Witnessing the war in Nagorno-Karabakh: Shusha’s IDPs testify

Those who were forced to flee their homes as a result of the Armenian occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory represent an important and as yet largely untapped resource of information about that conflict and the formation of ideas and identities of a far broader community about the war.  To remedy this lacuna, I interviewed elderly Azerbaijani internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Shusha about their experiences, elderly now because all were 30 years of age or older when the conflict began in the late 1980s.  This article provides some preliminary findings from that research.  By telling their stories, the Shusha IDPs are involved in constructing what scholars call “communities of memory.”  These communities of memory, or shared experiences, bind Karabakh IDPs across economic and geographical lines, but they are not monolithic.  Instead, they vary at least somewhat along class, gender, generational, and location lines.  In my conversations with them, I was especially interested in learning about the way in which the individual IDPs used their memory to give meaning to the traumatic and life-transforming events they experienced.

Source: http://biweekly.ada.edu.az/vol_4_no_10/Witnessing_the_war_in_Nagorno_Karabakh_Shusha_IDPs_testify.htm

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