After covering last year’s One Caucasus Festival for Meydan TV there was no way I was going to miss this year’s. That was just as well as there was definitely more international media interest in the event that brings Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians together in a small, somewhat isolated village located about two hours away from Tbilisi.
One of the standout bands at this year’s One Caucasus Festival in Georgia was undoubtedly the Baku-based Les Gardiens du Silence, a collective playing improvised world and spiritual music. They had also performed in Tbilisi a week earlier, and did so again soon after the festival, but it was their performances around a campfire at One Caucasus that was the most enjoyable.
Stratfor has published my text and photographs on the One Caucasus Festival held in the village of Tserakvi in Georgia. It’s aim is to bring together young Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian musicians and other artists to work together to build a common image of a united and peaceful region.
No sooner than I’m back from Yerevan, where I presented my work on alternative and counter narratives in the context of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) in general, than yet another exchange of fire has left innocent civilians dead on the Line of Contact (LoC) separating Karabakh forces, which include a significant number of conscripts from Armenia, and the Azerbaijani military.
Having moved from the UK to Armenia in 1998 to work for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) it was only natural that I started to take an interest in an alternative music scene that, while not really existing, was emerging at the time. From 2001 onwards the situation started to change, and bands such as Gyumri’s The Bambir really grabbed my attention. By the mid-2000s other bands started to emerge and those that had been dormant during the electricity shortages of the 1990s began to re-surface.
With peace still looking elusive, and all signs pointing to the possibility of renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, Stratfor recently published my photo story on ethnic Armenian-Azeri coexistence in Georgia.
Ethnic Armenians in Tsopi, Georgia, one of a few villages co-inhabited with ethnic Azerbaijanis @ Onnik James Krikorian First published by Stratfor. as part of my work on ethnic Armenian-Azerbaijani coexistence in Georgia also published by the BBC and Radio Free...
I won’t pretend to be a Eurovision fan as it’s really not my thing. Until I moved to the South Caucasus from the U.K. I never ever watched it and actually thought it something best avoided. True, standards in the international music competition have increased considerably since Eastern Europe and other former Soviet republics have participated, and the often acerbic commentary on on Twitter can be fun, but in the few years that really hasn’t been enough.
After putting together a short report on reWoven, a sustainable development project to revive and support the tradition of hand weaving carpets among Georgia’s largest ethnic minority, a year ago for BBC Azeri, I returned last week to do another report, but this time in English for Meydan TV.