Recently, I along with other Ukrainian journalists, was invited by the embassy of Azerbaijan to visit that country. It was my first time there.
For all of us Ukrainians, it often seems that our country is the poorest, most neglected and most shunned nation in the world – or at least among those that emerged from the former Soviet Union. And that we, citizens of Ukraine, live in the worst conditions of anyone, that our problems are bigger than anyone else's and that everything, generally, is in very bad shape.
In reality that is not the case and most of us in fact understand that. To understand is one thing. But to actually feel it, appreciate it and comprehend it emotionally is another matter especially when, for example, money problems prevent people from even buying an extra pair of socks, let alone a new refrigerator.
Sometimes I get depressed and complain about my seemingly bitter circumstances and the difficulty of earning a crust as a journalist. But everything is relative and you only recognize that when you have something with which to compare your own lot against.
So thanks to the Azerbaijani Embassy I flew to Baku, that country's capital, and one baking hot day, after a grueling car journey lasting several hours, I found myself at a refugee camp. This was a place for Azeris who had fled the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. And it was here that I realized, with all my heart and with all my soul, that our own Ukrainian problems and difficulties, all our screams of despair and perceived misfortunes, all the complaints that we pour out, all of these are as nothing compared to the grim fate of these people. People who were forced to flee their homeland and to abandon everything that they had worked for and owned – their homes, their farms, their livestock, their furniture, their refrigerators and even their socks.
They live on this burned, naked gray-brown plane which I would describe as a desert of mud with a few ribbons of salty water masquerading as rivers flowing through it. In this landscape, broken only by gray-brown dunes, the refugees live in mud huts baking in the unrelenting heat of a merciless sun.
And they have lived here for five years now. Some have even been born here while others have died here. People just the same as ourselves. Once they were villagers, teachers, farmers, engineers. And today they are refugees. Refugees who have lost their land, lost their jobs, lost their hope. They have a past, not very much of a present and they can only look forward to a dark, uncertain future.
Gazing into those old and weary eyes of the painfully thin children in that camp, you can only turn away in complete alienation from politics, from history and the nationalities question. All the theories about international relations and various high-level discussion proc-esses pale into insignificance.
And you are left only with sympathy and pity – for them, not for yourself or your neighbor back in Ukraine.
This refugee camp was just one of many. What I saw is the way that life has become for some one million former Azeri inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh. Of-course they get some help from the Azeri Government and from international humanitarian aid organizations. But those people can only survive, you feel that they are not really living. It is impossible to have any kind of a fulfilling life that way.
And after that visit to the camp – just a short excursion – I can only smile sadly when my neighbor complains how he has not been paid again now for the second month running but who lives in Ukraine with the comforts that it still has to offer. And not in a tiny hut that lies in the middle of a muddy desert and in which a man cannot even stand up in to his full height.
(Serhy Naboka is an author, journalist and political observer.)
