Giving voice to the voiceless.
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Our stories
Armenian Refugees from Azerbaijan are Treated as Second-Class Citizens in Armenia
Refugees and former refugees from Azerbaijan living in a hotel in Yerevan for 30 years tell their stories of forced naturalization and articulate their discontent with the policy of exclusion, which resulted in collapse of their hopes to find safety and home in Armenia.
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Frozen Hopes
"Miraculously I managed to transfer my savings from Azerbaijan, but I can’t withdraw them in Armenia."
Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan request that the Armenian government include them in the special category of people who can withdraw money from their accounts in the USSR Savings Bank without waiting in queue. |
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Our mission
Refugee Voice Advocacy and Rights Protection Non-Governmental Organisation is an Armenian NGO aiming to work with refugees from Azerbaijan and Syria to empower them and to help them to identify their potential in order to integrate into Armenian society.
The mission of the NGO is specially focused on the second generation of refugees, as it is generally assumed that the second generation would have overcome most of the integration obstacles which are commonly faced by the first generation. However, the blocked integration of the first generation from Azerbaijan and its consequences and effects have made it a longitudinal process for the second generation, let alone the trauma of displacement, which as is recognised, can be handed down, and children - and sometimes even their grandchildren - can bear the consequences of what happened and may feel and behave like victims, displaying deep hurt and bitterness. The second generation, particularly, tends to absorb and retain pain and grief, consciously or unconsciously. |
It is vital for our mission to advocate on the issues of the refugees by giving them voice to speak up for themselves in order to raise awareness and engage our community, and urge the Government of Armenia to stop perceiving the refugee crisis in terms of temporary arrangements and allocate funds to solve housing, as well as social-economic issues. It is vital for the Government of Armenia to recognize and accept the refugees as a special vulnerable category to ensure sustainable solutions to a range of issues from healthcare to education and employment opportunities.
Refugee Voice NGO was founded by a refugee and professional journalists and expert on human rights and gender equality. |
Target group definition
From 1988 to 1993 around 360,000 ethnic Armenians arrived in Armenia after being displaced from Azerbaijan as a result of the conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. A number of these refugees (65,000 as of 2004 and approximately 83,000 as of today) acquired citizenship due to a governmental and UNHCR-led naturalisation programme. However, members of both groups (those who have and haven’t been formally naturalised) remained “poor, marginalised, vulnerable and without the power to improve their lives” in Armenia. (UNHCR, 2006 Country Operations Plan for Armenia).
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Thus, we will abstain from distinguishing between these two groups, and will also define the former refugees just as ‘refugees’.
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What we do
- Issues of the refugees and conflict-affected persons through media tools, covering human stories and preparing articles, documentary films, multimedia stories.
Refugees, particularly, from Azerbaijan in Armenia are silenced and still undergo continuous processes of scrutiny and categorisation in the course of building external relationships and finding their place in Armenian society. Refugees are often perceived as ‘shur tvats hayer” (“Armenians upside down”) and these unwritten though widely acknowleged social rules, silent or not, have great force on public opinion. The effect of such attitudes is in fact more important in the daily lives of refugees than official proclamation of hospitality, since the consequences of such internalised stigmatising public images lead to a vicious circle of disadvantage and marginalisation. Obviously, the resistance of negative stigmatisation calls for the deployment of strong coping capacities by refugees, which certainly requires negotiation between the inside and outside images as a critical process to overcome this negative stereotyping or labelling. The local community needs to be reminded that refugees come from war-torn backgrounds, many are homeless, with little education and no employment because of the war, the displacement and the costs of their subsequent survival. The community needs to understand refugees' behaviour and see what it can do to help.
We also believe that systematic media coverage will drive policy-makers to realise their responsibility and role in the elaboration and implementation of the refugee legislation to assist them to access to basic specific services, such as housing, health care, education and employment. Local governments need to be familiar with the hardships, the needs and rights that refugee groups are entitled to in order to play a more meaningful role to address the moral content and breach the stereotypes and wrong attitudes.
Representation of the homeless and refugee histories through media tools will intensify and evoke the image to generate empathy for refugees who face very difficult circumstances to enable the local community and decision-makers to put themselves "in other people's shoes”.
- Needs Assessment of the refugees from Azerbaijan
- Transform understanding of refugee issues into solutions.
- Work with refugees to try to build peace in the region and to heal them from trauma.
Media about the refugees
Invisible Refugees | Gayane Mirzoyan and Oksana Musaelyan | Chai Khana
Since the late ‘80's and early ‘90's, on the outskirts of Yerevan, in one of the buildings of the former boarding school, now the Centre for care of patients with mental disorders "Dzorak", several families of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan live.
Forgotten Refugees in the South Caucasus Photo Exhibition Opens in Yerevan
A photo exhibition 'Beyond the borders - exploration amongst the forgotten refugees of the South Caucasus' has openedat Yerevan State University. The artist,Jan Zychlinski,is a lecturer in Social Urban Development at the Bern University of Applied Science, with additional focus on social photography.