Stepanakert, Nagorno Karabakh © Onnik James Krikorian 1994
My first website went online in late 1994. Working at The Independent newspaper on Old Street in London at the time, I would meet up with researcher friends at the University College of London (UCL), a few tube stops away, for a beer after work and one night they didn’t want to go to the pub just yet. Instead, they wanted to show me the World Wide Web, something we take for granted today, but at that time was only available to a select few.
I was as excited as they were.
It was clear that this was the future of the media, although most media consultants would dismiss me by saying it was simply a fad and the CD-Rom would see it die an early death would you believe, and so I decided to learn HTML and built my first site. As I had come back from Nagorno Karabakh earlier that year for The Independent, I decided that this would be a good topic to base my first site around. In retrospect, it was probably the first proper website on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.
Back then, little did I know that in 2009-2011 I would inadvertently end up pioneering the use of social media and blogs to bring Armenians and Azerbaijanis together online once Facebook became all the rage in the South Caucasus. NGOs working in the region were eager to use the contacts I made to include them in their own projects, but still failed to harness the potential of the online world properly. They sadly fail to do so even now.
But fast forward to today and we now pretty much take the web for granted, and even if web pages, including those of many media outlets, now largely play second fiddle to social media platforms and mobile phone apps. Yet, what must be something like the fifth manifestation of my original web site, although two of those were purely blog-based, seems worth spending time on.
However, having been reported on the South Caucasus for over 20 years now, it’s going to take a long time to migrate everything over. Basically, this is still very much a work in progress.
Kapan Psychiatric Dispensary, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2004
In the meantime, some content is up. From photographs from Nagorno Karabakh in 1994 to attempts to populate the strategic town of Lachin between Armenia and the disputed territory situated within Azerbaijan, and Landmine and UXO clearance in and around the contested space, there are also archive materials covering poverty, psychiatric institutions and residential children’s homes in Armenia as well as of attempts to reintegrate the latter in neighbouring Georgia.
There’s still plenty to upload, of course. For example, this 2002 interview with Thomas de Waal even before Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War was published, and dozens more articles from 2000-2003 than can for now be found in a book of my work as well as one I wrote and photographed for UNICEF in Armenia in 2005. Later work is mainly available online on various publications, but I’ll somehow include them too once I get an articles and analysis section up.
There have been a few lulls in my journalistic activity, however. The whole of 2008 was particularly hectic given the bitterly disputed presidential election in Armenia that ended with 10 people dead and a state of emergency declared. After having extensively covered the 2003 presidential election, I had anyway predicted that 2008 vote would end in bloodshed so that was the year that fatigue began to set in, especially as the year ended with the August 2008 Russia-Georgia War.
Russian Military Roadblock on the road to Gori, Georgia
© Onnik James Krikorian 2008
I especially wrote less from 2013 until 2017 because, apart from blogging, I was mainly fixing for the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera English, Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic, while also training journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia as well as the breakaway regions of Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, and South Ossetia for the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM), Deutsche Welle, and Free Press Unlimed (FPU). I also organised the largest gathering of journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia for France’s Canal France International in Tbilisi in 2013.
Following that, from 2013 onwards, much of my time was spent as a member of expert working groups and panels on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), United Nations Security Council Counterterrorism Committee (UNCTED), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNOCD), Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), Hedayah, and the International Center for Counterterrorism (ICCT)-The Hague.
In fact, from the end of 2016 to the end of 2018, nearly all my time was spent working multiple contracts with the OSCE’s Transnational Threat Department/Action against Terrorism (TNTD/ATU) for their Leaders against Intolerance and Violent Extremism (LIVE) project. In 2018 alone, I made eight trips to Kosovo alone along with frequent work trips to Vienna, Warsaw, and The Hague.
That’s not to say I was idle with journalism and photojournalism, of course, but more that the topic changed. I especially wrote on the problem of radicalisation in the South Caucasus – from the counterterrorism operation against ISIS operatives seeking refuge in Tbilisi to the growing problem of far-right and neo-Nazi radicalisation in Georgia.
There were also plenty of photo stories shot for the likes of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, video reports for BBC Azerbaijan, and articles for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, including continuing work on ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani coexistence in Georgia, especially in co-inhabited villages, as well as the rich musical diversity of the South Caucasus. Most recently, I also started a series of podcasts recorded during and after the 2020 Karabakh War.
And once the COVID-19 pandemic finally ends, I might even get round to finishing off yet another personal project – a documentary film on the underground metal and punk music scene in Tbilisi. So, until then, I’ll attempt to add more old content to this new website while also hoping to start writing new articles as well as shoot even more photo stories and video reports. There’s also one project that I’ve been working on since the end of last November, but for now it has to remain under wraps.
Just to say, however, that it’s coming…
