegian Refugee Council and build homes for the forty percent that are locals. We can build for one, two or even three percent [of the locals] but not more.

OJK: When you work in a village you’re also working on the infrastructure such as schools, so this must have a positive effect on the rest of the village whether it’s inhabited mainly by refugees or not.

TS: We’ve stopped the school program and I’m glad we did because now there’s a program of optimization and I’m worried that they’re going to close some of the schools that we fixed up [laughs].

But, for example, in Silikyan, we managed to persuade the city of Yerevan and the Ministry of Urban Development to prioritize infrastructure for the refugees. That was the agreement we had. We would build sixty-six houses including most of the infrastructure if they built the main sewage line. We put in $700,000 and asked for $80-100,000 from them, a small amount compared to what we were spending.

The idea is that the main sewage line will provide sewage facilities not only for the refugees but also for every house in the village. As the sewage line has to go through the village in order to reach the refugees every other family can put a toilet in their house which they’ve never been able to before. The refugees brought them something good and that’s what we like to do.

OJK: Because you’re calling them refugees I assume they haven’t taken citizenship?

TS: I would still call them refugees. About 65,000 have taken citizenship.

OK: Out of how many refugees?

TS: The official number is 240,000 although there is the general consensus that it’s actually less. How much less we don’t know. 240,000? We know there’s probably not that many. Besides, when refugees become citizens we don’t take them out of that number and still call them refugees. So, in a way, there’s probably significantly less refugees in Armenia than there were.

 

Ethnic Armenian refugee from Azerbaijan in Silikyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 1994

OJK: There appears to be some momentum building up with the number of refugees taking citizenship in the past few years. Why do you think that is?

TS: I think the Government is very keen but at the end of the day, there’s been a change of generation after fifteen years and some people have simply given up. Many now understand that keeping their refugee status doesn’t entitle them to more food, clothing or a home. If a refugee has become a citizen we don’t refuse to build them a house. They have a piece of paper that says they were formally refugees. It’s their living conditions that matter.

OJK: You don’t you have to be a citizen to get a house?

TS: You don’t have to be a citizen to receive a house from the NRC but — and this is a big and a very important but — to privatize the land underneath you have to be a citizen, so effectively, yes.

OJK: But with regards to social benefits like PAROS?

TS: PAROS does not discriminate between locals and refugees. Basically, there is no advantage in remaining a refugee. They don’t lose their right to compensation for property lost in Azerbaijan as a result of the conflict and I think that this has been a big boost to people.

OJK: But some refugees are still reluctant, for example, to take citizenship because they lose exemption from military service.

TS: Have you ever met a refugee who didn’t do his military service? I tell them that they don’t have to serve in the army but they disagree. I have never met a refugee who has ever used their status to avoid serving in the military.

OJK: However, I remember that about four years ago, UNHCR were getting very upset about the fact that the military were ignoring documents exempting refugees from serving.

TS: If someone says that they’re a refugee and refuses to serve in the army then they’re seen as a coward. That’s the impression I get and nobody here wants to be seen like that. I have even met one refugee who would rather find a medical reason for avoiding military service than use his refugee status.

OJK: In areas where both refugees and locals are living is there sometimes friction between the two communities?

TS: In general, I have actually been very surprised at how few problems there are. I can even remember one particular occasion when after we built a house for an elderly refugee couple, a woman came up to us. I thought she was coming for a fight but she instead she wanted to thank us for helping people that had suffered more than her. They deserved a house, she said, and I thought, whoa, where did that come from? So, I haven’t had a lot of complaints in that sense. However, the Karabaghtsis tend to get more upset and say that they lost everything just like the rich people from Baku. I can understand them completely.

OJK: You don’t build houses for people displaced from Karabagh?

TS: If we go into a village and there are fifteen families living in containers, and this is a new policy from our side that I have worked very hard for, and one family is local and another is from Karabagh, we’ve decided to fix the housing problem for the whole village and not to treat people differently. If they’re living very badly in containers we want to treat them as equally as possible. The challenge for us, however, is where is the line drawn between too many locals and not enough refugees? If it’s thirteen refugees and two locals, that’s okay but if it’s ten refugees and five locals is that too many locals? And what does that mean? Do we build just for the refugees and not the locals, or do we not build for everybody? It’s like a moving target.

OJK: Where does your funding come from?

TS: Almost every cent comes from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry although we did receive some donations for about ten houses through Armenian International Magazine (AIM). This year, we’re also working in cooperation with Bars Media to make a twenty-minute fundraising film that paints a true and sympathetic portrait of why we do what we do. Refugees don’t cry and sob; they’re fighters and they complain a lot. They scream and yell and that’s who they are, right? So, we’re going to present that in the film and shoot a true picture of how they’re living. We’re even going to show a family that lives in one of our houses but still isn’t happy.

Why not? That’s part of our reality too so why aren’t they happy? We’re going to weave that in with what it’s like to be a refugee and why we should help them. We have to remember that it’s very easy to think that because they complain that they must be stupid but they’re not. What they do have, however, is “learned helplessness.” This is a term that came up in a couple of seminars we had recently. We’re building houses for refugees and a few of them still aren’t happy and don’t take care of their homes. So far, we know of only one house that has been sold which is simply amazing but even if ten are sold, we should still be building houses.

But when they ring or come to the office to complain that they don’t have telephones, that they don’t have showers or that they want to be provided with a bus to take them to the city or they don’t say thank you it makes us frustrated. Nobody’s happy so what is this? This is when a person has been through a trauma and hasn’t been able to adapt to their new environment. They’ve been stamped as being inferior and are considered different because they speak a funny kind of Armenian or perhaps only Russian. How do you talk to people like this? How do you relate to people like that? This is a real challenge.

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat in the car feeling rather happy that we’ve been able to help people but all we do is get yelled at. And then there are other incidents. For example, one family that we built a house for said it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful but then complained that the turning radius of the stairway was too small to get a coffin up to the second floor. Our only reaction was that they’ve got be nuts but in a way this is part of the “learned helplessness” thing.

To express the emotion of I wasn’t born here, this isn’t my home, I don’t feel like I truly belong here, they’re going to find something even if it’s the color of the tiles in the bathroom or the color of the carpeting or something else like the turning radius of this coffin to hang their frustrations on and it becomes disproportionately large. I mean, how many funerals do they have in these houses? Hopefully not too many but this is what this particular person got hung up on.

We had another incident up in Gyumri where we gave someone a new house and he came to complain that the toilet wasn’t working. He said it was broken and that we had to come and fix it. He said that he’d been trying to dry the water in the toilet but that it kept on getting wet. He didn’t even know how to use a toilet. He had literally never seen a western toilet before so the situation was in our eyes, oh great, a new toilet, but for him it was, what the heck is this? I don’t know what to do with this. This isn’t what I’m used to. This is stress. This isn’t the huge help that I was hoping it was, or it is but it’s going to take some time getting used to.

OJK: The majority of refugees came from Baku or other cities in Azerbaijan?

TS: Many of them came from Baku but not all of them. This particular person came from a village where there were no toilets.

OJK: The reason I’m asking is because coming from a city like Baku it must be difficult to adjust to life in the countryside.

TS: True. I remember two or three years ago the World Food Program were literally teaching refugees from Baku which end of the potato to put in the ground. That’s one of the bigger challenges for urban refugees that are now living rurally.

OJK: Do you think that the younger generation is adapting and it’s just a question of age?

TS: Definitely, in every case.

OJK: Is that the same for language?

TS: Yes, sure.

OJK: So many really have become integrated here?

TS: Yes, even some of the older ones who lived in Baku up until their late teens. However, I know a guy who’s 21 or 22 and he’s from Baku. He left when he was four or five and when I was sitting in the Artbridge Cafe one day with a visitor from Norway who was evaluating our shelter project, Sasha came in. I asked Catherine if she would she like to talk to a refugee who has an apartment in Yerevan and hasn’t been helped by us so that she could compare that with those refugees we build houses for in the regions.

He sat down and told her that his father was one of the best tailors in Baku. Sasha’s very proud and is used to fighting this label of being a refugee. Then, Catherine happened to mention that she had just come from Baku and he asked whether she had been down to the docks. We started to speak about the center of Baku, the fish market and the restaurant on the docks and you could see that he was melting in a way.

He can’t remember much, but from his parents, I guess, or some vague memories of Baku, he still got very emotional about it even though he’s 21 or 22 years old.

OJK: I remember making a journey to Karabagh and spoke to two teenagers who were refugees. They said that they didn’t like it in Armenia and that they also didn’t like it in Karabagh but they did remember how beautiful Baku was. However, they also understood that they were never going back.

TS: It’s an intellectual memory. It’s too vague for them to remember and just something warm and fuzzy in a way. There was another young refugee guy from Baku and I asked him if he would fight for Karabagh if there was another conflict. He said yes, but only for his brothers from Baku. He would fight for his fellow refugees because they were the ones that had sacrificed everything. For Armenia, however, he said he would never fight, which is strange but he was very adamant on that. I really chewed on that. What is that mentality?

OJK: How many houses have you built?

TS: Since 1995, about 650.

OJK: And what is the average size of a family? Can you put a number on how many people that is?

TS: I can dig out the statistics [TS Note: approximately 3,000].

OJK: I mean a family would be quite large, at least four people.

TS: No, if you think that sixty percent of the refugees are women and that many are older, I’d say that the average size of the family in the case of the 66 houses in Silikyan, for example, is three to four.

OJK: The interesting thing about Silikyan is that these are mainly the families of men that died in Shahumian.

TS: These people lost a lot more brothers and fathers than those who were expelled from Baku. The refugees from Shahumian had a really tough time, walking for days and days through minefields and getting shot at.

 

Ethnic Armenian refugee child in Ptghavan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2004

OJK: I first visited those refugees in 1994 and then went back in 1999 to see how the situation was. In five years, nothing had changed. I’m glad that finally, someone got round to doing something.

TS: The refugees from Shahumian really have it together and are not very fond of people from Baku and other places. Almost everyone in those containers is from Shahumian. In Silikyan, we took sixteen families out of public facilities in Yerevan and also built houses for them. However, we didn’t realize that there were going to be some integration problems between this ragtag group of people from other places and this large chunk of refugees from Shahumian.

When a journalist spoke to them the other day, there was an old woman who is getting a house from us and when she was asked if she thought there would be a problem living next to these people from Yerevan and Baku she said no, no, no, there won’t be any problem at all. We just won’t talk to them. Then she gave me a pair of socks that she had knitted herself [laughs].

OJK: Have you ever considered trying to implement a program to resolve any problems with integration?

TS: Because the refugees living in Silikyan have expressed the desire for a kindergarten we’re working with Mission Armenia to build a kindergarten/community center where everybody can be included. However, I want town meetings and for everyone to work and fight for this so that they can feel responsible for it. Even so, we had penciled in a building on our general plan to be used for this from day one and we also want a playground as well.

OJK: You’re working with IDPs as well.

TS: We have the IDP survey which will be completed by the end of April. How many IDPs are there in Armenia? The official government number is 72,000 but what we’re working with is significantly less than half of that. This isn’t necessarily anything the government’s done wrong, it’s just old information. Many of those displaced from the border have gone back spontaneously so now they’re not IDPs, they’re returnees.

In this context, you have four categories. You have IDPs who have left and never went back, IDPs that have integrated into wherever they are now, the returnees who had their houses bombed and have been away for a few years but have since moved back to live in the ruins of their house or with relatives, and then you have the “never leftees” as I call them, who got bombed but didn’t leave.

I know one eighty year old woman who lives in the basement of her house, which is totally destroyed, since the day it got bombed. All of her sons have said screw this and left, but she has said that she’s going to stay there because she wants to die in the basement of her own house. And it’s a pretty grubby place, poor lady.

OJK: It’s worth mentioning that what you’re talking about is the border regions in Tavoush, in particular.

TS: Tavoush is the most damaged, I would say.

OJK: There is also a strategic importance to rehabilitate the border regions with Azerbaijan and we certainly know that there are problems with the infrastructure. In the autumn I made the journey from Ijevan through Shamsadin to the Azeri border and the roads were absolutely terrible.

TS: When we visit the villages they say the main problems are drinking water and irrigation. There are also problems with no man’s land, the trenches and Azeri control of traditional farming land and orchards. Villagers lost about 70-80% of their orchards to barbed wire and mines during the conflict so it’s a real challenge.

We have about eleven villages on a list and we’re talking to the community action groups that World Vision set up saying that we can do a little bit of infrastructure work, probably drinking water, but mainly we’ll be concerned with houses because it’s a shelter project. But then, who gets priority? Almost everyone agrees that it should be those families that have suffered the most damage and particularly those that lost family members during the conflict.

OJK: Have you done anything, or are you interested in doing anything, in Chambarak?

TS: We did schools in the old days.

OJK: It’s still terrible there and they also lost many people during the fighting.

TS: NRC in Azerbaijan is going to be working right across the border from Chambarak so maybe next year we can see if we can go in there as well but we don’t know. The most damage to Armenian houses is in villages on the border in Tavoush.

OJK: Yet it’s strange looking at the map. There are these small enclaves…

TS: Oh yes, Artsvashen, these are the only IDPs — 4,400 families as far as I can remember — that can not physically return to their own homes in the whole of Armenia. Then there are a couple of Azeri enclaves down south in Vayots Dzor but Armenia doesn’t like to talk about that but what the heck, I’m sure Azerbaijan doesn’t like to talk about the Armenian enclaves either.

Anyway, they can’t go home to their villages. Everybody else, more or less, can go home. They’ll be a house here or a house there in no man’s land but we want to find communities that believe in their village and that have the possibility for economic sustainability, who want to live there and already have an identity there. We really want those communities to grow. We’re planning to build about 100 houses in total and that’s what my staff has been doing for the past three days. They’ve been away trying to identify a couple of communities. Personally, I like Nerkin-Karmiraghbyur which is the most damaged village from the war. Villages like Aygepar, however, are what I call dying villages.

There used to be a tobacco and wine factory in Aygepar and so they built a village around it. Now, the factories are all shot up and bombed up and there’s no farming land. If we go in and build houses what are those people going to live off? Nostalgia? It’s a tough decision but we need to make some very tough choices. Probably, we should work in a village that has a chance of survival. If you ask people up there, however, most of them will say help the dying villages because they’re really in trouble. However, I’m saying that they’re dying for a reason.

OJK: That’s something that somebody should tell the Armenian Government. This is a strategic area, there’s a military base and if it was chosen for a tobacco factory in the soviet era, why not grant it some special economic status to encourage investment in the same areas today?

TS: It can still be quite easily shot at and this weighs in heavily on any economic considerations.

OJK: Talking about sustainability, you recently displayed some cushion covers made by refugees in the Artbridge cafe and the Hotel Armenia. How did that go?

TS: We sold sixty pillows in all and we’ve already started a new series of items with the Armenian alphabet on. Those have turned out to be very popular and we’ve sold twenty or thirty of them already. We haven’t even exhibited them yet so it’s all word of mouth and now we’re expanding into bedspreads. There’s a lot of interest in those and we don’t even have a prototype.

What’s also happening is that a couple of friends of mine are opening a gift shop on Amirian Street where all of these items can be sold. All of this is just ten women in Silikyan who are knitting everything and we’re going to be making cards with the Armenian alphabet on with some other women as well as picture frames, candlesticks and small furniture.

Someone in the United States has his own designs and he’s now talking about doing it here. John Hughes put me in touch with this guy who was looking for Armenian knitters in Los Angeles and so I wrote him a letter saying, look, they’re not in Los Angeles but they’re Armenian. Our big problem is yarn. Most of the yarn comes from Turkey which is politically whatever, but what’s available in Yerevan mainly comes from there. Yet, at the same time, we have a huge tel factory in Gyumri.

Tel in Armenian means both thread and yarn so I got all excited and thought we could buy yarn for our knitting project to make everything 100% Armenian but it turned out that it was a thread and not a yarn factory. But then, by coincidence, some Diasporans were in town and they said that they knew somebody in the states who wants to invest in Armenia. My response was that there are hundreds of factories around and that everybody should understand that Armenian women are knitting with yarn imported from Turkey.

That should be enough political motivation for the Diaspora to open up a factory in Armenia. I don’t know what will happen but that’s what I try to do — put people in touch with each other.

OJK: Have these women formed an NGO yet?

TS: No they haven’t. They need more confidence and they need to believe that they can do it. I don’t want to go in and tell them to set up an NGO because they have to decide that for themselves and they’re not there yet. It’s going to take some time for them to get comfortable.

OJK: These kinds of ideas have been popular in many countries where there’s been the need to provide sustainable incomes for vulnerable sections of the community. Yet, it hasn’t really taken off in Armenia or if it has, it’s very small scale. However, there’s a huge Diaspora out there that could really make a positive contribution to sustaining communities and promote Armenian culture as well. What do you think is needed?

TS: Diasporans with guts who really believe that they can make a difference but that doesn’t mean throwing money at something. Spending time is the biggest problem, a little like raising kids. You can throw all the money you want at your kids and they can still turn out bad. The most important thing is to spend time with them instead and it’s the same with Armenia.

If the Diaspora really wants to make a difference then they have to get off their couches. Yes, they have to also bring their money and be prepared to live here but they should not get upset and dismayed at the way things are done in transitional countries. Yes, there is corruption and yes, nearly everything is done differently than we’re used to, but if you decide that this is want you want to do, you can address those problems when they come up.

Instead of thinking that this is not going to work or expecting that unless everything works on my terms I’m going to pack up and go home, you have to be flexible, you have to be optimistic and you have to work hard. One thing I don’t agree with, however, is when people say that you also have to be prepared to expect a lower profit. That one I don’t buy. If you’re smart, you can make just as much profit on a product made in Armenia as one made in Guatemala.

It’s funny you should mention other developing nations, however, because they think that cooperatives are the most natural thing in the world. In Guatemala, Mexico and all over the place in Latin America, they exist but it’s not a tradition here. People don’t want to work together unless it’s me, my friends and family.

OJK: Yet, the soviet system was all about things such as collective farms.

TS: And that’s probably why they’re allergic to it. Cooperation held them back. They weren’t allowed to expand, to be creative or to stick their heads up. One thing about not taking responsibility is that you can avoid making decisions which is part of the soviet inheritance that needs to be changed in this new generation.

OJK: Talking about friction between refugees and non-refugees and then talking about the Diaspora-Armenia relationship, there also seems to be a significant amount of friction between some Diasporans and locals. In many cases, the two don’t seem to understand each other and intransigence exists on both sides. For example, when you talk about making a profit, there’s also the tendency for some, but not all, Diasporans to come to Armenia only because they can use their connections to set up a business that pays its workers very little, say the average salary of $50 a month, and make a killing. That isn’t right, either.

TS: No, it isn’t but I don’t know, it depends on the quality of the work and many other things. If someone comes and creates 500 jobs at $50 a month that’s going to make a lot of people happy in this country. If someone comes and pays $20 a month then they’ll start having problems. $50 a month is a survival salary.

OJK: Not in Yerevan.

TS: Not in Yerevan, if you’re out in the villages, but it becomes a question of the quality or number of the jobs created, that’s the issue. I wouldn’t be as adamant in saying that it’s as unacceptable as you are.

 

Ethnic Armenian refugee refugee from Azerbaijan in the Tavoush region, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2003

OJK: But what about some form of profit share so that a start-up business can avoid large overheads in terms of salaries in order to get started but if its does well, that’s reflected in top-ups to a basic salary. That would also encourage better workmanship.

TS: And I agree with you but I don’t think that that’s going to happen anytime soon. Incidentally, I know a guy who wants to start up an IT center in Armenia but wants to hire only women. Even though everybody knows that women are better students than men, they’re coming out of the universities and getting the IT jobs last. Anyway, this guy isn’t thinking along these lines because he believes in women’s rights but because he understands that he’d be getting the best employees. As a result, he’s going to pay them $150-200 a month because that’s what they’re worth. Promoting women’s rights is fine but that’s not why he’s doing it, he’s doing it because they’re good.

Now that’s what I believe in and that’s the way it should be done in my opinion. Yes, I also look forward to the day when nobody will take that job for $50 a month because they can take another that pays $75-150 and I have to admit that we’ve already discussed this regarding the shop on Amirian Street. However, that’s because we’re from the west. I still wouldn’t say that it’s unacceptable to pay $50 a month. It’s not a huge salary but if the working conditions are decent…

I mean, there are many people on zero dollars a month in this country and I’m surprised at the number of 12-hour shifts being worked. I’m a lot more upset with a cafe owner who doesn’t pay his waitresses a proper salary, for example, and expects them to live off their tips instead. That’s a lot worse than offering $50 a month. It’s not a perfect situation but we’ve got to start somewhere. We can’t just come in and install the Norwegian social justice system overnight.

OJK: You’ve just mentioned people living on very little here and as we all know, there’s now a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Are refugees included in that and have you had some involvement in the preparation of the PRSP?

TS: Yes, and again, jointly with UNHCR. They lead the charge on that and there are a significant number of pages on refugees. The result is the meeting I had today with the Minister of Urban Development, the head of the World Bank and other international organizations. The need to have a national housing strategy for vulnerable families in Armenia has already been identified and has been in the works for a while.

In the beginning, they wanted to implement a refugee program but both UNHCR and the NRC said that we couldn’t isolate the refugees from other vulnerable groups in Armenia because there are locals who are living just as badly. The result is that 13,150 families have been identified by the government as being particularly vulnerable.

We’re going to start working on the terms of reference and concept papers. The World Bank, UNHCR and UNDP are interested and so are we. This is the result of the PRSP identifying the need for socially vulnerable groups to be mapped out and the problem addressed. It’s all of these big fluffy things and fancy reports that are now turning into something concrete.

About $5.6 million of Government money funneled through the Department of Migration and Refugees will be spent on refugee and vulnerable group housing issues by the end of 2006 so it’s starting to move.

OJK: Are refugees considered one of the most vulnerable groups in Armenia?

TS: Yes, and if I can give my spiel. After four years working in Armenia I can say that there are two big problems that need to be addressed. I mentioned earlier that the neat little pockets of refugees in containers are drying up because we’re addressing those. The big issue for the future is the urban collective centers and what to do with them. We’ve been doing a great job in what we’re doing but have taken the easy route by not addressing that need.

OJK: Wasn’t that… isn’t that part of UNHCR’s remit?

TS: Yes, it is part of UNHCR’s work but their capacity alone isn’t enough to address the problem.

OJK: So are you saying that the lion’s share of refugees are living in urban collective centers?

TS: No. The lion’s share of refugees in dire need of housing — the most vulnerable — are living in urban centers.

OJK: That’s not just Yerevan, that’s also Goris…

TS: Yes, and Ararat, Artashat as well as other places and I had a meeting today with UNHCR to try to look at a new model. The twelve square meter rooms in these collective centers are not sustainable. Even if you give them a new toilet down the hall or a shiny new roof it’s not enough. We have to get them out of these buildings and into normal apartments.

That’s what UNHCR has been doing but more still needs to be done. UNHCR has been using half-finished buildings given by the government or whoever but those are drying up as a resource. As a result, for the first time today we examined the possibility of constructing new apartment buildings instead. However, we need to look at the cost efficiency first.

Then, the other burning question is the elderly refugees. What do we do about them?

In every one of our projects we have a little old lady who isn’t able to get out of bed anymore. My own headquarters has said that I may not work on this issue because, from a point of view that I don’t quite buy, they’re saying that this should be taken care of by the government. However, I’d be happy to help find a donor for a local NGO. Mission Armenia, for example, is trying to find funding to work on this issue.

OJK: It’s worth pointing out for those that don’t already know, Mission Armenia is a local NGO that has a very good reputation and is already working with elderly refugees.

TS: They have a very good reputation and they also have a home visit program which is excellent but I’m talking about those groups that are so bad that they can’t get out of bed. They need to be moved to an assisted living situation where they have a room of their own as well as a bathroom and even a place to cook if they’re able to use it. They need a little bell to ring if they require assistance getting out of bed or getting to the toilet, their medicines or whatever.

In Banavan, we have a little old lady who just stays in bed and the refugee kids in this filthy collective center go out to buy her vegetables. We’ve had huge discussions about taking that woman and putting her in an assisted-living environment in Yerevan until she dies but it’s taking her out of her social environment.

What’s the best solution for her? To die in a mess that is at least the social environment she knows or to put her in an assisted living situation in Yerevan that is clean?

OK: When you speak about an assisted-living environment, what you’re actually describing is an old age pensioner’s home?

TS: It’s an old age home to use the rude term but I think that what I liked about Mission Armenia’s model was that there would be a community center on the first floor for the whole neighborhood. These elderly refugees could be brought down to the first floor to eat and to also interact with other people. There needs to be a network around these people.

This is what I would like to find a donor for, and if a Diasporan wants to help with that it would be great. I just want this issue addressed and would gladly plug them straight into Mission Armenia. They even have a building and the money for the community center. When they designed their building up in Zeytoun they built the foundations so that they can build four more floors if a donor comes along. Mission Armenia is doing a fantastic job.

OK: What are living conditions like for refugees in general? I’m sure that there are quite a few refugees with sons working in Russia and there’s this idea that families with relatives overseas are actually living very good lives and not deserving of any assistance. They’re scrounging, basically, and living above the poverty line.

TS: That’s not anything I would support. There’s no question that many refugees as well as locals have relatives in Russia but our experience is that they don’t get the money that everybody thinks they do. Besides, even if they do receive money from abroad, it’s only $10-15 a month.

There’s a sign on Sayat-Nova for a bank saying that they charge a minimum amount for receiving transfers from abroad so there’s no question that money is coming in but how much it actually is and how it’s shared around? Anyway, I’ve heard quite a few stories about husbands who have left for Russia and just dumped their wives and families in Armenia.

OK: This is another one of the most vulnerable groups identified in the PRSP, single-parent households.

TS: Well, in the World Food Program survey held a few years ago, there were four groups of vulnerable persons. One was handicapped people, another was refugees, then single female-headed households and the fourth was those families with chronically ill members. Then you say, refugees are included as one category but in fact, we can also say that they are generally single-parent households and so on.

There was Ivan, a refugee with chronically untreated diabetes who was about to die until we got him help and then we had a woman who lost her baby because she ate badly during her pregnancy. She lived in a container which is cold in the winter and hot in the summer and didn’t have any money. She had the baby delivered at home and it died on the first day.

Then you have the local family that was renting a container just ten meters up the street from this refugee and they lost their baby at sixty days. And then you have the house across the street where a 10 year old boy, Ararat, died of chronic lung disease after his family received a house from us. They had four children and he died because he was born and raised in a container.

This is twenty square meters we’re talking about — this house, this house and this house.

It’s tough. The miracle of 14% economic growth last year in Armenia, that’s a Yerevan thing and actually, only certain groups in Yerevan. Yes, there’s now a lot of Mercedes on the streets and yes, I now have to sit in my car waiting at two red lights instead of one and that’s great, but this economic growth is not reaching our target group.

But then, on the other hand, you have to turn that around. Every once in a while we stumble across a refugee who’s made a good life for themselves. Up in Bagratashen, for example, we built fourteen houses and the electricity and water being supplied to the contractor was coming from an adjacent house. I asked the contractor if he had entered into an agreement with the owner but he said the water and electricity was being donated because the owner was also a refugee.

And it’s a beautiful house with climbing rose bushes and he’s one of those rare examples of a refugee who made a life for himself. He buys and sells this or that at the market in Sadakhlo and he’s made good. You’d never know he was a refugee by looking at him.

 

Ethnic Armenian refugee child in Silikyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2004

OJK: Talking of Sadakhlo, there were recently two articles published by Hetq Online and Armenia Now about a refugee in Bagratashen working as a prostitute across the border [in the market situated in an Azeri village in Georgia].

TS: The other end of the scale. In my four years in Armenia I have stumbled over three families that belong in a special category and we built houses for two of them but not the third because we didn’t work in that particular village. They were living in absolutely inhuman conditions and the story about Lida up at the border with her four kids that you refer to is one of them.

This is a woman who’s about 42 years old and she has four kids although she offered to sell her youngest for 10,000 dram. She received a house from NRC and when MSF Belgium went to follow up with this family, the pipe on their stove broke but they didn’t care, they just lit a fire. It’s a pig sty, an absolute pig sty.

We’ve had articles written, friends have gone to visit her and everyone has been shocked. I’ve been yelled at by someone I considered a good friend — how dare I build a house and just leave them, why didn’t I put a toilet in the house even though Bagratashen has no sewage system etc, but in this case, the refugees are responsible for building their own outhouse. It’s the least we can expect, in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s a woman, the Mayor of the town says he hates her and has no plans to ever help her, he considers her a bad woman and yes, she herself says that she is now so used to being yelled at, or scorned and spat at, that it doesn’t make any difference anymore. She doesn’t have the will or even the ability to help herself and she has four kids.

What do you do with those kids? That’s a dilemma I think a lot about and the same is true with the other two families. What is the right of the parents to be with their children and what are the rights of the children to be with their parents as compared to the rights of the child to be raised in a healthy, clean environment?

What’s better for that child? Should they be adopted or should massive support be given to the parents to look after their children and helped to change their life style? This is way outside the scope of our project and my experience and knowledge. MSF Belgium is trying to help them but what do we do?

OJK: What were their conditions like when you saw them in the container they were living in?

TS: It was a very disgusting container. Now it’s a nice little house that’s been turned into a disgusting house but does that mean that we go into Bagratashen and tell them that we’re not going to build anything for them?

In a perfect world we would build a house and provide a massive social support system for Lida and her kids but we don’t have the budget for that. We don’t a program for that so the best we can do is to find other organizations that can step in. We have a Peace Corps worker in Ptghavan who visits the family regularly but I still don’t know what the solution is.

OJK: About a year ago, MSF France took me to some of their beneficiaries living in the Aragatsotn Region and they were living in exactly the same conditions although they weren’t refugees. And the answer is that there’s not much that can be done until that family has jobs or an income and until there is a support system. In this case, however, the kids were temporarily sent to the Vanadzor Children’s Home after spending three months in the FAR Center.

TS: I doubt that in any of these cases that the parents will ever be able to get back on their feet again. They’ve been destroyed and they’ve given up completely. In another example that I know about, one woman keeps getting pregnant and she’s finally agreed to give her children up for adoption because she can’t take care of them. She’s been used like a sponge by every guy in town and as miserable as it sounds, without being paid. They come and rape her, basically, and take her food.

OJK: What do the police do about it?

TS: Nothing. I don’t want to mention the name of the town because I don’t want a hoard of journalists visiting, but I’ve said to the Mayor that something needs to be done and he says that he can’t do anything. He agrees that there’s a problem and tries to protect her but says that some powerful farmers will kick his butt if he attempts to intervene. He takes her sacks of flour in the morning so that she can bake her bread by the evening because the men that come for their night visits take whatever she has. She’s a refugee.

OJK: You don’t think that in this particular case, the NRC or UNHCR should intervene because this is a violation of her rights and probably the law.

TS: What can we do? Take her out of the village?

OJK: Why not go to the Armenian Government? If the Mayor wants to keep his position let him understand that it’s not acceptable for a village to be governed without respect for the law and a person’s rights.

TS: [whispers] But everywhere is like that.

It was a rude awakening for me. I’m not saying that we’re pushing that Mayor as best we can but we are providing help. Her parents are now in an old age home because she can’t take care of them and her youngest child is up for adoption. We’re talking to her and keeping as high a profile as we can as well as lobbying the Mayor but perhaps we’re going to have to tell him that we’re not going to be able to work in his village until he is willing or in a position to say no.

OJK: You don’t think it’s worth sitting down with this woman and suggesting that it’s best that she moves to another village where she can start afresh?

TS: We can’t move the refugees from one place to another. She is mentally incapacitated and this is the only form of acceptance that she has. When somebody comes and has sex with her it’s the only form of recognition in her life.

OJK: So the problem will just start again somewhere else?

TS: I don’t know and it’s the kids that I’m focusing on more than anything else. Her eldest son has refused to leave his mother.

OJK: How old is he?

TS: He’s nine and says that he wants to feed his mother. He’s nine and is taking the whole world on his shoulders. However, there is an organization that will intervene.

OJK: And you also seem to take the world on your shoulders at times. Isn’t there the danger that you get too involved in particular cases? Do you ever get depressed?

TS: You have to get depressed and if you don’t you’ve probably isolated yourself mentally. Of course, like anybody else in a job like mine, you have to keep that balance and identify the point where you can still have empathy but not to the extent that you become ineffective. Sometimes that’s a hard task and you also have to be careful not to go the other way and divorce yourself too much.

It’s always a struggle but it’s an important job that we’re doing. What gets me depressed is that we don’t have the budget, the mandate or the capacity to follow up on Lida in Bagratashen, for example. However, some Norwegian journalists are arriving in a few weeks to do a story about her that will be splashed all over the foreign press. She’s a public figure now but you can’t help everybody.

As for this other woman, I hope that when she gets her house she’ll say, oh, new life, time to turn the page. That’s what I was hoping Lida would do but she didn’t.

OJK: I think the problem is that when people think of helping Armenia, they think that building a road or a house is going to solve everything but it requires a lot more than that. Not necessarily are all the mechanisms in place to follow through to the next stage and that needs to change as well.

TS: And in a way, you can’t not try. It’s always a judgment call but we never considered not building a house for this other woman. We were the ones that put Lida in touch with MSF although I think that they would have found her anyway because she’s a sex worker.

OJK: A refugee is a refugee and their situation is as much an indication of how they’ve been living as whether they’re a bad person or not.

TS: I’ve met someone in Yerevan who maintains very strongly that any Armenian woman that prostitutes herself is genetically defective and I’ve said to him, you’re living in a romantic bubble land.

OJK: So, your remit is to build houses for refugees but unfortunately, there are vulnerable sections of the community that are sometimes forced to do anything in order to survive. Ten years later, it becomes entrenched.

TS: It’s another form of “learned helplessness” and there’s another example. When we went and agreed to supply asphalt to some refugees to build a road, they instead told us that we had to come and do it instead. That’s “learned helplessness.”

OJK: I think it’s worth pointing out that when we talk about these issues, not necessarily are you implying that every refugee woman is a prostitute or that every refugee is lazy. People certainly shouldn’t start stereotyping.

TS: Out of these thousands of refugee families that I’ve spoken to and met since I’ve been here, there’s only been three that we couldn’t help sufficiently. We’ve helped hundreds and hundreds but in these other cases we weren’t particularly successful. I would never say it was a failure, however, and we will definitely keep trying.

We’ve built around 650 houses and very few have been sold so I’d say that we’ve been very successful. This doesn’t mean that our program is perfect and we need to combine our shelter project with job creation activities but that’s outside of our mandate. That frustrates me so what I like to do instead is latch that on to others who can work in these areas.

The Danish Refugee Council, for example, is going to start a small micro-credit program in Armenia specifically targeted at our beneficiaries. That’s a small victory for us.