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14. Sabirabad: The Children's Republic
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14 Sabirabad The Children’s Republic MUSIC WAS COMING out of the big hall with the corrugated iron roof. There was the rasping gut of a stringed instrument, the beat of stamping feet, an accordion, and a banging drum. Inside a line of young girls, hand in hand and dressed in pinks and greens, glided in a line, urged on by a clutch of musicians sitting in the corner. The dancing master clapped his hands, the music stopped, and the girls laughed and went back to their positions. The hall teeming with joie de vivre was in a refugee camp outside the town of Sabirabad in the arid plains of central Azerbaijan. Every weekend this courtyard becomes the headquarters of an exceptional project. In the next-door room to the dancing class, another group of children was studying a text of an operetta by the composer Uzeir Hajibekov. On a square of baked mud and grass outside, a game of soccer was in progress. Animated children, bustling between activities, came up to chat to me. Despite the circumstances, I found it the most inspiring and hopeful place I had seen in the Caucasus. The six or seven hundred children of Camp C-1 are willing guinea pigs. A few years ago a group of Azerbaijani educational psychologists found that several years after the war over Karabakh had ended, many refugee children were still frightened and disturbed. The elder ones still remembered the traumatic scenes, when they had been driven from their homes in the summer and fall of 1993. The younger ones had different problems; not remembering their original homes, they were growing up without any motivation in the listless environment of the camps. The psychologists decided they had to catch these children before they slipped further into depression. Azad Isazade was one of the founding psychologists and my guide to C-1 camp. He told me, “The children don’t know it’s happening of course, but the teachers are 217 trained to observe them and identify what they need.” They had devised four sets of activities—folk dancing, theatre, art, and sports—that were also forms of therapy. “It’s a process,” said Azad, a slight man with an endlessly inventive and inquiring mind. “So with music, for example , they first of all needed to hear depressive melodies, then neutral ones, then cheerful ones. Or drawing. We gave them one page and asked them to draw the saddest day of their life—then later on lots of pages to draw the happiest day of their life.” The program has had remarkable effects on the children, as I saw. Yet its depressing corollary is that far more refugee children—not to mention their parents—in Azerbaijan are moldering without this kind of care or attention. Azerbaijan may have the largest proportions of displaced people per capita of any country in the world. The total numbers may be greater in Afghanistan or Congo, but in Azerbaijan every tenth person is a refugee from the conflict with Armenia. First, approximately 200,000 Azerbaijanis fled Armenia in 1988 and 1989. Then, between 1992 and 1994, came all the Azerbaijanis of Nagorny Karabakh and the inhabitants of seven regions around Karabakh—more than half a million people in all. Six years after the cease-fire agreement was signed, in the year 2000, around eighty or ninety thousand of them were still in refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands more were living in a vast archipelago of sanatoria, student hostels, and makeshift accommodations. All remained in a terrible limbo while the conflict was unresolved.1 The basic ingredients the psychologists needed to get the program going in the camp, a surplus of time and unused energy, were already there: refugee schoolteachers, musicians, and sportsmen worked for free and gradually took on most of the teaching. Then, in the summer of 1999, the psychologists set up what they called The Children’s Republic , a minigovernment run entirely for and by children. The children elected a “parliament” with twelve MPs, which took collective decisions . The Ministry of Ecology planted a garden, the Ministry of Information put out a newspaper. Children from the two camps the psychologists were working in played competitive games with one another and traveled to music and dance festivals, where their trainers were heartened to see that their children were the most self-assured and confident of all the competing teams. Out on the soccer field, a boy in yellow track-suit trousers was...