Onnik Krikorian: When did the NRC start working in Armenia ?

Tim Straight: The NRC started working in Georgia in 1993 and then expanded to cover Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1995. We started with schools and then did some drinking water projects in the city of Sevan . We've cooperated with local NGOs, been involved with human rights education and also have the shelter project for refugees, which is basically what we do now.

We also have an IDP survey going on this year because we're going to rehabilitate houses in the border regions of Armenia .

OK: When the refugees came to Armenia they settled in the regions, or in urban centers like Massis that were once quite heavily inhabited by Azeris. Did many just simply move into these newly-abandoned homes?

TS: Officially, there are 36,000 Azeri-owned houses that are now occupied by Armenians and I have no reason to believe that this number isn't correct. Those might sound like strange words today, fifteen or sixteen years later. That is, that they're Azeri owned but that they're occupied.

Of course, these refugees fully consider them to be their houses. Legally, however, they're not.

OK: But in some cases, Armenians purchased the houses of Azeris.

TS: Or traded.

OK: Do we know how many were obtained that way?

TS: I'm not sure but comparing it to the Bosnian situation, a lot of the deals that were made when the Serbs left Bosnia and the Bosniaks were thrown out of Serbia were made under duress and were later declared null and void.

However, that was also a completely different situation. There was a lot of focus, a lot of pressure, a lot of money and, in fact, a lot of everything in Bosnia . Here, there's not a lot of donor presence, not a lot of focus, not a lot of interest and there will be no progress or decision made on this issue until a peace deal is signed. Do they own those houses or not?

What about those 36,000 houses that Armenians have been living in for up to sixteen years? Can they be legally titled to those families? What about compensation to the Azeris that used to own them? What about compensation for those Armenians with apartments in Baku ?

None of that is going to be solved until there's a peace agreement and it has to be part of any deal. You can't make a durable peace agreement without addressing these issues and they're horribly complicated. So as much as everybody says it's important, yes it is, but we can't do anything about it. In cooperation with UNHCR all we can do is just say that there can't be a peace agreement without addressing those issues.

For example, you've seen Ptghavan. It was an Azeri village, or seventy percent of it was, and when the first wave of people came they took those houses. There were no houses for the second wave of refugees so they just moved into containers on the edge of town.

OK: Because you're calling them refugees I assume they haven't taken citizenship?

TS: I would still call them refugees. About 65,000 have taken citizenship.

OK: Out of how many refugees?

TS: The official number is 240,000 although there is the general consensus that it's actually less. How much less we don't know.

OK: You're working with IDPs as well.

TS: We have the IDP survey which will be completed by the end of April. How many IDPs are there in Armenia ? The official government number is 72,000 but what we're working with is significantly less than half of that. This isn't necessarily anything the government's done wrong, it's just old information. Many of those displaced from the border have gone back spontaneously so now they're not IDPs, they're returnees.

In this context, you have four categories. You have IDPs who have left and never went back, IDPs that have integrated into wherever they are now, then you have the returnees who had their houses bombed and have been away for a few years but have since moved back and you also have the "never leftees" as I call them, who got bombed but didn't leave.

I remember one eighty year old woman who lives in the basement of her house, which is totally destroyed, since the day it got bombed. All of her sons have said screw this and left, but she has said that she's going to stay because she wants to die in the basement of her own house. And it's a pretty grubby place, poor lady.

OK: It's worth mentioning that what you're talking about is the border regions in Tavoush, in particular.

TS: Tavoush is the most damaged, I would say.

OK: There is also a strategic importance to rehabilitate the border regions with Azerbaijan and we certainly know that there are problems with the infrastructure. In the autumn I made the journey from Ijevan through Shamsadin to the Azeri border and the roads were absolutely terrible.

TS: When we visit the villages they say the main problems are drinking water and irrigation. There are also problems with no man's land, the trenches and Azeri control of traditional farming land and orchards. Villagers lost about 70-80% of their orchards to barbed wire and mines during the conflict so that's a real challenge.

We have about eleven villages on a list and we're talking to the community action groups that World Vision set up saying that we can do a little bit of infrastructure work, probably drinking water, but mainly we'll be concerned with houses because it's a shelter project. But then, who gets priority?

We're planning to build about 100 houses in total and that's what my staff has been doing for the past three days. They've been away trying to identify a couple of communities. Personally, I like Nerkin-Karmiraghbyur which is the most damaged village from the war.

Villages like Aygepar, however, are what I call dying villages. If we go in and build houses what are those people going to live off? Nostalgia? It's a tough decision but we need to make some very tough choices. Probably, we should work in a village that has a chance of survival.

If you ask people up there, however, most of them will say help the dying villages because they're really in trouble. However, I'm saying that they're dying for a reason.

OK: Are refugees included in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and have you had any involvement in that?

TS: Yes, jointly with UNHCR. They lead the charge on that and there are a significant number of pages on refugees. The result is the meeting I had today with the Minister of Urban Development, the head of the World Bank and some other international organizations. The need to have a national housing strategy for vulnerable families in Armenia has already been identified and has been in the works for some time.

OK: What are living conditions like for refugees in general? I'm sure that there are quite a few refugees with sons working in Russia and there's this idea that families with relatives overseas are actually living very good lives and not deserving of any assistance. They're scrounging, basically, and living above the poverty line.

TS: That's not anything I would support. There's no question that many refugees as well as locals have relatives in Russia but our experience is that they don't get the money that everybody thinks they do. Besides, even if they do receive money from abroad, it's only $10-15 a month. I've also heard quite a few stories about husbands who have left for Russia and just dumped their wives and families in Armenia .

There was also Ivan, a refugee with chronically untreated diabetes who was about to die until we got him help and then we had a woman who lost her baby because she ate badly during her pregnancy. She lived in a container which is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, she didn't have any money and so she had the baby delivered at home. It died on the first day.

Then you have the local family that was renting a container just ten meters up the street and they lost their baby at sixty days. And then you have the house across the street where a 10 year old boy, Ararat, died of chronic lung disease after his family received a house from us. They had four children and he died because he was born and raised in a container.

This is twenty square meters we're talking about -- this house, this house and this house.

It's tough. The miracle of 14% economic growth last year in Armenia , that's a Yerevan thing and actually, only certain groups in Yerevan . Yes, there's now a lot of Mercedes on the streets and yes, I now have to sit in my car waiting at two red lights instead of one and that's great, but this economic growth is not reaching our target group.

OK: There was recently an article published in Hetq Online about a refugee working as a prostitute in the market [situated in an Azeri village located across the border in Georgia ].

TS: In my four years being in Armenia I have stumbled over three families that belong in a special category and we built houses for two of them. They were living in absolutely inhuman conditions and the story about Lida up at the border with her four kids that you refer to is one of them.

This is a woman who's about 42 years old and she has four kids although she offered to sell her youngest for 10,000 dram. She received a house from NRC and when MSF Belgium went to follow up with this family, the pipe on their stove broke but they didn't care, they just lit a fire. It's a pig sty, an absolute pig sty.

We've had articles written, friends have gone to visit her and everyone has been shocked. I've been yelled at by someone I considered a good friend -- how dare I build a house and just leave them, why didn't I put a toilet in the house even though Bagratashen has no sewage system etc, but in this case, the refugees are responsible for building their own outhouse. It's the least we can expect, in my opinion.

Anyway, here's a woman, the Mayor of the town says he hates her and has no plans to ever help her, he considers her a bad woman and yes, she herself says that she is now so used to being yelled at, or scorned and spat at, that it doesn't make any difference anymore. She doesn't have the will or even the ability to help herself and she has four kids.

What do you do with those kids? That's a dilemma I think about a lot and the same is true with the other two families. What is the right of the parents to be with their children and what are the rights of the children to be with their parents as compared to the rights of the child to be raised in a healthy, clean environment?

What's better for that child? Should they be adopted or should massive support be given to the parents to look after their children and helped to change their life style? This is way outside the scope of our project and my experience and knowledge. MSF Belgium is trying to help them but what do we do?

In a perfect world we would build a house and provide a massive social support system for Lida and her kids but we don't have the budget for that. We don't a program for that so the best we can do is to find other organizations that can step in. We have a Peace Corps worker in Ptghavan who visits the family regularly but I still don't know what the solution is.

I doubt that in any of these cases that the parents will ever be able to get back on their feet again. They've been destroyed and they've given up completely.

In another example that I know about, one woman keeps getting pregnant and she's finally agreed to give her children up for adoption because she recognizes that she can't take care of them. She's been used like a sponge by every guy in town and as miserable as it sounds, without being paid. They come and rape her, basically, and take her food.

I don't want to mention the name of the town but I've said to the Mayor that something needs to be done and he says that he can't do anything. He agrees that there's a problem and tries to protect her but says that some powerful farmers will kick his butt if he attempts to intervene. He takes her sacks of flour in the morning so that she can bake her bread by the evening because the men that come for their night visits take whatever she has. She's a refugee.

It was a rude awakening for me. I'm not saying that we're pushing that Mayor as best we can but we are providing help. Her parents are now in an old age home because she can't take care of them and she's put her youngest child up for adoption. We're talking to her and keeping as high a profile as we can as well as lobbying the Mayor but perhaps we're going to have to tell this guy that we're not going to be able to work in his village until he is willing or in a position to say no.

OK: You don't think it's worth sitting down with this woman and suggesting that it's best that she moves to another village where she can start afresh?

TS: We can't move the refugees from one place to another. She is mentally incapacitated and this is the only form of acceptance that she has. When somebody comes and has sex with her it's the only form of recognition that she has in her life.

OK: So the problem will just start again somewhere else?

TS: I don't know and it's the kids that I'm focusing on more than anything else. Her eldest son has refused to leave his mother.

OK: How old is he?

TS: He's nine and says that he wants to feed his mother. He's nine and he's taking the whole world on his shoulders. However, there is an organization that will intervene.

OK: And you also seem to take the world on your shoulders at times. Isn't there the danger that you get too involved in particular cases? Do you ever get depressed?

TS: You have to get depressed and if you don't you've probably isolated yourself mentally. Of course, like anybody else in a job like mine, you have to keep that balance and identify the point where you can still have empathy but not to the extent that you become ineffective. Sometimes that's a hard task but you also have to be careful not to go the other way and divorce yourself too much.

It's always a struggle but it's an important job we're doing. What gets me depressed is that we don't have the budget, the mandate or the capacity to follow up on Lida in Bagratashen, for example. However, some Norwegian journalists are arriving in a few weeks to do a story about her that will be splashed all over the foreign press. She's a public figure now but you can't help everybody.

As for this other woman, I hope that when she gets her house she'll say, oh, new life, time to turn the page. That's what I was hoping Lida would do but she didn't. In a way, you can't not try. It's always a judgment call but we never considered not building a house. We were the ones that put Lida in touch with MSF although I think they would have found her anyway because she's a sex worker.

OK: A refugee is a refugee and their situation is as much an indication of how they've been living as whether they're a bad person or not.

TS: Out of these thousands of refugee families that I've spoken to and met since I've been here, there's only been three that we couldn't help sufficiently. We've helped hundreds and hundreds but in these cases we weren't particularly successful. I would never say it was a failure, however, and we will definitely keep trying.

We've built around 650 houses and very few have been sold so I'd say that we've been very successful. This doesn't mean that our program is perfect and we need to involve our beneficiaries with their own houses and to help them take control over their own lives. That's possible with the mandate that we have.

The main need is to combine our shelter project with job creation activities but that's outside of our mandate. That frustrates me so what I like to do instead is latch that on to others who can work in these areas. The Danish Refugee Council, for example, is going to start a small micro-credit program in Armenia specifically targeted at our beneficiaries.

That's a small victory for us.