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IWPR: History Lessons In Armenia And Azerbaijan

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  • IWPR: History Lessons In Armenia And Azerbaijan

    HISTORY LESSONS IN ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN
    By Hayhuki Barseghyan, Shahla Sultanova

    Institute for War and Peace Reporting
    http://iwpr.net/report-news/history-lessons-armenia-and-azerbaijan
    CRS Issue 631
    Feb 27 2012
    UK

    In each country, school textbooks teach one version of history that
    sustains animosity towards the other.

    Schoolchildren in Armenia and Azerbaijan are too young to remember
    the Nagorny Karabakh conflict which created so much hostility between
    their countries. But their school textbooks feed them an unbalanced
    view of history that some experts believe will only harden attitudes
    for the future.

    For decades, when both the republics were part of a single Soviet
    state, many Armenians lived in Azerbaijan - predominantly in Nagorny
    Karabakh - while large numbers of Azerbaijanis lived in Armenia.

    In the late 1980s, Armenians in Karabakh began campaigning for
    separation from Azerbaijan. Open warfare began in 1988 and only ended
    in 1994 with a ceasefire that left Armenians in control of Nagorny
    Karabakh and adjoining areas. No formal peace treaty was signed, and
    international attempts to resolve Karabakh's status have so far failed.

    By the end of the conflict, the ethnic Azeris of Karabakh and Armenia
    itself had become refugees in Azerbaijan, and the Armenians had fled
    in the other direction. So two populations that were once mixed became
    homogenous, each with a decreasing awareness of the other.

    As the two nations developed separately over the past two decades,
    each established its own narrative of events not just around the
    Karabakh conflict but going back decades, even centuries. This is
    reflected in the very different content of school history books in
    Azerbaijan and Armenia, which colours the way children view both the
    other side and their own past.

    ENEMIES AND HEROES

    Ashkhen, an Armenian in the 12th grade - the final year of school -
    says she has studied the causes of the Karabakh conflict and the way
    it unfolded, as well as the names of Armenian war heroes. She has
    concluded that peace with the Azerbaijanis will not come any time soon.

    "They have to give up their claims to our lands," she said. "Only
    when several generations have passed will it be possible for Azeris
    and Armenians to stop being enemies."

    Guljennet Huseynli, a 16-year-old Azeri schoolgirl in Baku, can list
    the sites of atrocities committed by Armenian forces in the conflict,
    although she is too young to remember it herself.

    "How can we forget it? They killed our babies in Khojaly and Shusha,"
    she said, referring to events of the early 1990s. "My parents lost
    their friends and classmates in the war. They witnessed a huge influx
    of refugees to Baku. I'm learning about the bloody acts which the
    Armenians committed against my nation at school from teachers and
    textbooks."

    Khojaly is a case in point - an event in January 1992, during
    the Karabakh war, which is remembered in Azerbaijan as a massacre
    of hundreds of civilians fleeing the town - a tragedy of iconic
    importance. The Armenians' memory is that it was one of the unfortunate
    incidents of war, with a lower bodycount than their opponents claim.

    In their most recent attempt to forge an agreement, Armenian president
    Serzh Sargsyan met his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the
    Russian town of Sochi last month. One of the points they agreed on
    in a joint statement issued together with Russian president Dmitry
    Medvedev was that intellectuals needed to start engaging in dialogue
    in an attempt to bridge the gap between their two countries.

    Many young Armenians, however, say they want nothing to do with their
    contemporaries in Azerbaijan.

    Anna, 21, has plenty of internet contacts in various countries,
    but avoids interacting with Azeris.

    "You can't talk to them without a conflict arising. We start arguing
    about history, blame each other for things, attempt to convince each
    other, but we always end up with the same opinions that we started
    out with," she said. "An Azeri schoolboy once wrote to me and started
    accusing me of various things, denying the existence of a genocide
    [against Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16], and calling Armenians
    'occupiers'. I was naïve enough to say that he had studied poorly at
    school, and suggested he read what it says in the textbook."

    The boy replied by quoting chunks of Azeri school books that supported
    his argument, such as one passage from a year-ten history text
    describing Armenians as "our eternal enemies" and detailing their
    offences in the early 1900s.

    Tofig Veliyev, head of the Slavic history department at Baku State
    University, is the author of this textbook, and insists he had to
    use negative language in order to tell the truth.

    "Those phrases give an accurate picture of the Armenians," Veliyev
    said. "I would be falsifying history unless I described them like
    that."

    Similar language is found in the year 11 history book, which covers the
    Karabakh war period, and describes the Armenian forces as "fascists"
    who perpetrated various crimes.

    Hasan Naghizade, a year 11 student in Baku, said it was right for
    history to be presented in this way.

    "The author is Azerbaijani. Of course he's going to incite animosity.

    That's the way it should be," he said. "They definitely don't want
    to prepare us for peace. We don't need peace. The Armenians have
    committed a lot of bloody acts against us. Peace would be disrespectful
    to those who died in the war."

    Azerbaijan's education ministry approved the current set of history
    books in 2000. Faig Shahbazli, head of the ministry's publications
    department, says the books were commissioned from historians and then
    checked for content.

    One stipulation was that the texts should not contain discriminatory
    language. "Textbooks should promote democracy and tolerance, not
    hatred," Shahbazli said.

    But he added that words like "terrorist", "bandit", "fascist" and
    "enemy" did not breach that principle.

    "Those words reflect facts. They do not provoke intolerance of
    Armenians. They don't suggest the Armenian nation committed crimes;
    they merely indicate the nationality of those who did," he said,
    adding that children were capable of distinguishing between individual
    wrongdoing and a nation as a whole.

    Armenian's education ministry conducts competitions for new textbooks
    every four to five years, with historians and publishers entering
    joint bids to be approved by ministry experts.

    In Armenia, adolescents learn about the "War of Liberation" for
    Karabakh - which they call Artsakh - in year nine. The conflict is
    framed within the context of a long history from ancient Armenian
    statehood through to the "perestroika" period of the late 1980s, when
    nationalist aspirations began being voiced by various Soviet groups.

    "The spread of liberation movements in the Soviet Union was a direct
    result of the politics of perestroika," the book says. "The Artsakh
    Armenians were the first to rise up in defence of their national
    dignity. They would not accept that their historical lands had been
    forcibly united with Azerbaijan."

    This textbook is careful to avoid criticism of the Azeri nation as
    a whole, reserving it for the government in Baku.

    Some say the book lays out the facts too drily, and would like to
    see it strike a more patriotic tone.

    "There's no national spirit in this material," complained Anahit, 19.

    "Student should feel a sense of national pride in the valorous
    compatriots and in this magnificent victory won by the Armenians. This
    is lost in a dry recounting of events," she said.

    Mikael Zolyan, a political analyst in Yerevan, has studied textbooks
    from all three countries in the South Caucasus, including Georgia.

    He said Armenian books were phrased relatively neutrally, and lacked
    the emotional language found elsewhere, he said. But they were still
    far from ideal as they presented history from an entirely Armenian
    perspective.

    "You can't expect anything else from history textbooks, but it would
    be right to present the other side's point of view, even if it's
    mistaken," he said.

    Arif Yunusov, an Azeri historian who has written on the Karabakh war,
    appealed to the authors of all textbooks to refrain from inflammatory
    language and to try about their influence on the younger generation.

    Bellicose rhetoric makes a resumption of conflict more likely, he said.

    "It is racism to portray Armenians the way they do in the [Azerbaijani]
    textbooks," he said. "Those kids will grow up with hatred, not
    tolerance. How are we going to achieve peace then?"

    OLD GRIEVANCES, MODERN NARRATIVES

    It is not just recent history that leaves Armenians and Azerbaijanis
    with entrenched opposing views.

    Another major difference concerns the mass killings of Armenians in
    Ottoman Turkey during the First World War.

    Schoolchildren study these events in year eight, and read accounts of
    the Ottoman authorities driving Armenians into the desert and killing
    1.5 million of them in a deliberate act of genocide.

    Ruben Sahakyan, the historian who wrote the section on the killings,
    said he tried to avoid provoking emotional reactions.

    "You must present only the facts, so that children can analyse them
    for themselves," he said. "If you introduce emotional factors, you
    lose objectivity."

    Sahakyan argued that the Azerbaijanis were perpetuating historical
    myths created in Soviet times, whereas Armenian academics had spent
    the early years after independence in 1991 attempting to correct
    the record.

    "We are writing real history, without exaggerations," he said.

    Turkey denies genocide and disputes the number of dead, and its stance
    is shared by its close ally Azerbaijan.

    Veliyev, for example, said the reason Azeri children did not learn
    about the Armenian genocide is because it did not take place.

    "It never happened. Why should we teach our children an invented
    history?" he asked.

    Another set of historical issues about which Azerbaijani and Armenian
    teachers offer differing accounts is the period following the Russian
    Revolution and attempts to create nation-states in the South Caucasus.

    In outlining the events of 1918, when Armenians and Azerbaijani forces
    battled for control of Baku, textbooks from Yerevan confine themselves
    to describing the short-lived independent Armenian state that was
    later subsumed within the Soviet Union. Azerbaijanis, meanwhile,
    read accounts of massacres committed by Armenians in Baku.

    Baku school pupil Guljennet links the Karabakh war to 1918, suggesting
    a pattern of events that means Azerbaijanis must always be on their
    guard.

    "Armenians killed Azerbaijanis at the beginning of the [20th] century.

    We forgot it and became friends. And what happened? They killed us
    again. Is there any guarantee they won't do it in future?" she said.

    Sahakyan dismissed such accounts as inventions.

    "The Azerbaijanis have set themselves the task of making Baku an Azeri
    city, so in order to explain why Armenians were numerically superior
    there, they have invented mass killings that did not actually happen,"
    he said.

    Armenian Academy of Sciences member Vladimir Barkhudaryan led the
    group of writers who produced the first post-independence history book,
    and continues to edit textbooks today. He argues that the reason why
    Armenian textbooks pay little attention to certain events is that
    they are not judged important.

    "Insignificant events such as those that took place in Khojaly and in
    Baku in 1918 cannot be included. Schools have a clear timetable for
    the number of lessons into which the study of history has to fit. If
    you include this small changes in the book, it would be a huge tome,"
    he said.

    CALLS FOR ALL-EMBRACING, RIGOROUS HISTORY

    In Azerbaijan, historian Yunusov said the selective approaches
    taken to events in Baku in 1918 illustrated the problem of drawing
    up a commonly-accepted narrative of the past. He said Azerbaijani
    historians talked only about March 1918, when many Azeris died, while
    their Armenian counterparts focused on September the same year when
    the Turkish army entered Baku and killed many Armenians.

    He said this was wrong, and recommended instead that each side include
    the grievances of the other when compiling historical textbooks.

    "Both sides use history as a political game. Armenian and Azerbaijani
    historians each claim to represent the public interest. But the
    historian should not be a provocateur; he should not represent
    the public interest. He should just present the historical facts,"
    Yunusov said.

    In Armenia, Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan, an analyst with the Mitq think
    tank, was similarly despairing of the spectacle of historians engaged
    in mutual recriminations.

    "The [textbook] material must not agitate to create a victim mentality,
    but instead point to the mistakes that were made and the methods for
    avoiding them in future," he said.

    Melik-Shahnazaryan called for more intellectual rigour and analysis
    in historical accounts.

    "You end up with a load of facts that you can't connect together,"
    he said.

    Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre in Yerevan,
    agreed that the general intellectual standard of Armenian school
    books could be better.

    "Even the more recently produced textbooks have generally not been up
    to the minimum professional standard," he said. "That's particularly
    true of history books, which despite the higher expectations placed on
    them with the end of Soviet state control and ideology, tend to deliver
    only a meager and random selection of historical topics," he said.

    Hayhuki Barseghyan is a reporter for the Armenian weekly Ankakh and
    its website www.ankah.com. Shahla Sultanova is a freelance journalist
    in Azerbaijan.

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