Varazdat Gasparyan has never met his father. After his mother’s death, Varazdat decided to search for his father and found him in the U.S. when he was 27 years old. As for 65 year-old Iraqi Armenian Vardine Hakobyan, who has worked for an American organization for two years in Iraq, has been discriminated by Muslims and after losing all her money, took refuge in Armenia in 2004. She is currently looking for her younger brother.
In 2005, when she had lost all hope and was deciding to leave for Syria, her brother appeared.
“It’s hard to lose a family member, but it’s overwhelming to find the person you’re looking for. We’ll help you search and find.” This is the slogan of the Armenian Red Cross “Search Service”, which has helped Varazdat and Vardine find their loved ones. According to head of the service Nune Aslanyan, search applications have increased during the past year and this mainly has to do with the illegal migration factor. In 2005, out of the 100 applicants, 45 have found who they were looking for. According to Aslanyan, in general 60-70% of the applicants get positive results thanks to the computer data base of the Armenian Red Cross and the worldwide network of the American Red Cross. The Red Cross also gets help from state officials. The head of the search team says that there are many cases of migration based on economic status, for example, when the woman is looking for her husband, or vice versa.
N. Aslanyan recalled another case: a man from Vanadzor had been searching for his son Arsen Chilingiryan for the past seven years. Arsen had gone to Russia in search of work. The father didn’t know anything about him. After the search, it turned out that Arsen had lost his documents and is currently in one of the banks in Chechnya. The search continues to this day.
According to Aslanyan, citizens who were victims of the 1988 earthquake still haven’t been found.
People not only lose each other during wars or earthquakes, but also in peaceful conditions. The “Team” NGO started implementing the “Meeting Spot” search project two years ago. By working with French and Russian Internet web sites, they have searched and found 150 people out of the thousand applications. According to the representative of the organization, there are practically no search teams in Armenia and the ones that do exist don’t work efficiently due to lack of financial resources.
“For example, there are leased Internet search web sites around the world, which help you find who you’re looking for,” says the NGO representative.
Experts place high emphasis on the role of television. The Russian “Zhdi Menya” (Wait for Me) television program has a large audience of viewers. Throughout the past five years, the staff has received more than a million applications. Armenian television channels don’t broadcast these kinds of programs. In 2004, the Public Television made an attempt to start a program called “Destinies”. The staff was not able to find anyone during that short time. According to one of the public television workers, the author of the project did not fulfill his promises and the group failed. After the Karabagh war, June 29 has been added to the Armenian holiday calendar as the day of missing soldiers. Based on different sources, there are 79 missing soldiers after the Karabagh war, while there are 100 military hostages in Azerbaijani prisons.
One of the missions of the American Red Cross International Committee (RCIC) delegation of Armenia is to search for the missing citizens and soldiers of the Karabagh war. There are 3165 missing people in the new lists of the committee and that list has been presented to the Armenian authorities.
During an interview, delegate Katherine Patronoffe told us that she has started to get involved in finding the missing people. The organization works with everyone. In 2006, the RCIC plans on collecting information regarding the physical status, as well as personal information about the missing people. The delegate wasn’t able to say how long it will take and when they will actually start recognizing the corpses because they still have to overcome some obstacles, such as the allocation of graves.
“Whoever has fought in the war knows where we can allocate the graves. Some graves can be allocated in Karabagh or other places, but the RCIC can’t show an exact site. But we are currently negotiating with the authorities to allow us to do that,” says Mrs. Patronoffe. She also said that the RCIC is ready to help the authorities in recognizing the corpses, provide regional forensic medicine doctors, train the local specialists and show technical aid. The delegate stated the fact that citizens and soldiers sometimes cross the border if it’s safe (sometimes due to foggy weather) and find themselves in Azerbaijan. When something like that happens, the RCIC asks the authorities for permission to visit the prisons and be assured that they will return to Armenia. They actually help them come back to the Homeland. The last time this happened was on December 15, 2005, when an Armenian woman moved from the northern section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border to Armenia. According to the RCIC, there have been 655 similar cases ever since 1994.
P.S. The names of the missing people stated in the beginning of the article were made up in order to keep everything confidential.