An Interview with Tim Straight
Country Director, Norwegian Refugee Council and Honorary Norwegian Consul to Armenia

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is a voluntary organization involved in international refugee work. For more than 50 years the organization has worked to provide humanitarian assistance to people fleeing from their homes and to defend their fundamental human rights.

This interview was held at the NRC's office in Yerevan, Republic of Armenia, on 20 February 2004.

ONNIK KRIKORIAN: When did you start working for the Norwegian Refugee Council?

TIM STRAIGHT: I've worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council for seven years now and the first three years were spent in Oslo working as the desk officer for Bosnia and Croatia. I had worked in Bosnia during the war for another Norwegian aid organization so it was my experience there that got me the job and they expanded it to Croatia.

Then I got kind of bored and restless and they asked me if I wanted to take this job. I came here in September 2000.


OK: When did the NRC establish itself in Armenia?

TS: 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: There are two international organizations that are mainly concerned with refugees? UNHCR and NRC?

TS: As their only mandate.


OK: How do the two differ?

TS: Not much. I mean, we both have the same focus on refugees and we sometimes work together. We've been funded by UNHCR in other countries and we've also combined our money on certain projects here. We made a gentleman's agreement that they would work in urban centers while we would concentrate on rural areas. We specialize in the nice little houses while they take incomplete buildings that were started during the soviet era. After they're finished they're then provided as apartments to refugees but let's back up a little.

UNHCR's funding has gradually been reduced and they've changed their focus from building shelters to concentrating on the rights of refugees. For example, the privatization of land and the houses issue. There wasn't a system in place until we both pushed for the law that was passed last year. With our support, UNHCR is campaigning very hard to prevent eviction from collective centers whereas we're working in Ararat and Lori and some villages here and there. However, what we're beginning to realize is that those nice, neat little packages of refugees living in containers are getting fewer and fewer.

When we built sixty-six houses in Silikyan, for example, that was the last big pocket of refugees living in containers in Yerevan and when we finished fifty-two houses up in Gyumri we managed to accommodate all the refugees living in containers there. So, now that they're all provided for we can cross Yerevan and Gyumri off the list. However, what we're finding more and more is that there's a village here with four families or another there with five. In Banavan, for example, a village next to the city of Ararat, there's a project that we'll be starting this year but it’s the urban collective centers that are the serious problem. These are big numbers and bad conditions.


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 in Armenia, 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, in as much as everybody says it's important, yes it is, but we can't do anything about it now. In cooperation with UNHCR all we can do is just say that there can't be a peace agreement without addressing those issues.


OK: When the NRC first arrived in Armenia was there a very noticeable problem with refugees in Armenia?

TS: No, because you have those thirty-six thousand houses. 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. It is less visible in that sense.

OK: Is that the same with Bagratashen and the adjoining villages as well?

TS: Less so and many of the [Azeri] refugees that lived in Ptghavan now live in Georgia.


OK: In Sadakhlo?

TS: In the next village which must be very frustrating. They can physically see their houses from Georgia every day. Their former houses, but anyway.

But yes, it was a less visible situation when we arrived in 1995. It was already something like eight years that they had been living in these containers which was far beyond their initial expectation. They expected that six months later they'd have a house but then the Soviet Union collapsed so it was less visible because the country was also doing a lot worse.

There were electricity problems, water problems, all kind of problems and the roads were miserable but now there is a gradual improvement in Yerevan at least so the contrast between the people living badly and the rest of the population is greater. However, in that group that is living very badly we also have a lot of locals who have fallen between the chairs as they say, or just haven't managed. They're living together with the refugees.

You can see a very nice new construction, the new AUA building, right across the street, and then somewhere else in the city you can see a very miserable collective center where only sixty percent of the inhabitants are refugees. Only? That's a lot and as a result, we always face the challenge of what to do with the locals. You don't want to say we can fix your life but not yours because somehow another injustice takes place.

In Banavan, for example, there are two collective centers. One is mainly comprised of refugees while the other is made up of locals. We're going to build houses for thirteen refugees but there are nine local families and I'm tearing my hair out wondering what we're going to do.

It's not a problem to get the land from the Mayor of Ararat and the infrastructure is only another twenty meters of pipe but every time we're there interviewing, making sure, making the right selection of refugee families, the locals are asking, what about us?

And I'm saying, I can't promise anything. I don't want to say no, the answer's probably no and it is as of today, but as much as I would like to, what are we going to do? We can't go in as the Norwegian Refugee Council and build homes for the forty percent that are locals. We can build for one, two or even three percent [of the locals] but not more.


OK: When you work in a village you're also working on the infrastructure such as schools, so this must have a positive effect on the rest of the village whether it's inhabited mainly by refugees or not.

TS: We've stopped the school program and I'm glad we did because now there's a program of optimization and I'm worried that they're going to close some of the schools that we fixed up [laughs].

But, for example, in Silikyan, we managed to persuade the city of Yerevan and the Ministry of Urban Development to prioritize infrastructure for the refugees. That was the agreement we had. We would build sixty-six houses including most of the infrastructure if they built the main sewage line. We put in $700,000 and asked for $80-100,000 from them, a small amount compared to what we were spending.

The idea is that the main sewage line will provide sewage facilities not only for the refugees but also for every house in the village. As the sewage line has to go through the village in order to reach the refugees every other family can put a toilet in their house which they've never been able to before. The refugees brought them something good and that's what we like to do.


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. 240,000? We know there's probably not that many. Besides, when refugees become citizens we don't take them out of that number and still call them refugees. So, in a way, there's probably significantly less refugees in Armenia than there were.

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