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War & peace

14 March 2023

7 min read

Diary of an invisible war

As her journalism career started, Lika Zarkaryan’s home town was invaded. She kept a diary as she reported and recalls the experience of an invisible war.

Lika Zakaryan

Lika Zakaryan is a writer and photographer based in the Republic of Artsakh (Karabakh).

The We Are Our Mountains monument, a war memorial in Stepanakert, the capital of the Republic of Artsakh,

Photo: Marcin Konsek, Wikimedia Commons.

Once upon a time in a faraway corner of the world, there was a little republic. It was mountainous and beautiful, located in the South Caucasus. Here was the ancient Amaras monastery, where the creator of the Armenian Alphabet Mesrop Mashtots founded the first-ever school that used his script - the Armenian Letters, in the 4th century. Many other Armenian Christian monasteries and churches from the 4th, 8th, 13th and different centuries are located in this area.

This is a magical place - the Republic of Artsakh, although you may have heard it called Karabakh. Depending on who you ask that means Black Garden or a Beautiful Garden.

Stalin’s legacy

Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but for me, it is HOME. The conflict over Karabakh dates back to the early days of the Soviet Union when the boundaries of a new empire were being drawn. It was Joseph Stalin’s idea to award the territory of Karabakh, inhabited by Armenians for centuries, to Soviet Azerbaijan, which produced 60% of the oil of the USSR. But Karabakh would remain semi-autonomous and Armenians actually remained a firm majority there even though ethnic crimes increased over the next decades.

In February 1988 mobs of Azerbaijanis in the seaside town of Sumgait began to attack and kill Armenians in the town. That is when Armenians in Karabakh and in Armenia rose after protests

and in 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the people of Karabakh voted to regain independence, just like Armenia, Azerbaijan and other Soviet countries. Of course, Azerbaijan didn’t like that. That is how the first war started. In the early 1990s, Armenians from all over the world came to Artsakh to fight in an intense ground war. When a ceasefire was brokered in 1994 Armenians were in control of Artsakh and several surrounding regions. So the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, co-chaired by Russia, France, and the United States, was charged with organizing the peace process. But negotiations failed and Artsakh was never recognized. Azerbaijan continued to dream of revenge.

A peaceful capital

This area is not so rich in natural resources, but it seems like heaven on earth. Clean mountain air, green and dense forests, pristine water from the mountains, and kind, smiling people. Here, for example, in public transport, you will never be afraid that someone might steal something from your bag. Such things do not happen in Artsakh. Children can play quietly for hours in the yard, and parents don't even think that someone can harm them. While walking in the capital city - Stepanakert, it is impossible to see any garbage on the street, people keep the environment very clean. People do not usually take their parents to the care home, but take care of them themselves and enjoy the presence of their parents until the last day. Everyone cares about each other and just wants to live peacefully in their homes. I was born in Stepanakert and grew up in just such an environment.

The first day

On September 27, 2020, we woke up in the morning to the sounds of an explosion. At first, I thought it was just a nightmare. But then, when I saw my little sister trembling with fear, I realized that it was real, and the war had begun. Azerbaijan attacked Artsakh and used various prohibited weapons, targeting ordinary people like me. My family and everyone went down to the basements, the first floors of our houses, or wherever we could hide. However, we were aware that we would not be saved in case of a direct hit, of course.

I was working as a journalist in an Armenian media outlet Civilnet at that time and could not sit idly by. My cameraman and I went out into the streets together to see what evidence we could film. I started my work as a journalist only two months before the war and it would be a lie to say that I was the most experienced one. However, at that moment there was no more time, it was necessary to get together and do what you can. Our colleagues from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, joined us and together we began to tell stories about the war. I turned from a novice journalist into a war correspondent.

The diary of war

All my family was in this war: my mother worked in the hospital and I saw her only several times during those 44 days of the war; my brother was called to the frontline on the first day and was in the war till the end; my father, a veteran and a disabled person from the First Artsakh War, helped transport military equipment. For us it wasn’t like ‘going to war’, for us it was ‘protecting our home’.

I started to write posts - diaries every day and post them online. Here is a paragraph from the first day:

‘I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. No matter how much my parents insisted, I decided to go out into the city and work. I am not a war journalist, of course, but this is not simply a job. These events are happening in my Artsakh. Today, for the first time, I witnessed the traces of explosions, scattered pieces of rockets, wounded people and a drone flying and exploding in the air… I think that’s enough for a day.’

The diaries became quite popular by that time, especially after some days, when my cameraman was also called to the frontline. I couldn’t make video reports myself, and then I started to write and photograph more. I understood that I don’t want to write about politics, but rather about human beings, who suffer, hope, smile, cry, lose, and love.

‘Today my friend Mike from the USA, also a reporter, asked the five-year-old boy Marat what he would do if he had a lot of money. We met the family of Marat in a basement of an old school. He replied, “I would buy a watch and sunglasses.” Mike took his Lacoste glasses out of his bag and gave them to Marat as a gift. “Try them on!” And Marat, not knowing how to put them on, wore them backwards. We all laughed and helped him to do it properly. They were too big for him but he was incredibly happy. We looked at the boy and said, “Marat, you have to be careful, they cost a fortune!” We all had a good laugh…’

Sometimes it was very difficult to stay resilient…

‘Day 15: October 11, 2020

It already feels like Groundhog Day. Stepanakert isn’t being bombed, at least that is how it seems so far since I’m still in the basement. The drones flew and fell, but I did not hear talk of victims. The weather was great today, but it was scary to go outside. Sometimes, it feels like I will never be able to go out into the street. I woke up at midnight and I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night from yesterday’s heavy bombing. We already can distinguish the sounds—when it’s a Smerch, when it’s a drone, when it’s cluster bombs, and when it’s us hitting their drone. It is sad that we can distinguish these sounds. But what can we do? This is our reality for today.’

During the war, I and my diaries experienced a lot. I heard that the hospital where my mother works was bombed. I headed there and found her, thanks to God, safe and sound. I saw a man repairing his garage as cluster bombs were falling; a woman making tea between an intermission of the bombs; the targeting against the civilian population; a human rights defender who could not see asking the world not to be blind; soldiers being baptised in the middle of the war; a man dying in a hospital; houses without faces; closets abandoned; toys left behind; mothers who lost the meaning of the lives - their sons…

The war was over with our loss… We didn’t win, although we thought we will… Azerbaijan conquered nearly 70% of Artsakh. Thousands of people lost their lives, and thousands lost their homes and became displaced persons. The war continued for 44 days and 150 000 Armenians of Artsakh and millions of Armenians in Armenia and Diaspora will never forget those bloody days.

Writing the diaries for me was a way to express myself, as sometimes it seemed that I could go insane. I also felt that by doing that I am useful to others. And that is a very important factor for me. I, like everyone else, wanted to be useful. Mostly the women and children left for Armenia, to a safer place, than Artsakh. They went there to wait until the war is over, and later they came back home. I felt that people who are outside couldn’t really know what happens there. That is why I wanted to give them information first-hand.

During the war, I met many wonderful people. I also met a director, Garin Hovannisian, who came to Artsakh from Armenia to film the war and my diaries. After the war, he supported me in publishing the diaries as a book: 44 days: Diary From an Invisible War. Together we made a documentary on the Artsakh war - Invisible Republic, which is now, after taking part in film festivals, available for watching.

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Migration

13 November 2024

5 min read

Travelling in a world of refugees

Reconciling the contrasting journeys of travellers and the migrant.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Migrants on a freight train reach for food bags held aloft by people on the track side.

Migrants on La Bestia being passed bags of food and water.

Pequeño Mar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll never forget the sight, 10 years ago this month, as I hitchhiked north through Mexico, of dozens of migrants hanging off the side of a goods train as they made their own journeys towards their Promised Land.

Like me, these migrants - of whom there must have been at least 30 - were heading for the United States. Unlike me, they were doing so not for fun but for their futures.

“Come with us!” some shouted, as my wife and I lugged our backpacks towards what we hoped would be our next successful hitchhiking post, having begun our journey seven months prior at the southern tip of Argentina.

We declined the offer, but I wondered then - and still do - whether they had known we were in a different position to them, or had simply assumed us to be in the same metaphorical boat.

Around the same time, a new wave of refugees were making their way westward across Turkey and Europe, in a reversal of my first hitchhiking adventure, which took me eastward from the UK to Malaysia. And again, I found the contrast between the respective circumstances of our two journeys confronting.

There I had been, a post-university thrill-seeker, taking to the road with my best mate to open my eyes to the big wide world beyond these shores, and now six years later, these poor souls were moving in the opposite direction - again, not for fun, but through sheer desperation.

Many were fleeing ISIS, who took control of Mosul while I was hitchhiking through Brazil at the time of the 2014 Football World Cup. My chief concern during those days were the occasions hitchhiking proved less straightforward. On some days, we had to wait hours for a ride. Sometimes, night would set in as we waited, and we were forced to call it a day.

There were times, too, when we fell foul of the law, such as in the States, where a policeman told us off for hitchhiking on the freeway. But undoubtedly the most challenging moment of that trip was the time we ended up back in the same hotel we had been in two days prior, having done a 1,000km round trip only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This came about in Prince George, Canada, after we had been encouraged by a trucker on the so-called “Highway of Tears” to take a different route to our final destination: Alaska. I can still remember the feeling, as I woke up early the next morning, in the very same room of the very same hotel, of such a lot of effort wasted and a deep desire to get moving again as swiftly as possible, if only to enjoy a sense of progress.

No doubt, there have been many refugees who have experienced the same emotions - only, one imagines, with much greater intensity. Perhaps they have been deported back to where they began their journey, or simply sent back to the last country from which they arrived, in the process undoing in their minds and hearts all of the efforts that went in to getting them there.

No doubt, many of these refugees will also have fallen foul of the authorities. Some, will have been detained; others deported. Perhaps some will also have been told off for walking on a highway, or illegally crossing a border, as I myself tried to do between Bangladesh and Myanmar back in 2008 - only to be picked up by a border patrol and taken back to where I’d started again.

Yet, unlike me, I doubt many refugees were offered helping hands by strangers along their way, or at least not so frequently, and I expect many more of them experienced harsh words from passersby than the few jokey thumbs-downs or shouts of “gringos!” that I received on my own journeys.

And while I, with my Great British passport, was able finally to arrive at my goals and to feel the joy of that completion, many refugees will not have been so fortunate. And while I was able eventually to return home and continue my life - in whatever way I saw fit - for many refugees, their own journeys will still be ongoing, and there will still be a lack of clarity regarding what the future may hold.

I always used to say, standing beside the side of the road, that if only we knew how long it would be until the next ride, we needn’t worry. If someone could tell us that in four hours we’d be picked up, or that although we wouldn’t get another ride that day, that on the very next we’d be adopted by a lovely family who would end up taking us with them for 10 days (as happened in northern Argentina), then all our worries would melt away.

I felt the same way during the years in which my wife and I struggled to conceive, post-adventure. Were someone to have told us then that in a few years, we’d have three beautiful boys, we need never have suffered such heartache.

So too for refugees: if only someone was able to tell them when, where and how their journeys would end, they would be able to come to terms with what lay ahead, and to stop feeling so anxious about the many unknowns.

But of course that’s not how life works - whether you’re lucky enough to have been born with a British passport that enables you to see all the world has to offer without a second thought, or whether you’ve had the misfortune of being born in a country within which you find yourself unable to remain.

I have long wrestled with the question of whether my travels were simply a selfish waste of time. Not that they didn’t bring me great joy and truly opened my eyes to the big wide world - they most surely did - but whether I might instead have used that time in some nobler endeavour.

I find encouragement today in knowing that my love of people of different countries - and especially Iran - was birthed during those travels, and that I probably would not be doing the job I am now, had it not been for those experiences. But it doesn’t make it any easier to reconcile the contrasting journeys of travellers and refugees, which although they may share many parallels, also exhibit some stark differences.