Karabakh Radio's Peace Mission Falters

Armenians and Azeris have looked with distrust over the front lines around Nagorny Karabakh for 15 years, but one small group of Armenians is trying to change that.



Since 1997, they have broadcast for half an hour, four times a week, what they call Voice of Justice, an Azeri-language radio station intended to let Azeris know what they are thinking.



Karabakh, which has declared unilateral independence from Azerbaijan, once had a significant Azeri population but they fled during the war for control of the region.



The station output appears to be having little effect, however. Officials in Baku have said the broadcasts are just propaganda, while refugees tracked down by IWPR said they would not listen to them, and called the carefully-crafted reports biased.



“We are just trying to show the Azeris that a new war would bring only harm to our peoples. Despite the fact that the policies of Azerbaijan are today preventing a solution to the conflict, we are convinced that the final word will belong to our peoples,” said Mikael Hajian, director of the station.



Hajian is a linguist who studied in Baku and speaks Azeri like a native.



“Azeri is a beautiful language, with many of its own characteristics, and it is very similar to Armenian,” he said.



The station staff is mainly made up of Armenians who fled Azerbaijan during or before the conflict. They prepare reports every day, and try to remain up to date. On one occasion, they heard an Azeri child on Radio Liberty asking that his contemporaries in Karabakh also speak out against war.



“Our radio station quickly made a series of programmes in which Karabakh children said ‘no’ to war, and told all about their experiences and the horrors they had seen,” Hajian said, adding the station was careful to be unbiased in its reports.



“You will never hear a bad word about the Azeris. We sometimes criticise [Azerbaijan president Ilham] Aliev and the current authorities, but never the people. If a journalist has prepared material that has a negative feel, I make sure to remove it, and I am proud of this,” he said.



The station is a rare link between the two countries that have had no diplomatic relations since the end of the Soviet Union. Clashes between Armenians and Azeris over the control of Nagorny Karabakh started even before the fall of communism, shooting over the front line remains a danger for local residents, and relations between the peoples are poisoned to this day.



A peace process, chaired by Russia, France and the United States has failed to make much progress since the war ended with a ceasefire in 1994, and hundreds of thousands of refugees are still in limbo.



The station transmitter is not powerful enough to be heard in Baku, but officials in the Azerbaijan capital said they took it seriously as a source of Armenian propaganda.



“The Armenian Voice of Justice is not the only one. There are also radio channels being broadcast from Iran and propagandising separatist ideas against Azerbaijan. It was to fight such broadcasts that President Ilham Aliev issued the decree Strengthening Azerbaijan’s TV and Radio Space. The communications ministry conducts this work, they even get specific money for this,” said Togrul Mamedov, assistant to the chairman of Azerbaijan’s television and radio council.



The station’s broadcasts are not aimed at officials, however, so IWPR journalists in the Azerbaijan capital contacted some refugees in the west of the country to see if the Armenians’ message was getting through.



Two refugees had never listened to it, and the one who had was not impressed.



“Once, a couple of years ago, I listened to a report by this radio station, which apparently is called Voice of Justice. I really did not like the content of the broadcasts, since it appeared from their words that Azeris were falsifying the history of Karabakh,” said Kerim Kerimli, a journalist and a refugee from Shusha.



“I did not listen to it again.”



Lusine Musayelyan is a reporter with Radio Liberty in Stepanakert and a member of IWPR’s Cross-Caucasus Journalism Network. Shahin Rzayev is IWPR’s Azerbaijan country director.