Karabakh War Refugees Denied Soviet-Era Funds

Uprooted Armenians and Azeris can’t return to claim savings they left behind.

By Gayane Avagyan and Sara Khojoyan in Yerevan, and Samira Akhmedbeyli in Baku (CRS No. 529, 29-Jan-10)

Many former Soviet citizens who entrusted their savings to the state’s Sberbank have struggled to retrieve their cash, but refugees in Armenia and Azerbaijan are afflicted worst of all - their money is not just frozen and devalued, it is behind enemy lines.

Residents of the communist state were encouraged to keep their savings in Sberbank and, since there was not very much to buy, many of them did. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and hyperinflation slashed the value of the rouble, their accounts were frozen.

Even now, much of the money has not been paid back. It amounts to billions of US dollars and many impoverished post-Soviet states can ill afford the outlay. But most governments – including Armenia, but not yet Azerbaijan - have at least created schemes to refund some depositors in their own part of the Soviet bank’s system. Sadly, the refugees fall outside them.

“My father is 70, and he became a diabetic after the terror of a group of Azeris attacking Armenians’ homes in Baku. He has damaged kidneys, and other illnesses. How long does he have to live to see this money, which he saved by working his whole life?” asked Srbuhi Gazaryan, one of the 300,000 or so Armenians who fled neighbouring Azerbaijan at the end of the Soviet period.

Relations between Armenians and Azeris were wrecked by the dispute over Nagorny Karabakh, a part of Soviet Azerbaijan inhabited by Armenians. The two countries clashed over the enclave, sending hundreds of thousands of refugees in both directions.

Fighting broke out in 1988, accelerating in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A ceasefire came into force in 1994, but the enclave’s status is still to be finally resolved.

Because Azerbaijan and Armenia have a hostile relationship, refugees who moved from one country to the other are unlikely to see any money for as long as the conflict over Nagorny Karabakh continues.

While Azerbaijan has no scheme for returning money to past or present citizens, when it does Armenian refugees could not visit to put in a claim for their lost savings because of sanctions between the two Caucasian neighbours. And though Armenia does provide some compensation, Azeri refugees face the same problem.

Armenian officials will not comment on the future or volume of deposits left behind in Azerbaijan when the Armenians fled.

Gagik Yeganyan, the head of Armenia’s migration service, the state body responsible for refugees, said he could not answer any questions on the subject.

“There was a great tragedy. In a day, people lost the roof over their heads; they lost property stored up by five or six generations. This is an injustice, which of course needs to be righted,” he said.

His deputy, David Hakobyan, added, “No one can say whether Azerbaijan will return these savings or how this will be resolved.”

But in fact, even ordinary Azeris are still waiting to get hold of their savings. According to economist Vugar Bayramov, almost two million of them.

The government has long promised to return the money, and debated how to do so since 1996, but without fixing on a definite plan.

Meanwhile, the situation for Azeri refugees, numbering around 200,000, is every bit as heart-breaking as for uprooted Armenians.

“I worked on a collective farm in the village of Archut in the Kirovakan region,” said 56-year-old Zarovshan Salimova, referring to an Armenian region now called Vanadzor. “Being a widow, I raised three sons on my own. I did not eat or drink hardly to secure their futures, and I collected money for them for ten years and put 2,000 roubles in a bank account for each of them.

“And then in 1988 they threw us out of our homes. In one day we lost everything - homeland, house, savings – I could not even take my household things. We only just saved ourselves.”

Like Armenia, Azerbaijan can do little to help refugees to retrieve their funds because of the poor relations between the two countries.

“If a mechanism is found [in Azerbaijan] for the money to be returned to the account-holders…then this will only be for those people who were citizens of Azerbaijan before 1992 – [not the] refugees from Armenia,” Bayramov said

But there are other complications for refugees. Armenians have often not even received money that they managed to move from Azerbaijan into the Armenian branch of the Soviet Sberbank before 1991. Emma Shahumyan, who lives in a Yerevan refugee hostel, has still not managed to receive her funds.

Having left Azerbaijan, she asked Sberbank to transfer her savings of around 5,000 roubles to Armenia and managed to double the sum she had in her account before it was frozen.

But she falls foul of the complicated rules laid out in a 2006 law to regulate who can receive money. She has a job for the charity Mission in Armenia, earning around 50 dollars a month, and receives income support from the state.

The law only gives savings to those who need them most, and she is not poor enough to deserve them, something that Yeganyan of the migration service says is wrong.

“In my opinion it would be right for refugees to be treated as a separate group, as people in the greatest need and who have suffered the most. However, there has been no reaction to my suggestion,” he said.

Gayane Avagyan is a freelance journalist. Sara Khojoyan is a journalist from ArmeniaNow.com and a participant in IWPR’s Cross Caucasus Journalism Network. Samira Akhmedbeyli is an IWPR reporter in Baku.