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

OK: There appears to be some momentum building up with the number of refugees taking citizenship in the past few years. Why do you think that is?

TS: I think the Government is very keen but at the end of the day, there's been a change of generation after fifteen years and some people have simply given up. Many now understand that keeping their refugee status doesn't entitle them to more food, clothing or a home. If a refugee has become a citizen we don't refuse to build them a house. They have a piece of paper that says they were formally refugees. It's their living conditions that matter.


OK: You don't you have to be a citizen to get a house?

TS: You don't have to be a citizen to receive a house from the NRC but -- and this is a big and a very important but -- to privatize the land underneath you have to be a citizen, so effectively, yes.


OK: But with regards to social benefits like PAROS?

TS: PAROS does not discriminate between locals and refugees. Basically, there is no advantage in remaining a refugee. They don't lose their right to compensation for property lost in Azerbaijan as a result of the conflict and I think that this has been a big boost to people.


OK: But some refugees are still reluctant, for example, to take citizenship because they lose exemption from military service.

TS: Have you ever met a refugee who didn't do his military service? I tell them that they don't have to serve in the army but they disagree. I have never met a refugee who has ever used their status to avoid serving in the military.


OK: However, I remember that about four years ago, UNHCR were getting very upset about the fact that the military were ignoring documents exempting refugees from serving.

TS: If someone says that they're a refugee and refuses to serve in the army then they're seen as a coward. That's the impression I get and nobody here wants to be seen like that. I have even met one refugee who would rather find a medical reason for avoiding military service than use his refugee status.


OK: In areas where both refugees and locals are living is there sometimes friction between the two communities?

TS: In general, I have actually been very surprised at how few problems there are. I can even remember one particular occasion when after we built a house for an elderly refugee couple, a woman came up to us. I thought she was coming for a fight but she instead she wanted to thank us for helping people that had suffered more than her. They deserved a house, she said, and I thought, whoa, where did that come from? So, I haven't had a lot of complaints in that sense. However, the Karabaghtsis tend to get more upset and say that they lost everything just like the rich people from Baku. I can understand them completely.


OK: You don't build houses for people displaced from Karabagh?

TS: If we go into a village and there are fifteen families living in containers, and this is a new policy from our side that I have worked very hard for, and one family is local and another is from Karabagh, we've decided to fix the housing problem for the whole village and not to treat people differently. If they're living very badly in containers we want to treat them as equally as possible. The challenge for us, however, is where is the line drawn between too many locals and not enough refugees? If it's thirteen refugees and two locals, that's okay but if it's ten refugees and five locals is that too many locals? And what does that mean? Do we build just for the refugees and not the locals, or do we not build for everybody? It's like a moving target.


OK: Where does your funding come from?

TS: Almost every cent comes from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry although we did receive some donations for about ten houses through Armenian International Magazine (AIM). This year, we're also working in cooperation with Bars Media to make a twenty-minute fundraising film that paints a true and sympathetic portrait of why we do what we do. Refugees don't cry and sob; they're fighters and they complain a lot. They scream and yell and that's who they are, right? So, we're going to present that in the film and shoot a true picture of how they're living. We're even going to show a family that lives in one of our houses but still isn't happy.

Why not? That's part of our reality too so why aren't they happy? We're going to weave that in with what it's like to be a refugee and why we should help them. We have to remember that it's very easy to think that because they complain that they must be stupid but they're not. What they do have, however, is "learned helplessness." This is a term that came up in a couple of seminars we had recently. We're building houses for refugees and a few of them still aren't happy and don't take care of their homes. So far, we know of only one house that has been sold which is simply amazing but even if ten are sold, we should still be building houses.

But when they ring or come to the office to complain that they don't have telephones, that they don't have showers or that they want to be provided with a bus to take them to the city or they don't say thank you it makes us frustrated. Nobody's happy so what is this? This is when a person has been through a trauma and hasn't been able to adapt to their new environment. They've been stamped as being inferior and are considered different because they speak a funny kind of Armenian or perhaps only Russian. How do you talk to people like this? How do you relate to people like that? This is a real challenge.

I don't know how many times I've sat in the car feeling rather happy that we've been able to help people but all we do is get yelled at. And then there are other incidents. For example, one family that we built a house for said it's wonderful, it's wonderful but then complained that the turning radius of the stairway was too small to get a coffin up to the second floor. Our only reaction was that they've got be nuts but in a way this is part of the "learned helplessness" thing.

To express the emotion of I wasn't born here, this isn't my home, I don't feel like I truly belong here, they're going to find something even if it’s the color of the tiles in the bathroom or the color of the carpeting or something else like the turning radius of this coffin to hang their frustrations on and it becomes disproportionately large. I mean, how many funerals do they have in these houses? Hopefully not too many but this is what this particular person got hung up on.

We had another incident up in Gyumri where we gave someone a new house and he came to complain that the toilet wasn't working. He said it was broken and that we had to come and fix it. He said that he'd been trying to dry the water in the toilet but that it kept on getting wet. He didn't even know how to use a toilet. He had literally never seen a western toilet before so the situation was in our eyes, oh great, a new toilet, but for him it was, what the heck is this? I don't know what to do with this. This isn't what I'm used to. This is stress. This isn't the huge help that I was hoping it was, or it is but it's going to take some time getting used to.

OK: The majority of refugees came from Baku or other cities in Azerbaijan?

TS: Many of them came from Baku but not all of them. This particular person came from a village where there were no toilets.


OK: The reason I'm asking is because coming from a city like Baku it must be difficult to adjust to life in the countryside.

TS: True. I remember two or three years ago the World Food Program were literally teaching refugees from Baku which end of the potato to put in the ground. That’s one of the bigger challenges for urban refugees that are now living rurally.


OK: Do you think that the younger generation is adapting and it's just a question of age?

TS: Definitely, in every case.


OK: Is that the same for language?

TS: Yes, sure.

OK: So many really have become integrated here?

TS: Yes, even some of the older ones who lived in Baku up until their late teens. However, I know a guy who's 21 or 22 and he's from Baku. He left when he was four or five and when I was sitting in the Artbridge Cafe one day with a visitor from Norway who was evaluating our shelter project, Sasha came in. I asked Catherine if she would she like to talk to a refugee who has an apartment in Yerevan and hasn't been helped by us so that she could compare that with those refugees we build houses for in the regions.

He sat down and told her that his father was one of the best tailors in Baku. Sasha's very proud and is used to fighting this label of being a refugee. Then, Catherine happened to mention that she had just come from Baku and he asked whether she had been down to the docks. We started to speak about the center of Baku, the fish market and the restaurant on the docks and you could see that he was melting in a way.

He can't remember much, but from his parents, I guess, or some vague memories of Baku, he still got very emotional about it even though he's 21 or 22 years old.

OK: I remember making a journey to Karabagh and spoke to two teenagers who were refugees. They said that they didn't like it in Armenia and that they also didn't like it in Karabagh but they did remember how beautiful Baku was. However, they also understood that they were never going back.

TS: It's an intellectual memory. It's too vague for them to remember and just something warm and fuzzy in a way. There was another young refugee guy from Baku and I asked him if he would fight for Karabagh if there was another conflict. He said yes, but only for his brothers from Baku. He would fight for his fellow refugees because they were the ones that had sacrificed everything. For Armenia, however, he said he would never fight, which is strange but he was very adamant on that. I really chewed on that. What is that mentality?

OK: How many houses have you built?

TS: Since 1995, about 650.


OK: And what is the average size of a family? Can you put a number on how many people that is?

TS: I can dig out the statistics [TS Note: approximately 3,000].


OK: I mean a family would be quite large, at least four people.

TS: No, if you think that sixty percent of the refugees are women and that many are older, I'd say that the average size of the family in the case of the 66 houses in Silikyan, for example, is three to four.


OK: The interesting thing about Silikyan is that these are mainly the families of men that died in Shahumian.

TS: These people lost a lot more brothers and fathers than those who were expelled from Baku. The refugees from Shahumian had a really tough time, walking for days and days through minefields and getting shot at.

Page 2 of 5