Schoolchildren in secondary school no. 1, Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh. Photo (c): Ilya Pitalyev / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
The four day war over Nagorno-Karabakh last year took the populations of both the disputed region and Armenia completely by surprise. The events of that April reopened old wounds in a long-simmering conflict which has defined Armenia and Azerbaijan since the dying days of the Soviet Union. Several months after the escalation, while taking part in an international project, I got to meet colleagues from Azerbaijan and shared a room with them. It was only on the last day that we decided to talk about the sensitive issue of Karabakh, exchanging impressions and discovering how far they overlapped, while understanding that we would have little in common.
After listening to one of my new acquaintance’s stories, all I could say was, “the same happened to us”. Our recollections of the war were mirror images of one another, with one difference: for some of us, the war and all its atrocities were initiated by Armenia; for others, all the barbarity was down to Azerbaijan.
