Gala Danilova
BY GALA DANILOVA
The arrival of Arayik Harutyunyan in California this Thanksgiving is an opportunity for the people of Nagorno Karabakh to thank Armenian Americans for all the support you have shown us in recent years.
Those of you with relatives in Karabakh know how hard life has been since the war of 1992 – 1994. My family and I were forced to flee Baku in 1988 and spent five years camped out in a cramped refugee shelter in Stepanakert. We were among the lucky ones – my aunt escaped alive after she was trapped under a heavily bombed five-story building – but pain and death were part of our daily existence.
My people have lived with the legacy of the conflict long after the ceasefire. We are hugely dependent on agriculture, but the deadly presence of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines has driven many rural communities into deep poverty and caused terrible accidents. Indeed, we have one of the highest per capita rates of mine-caused injury or death in the world.
The US government recognized this and has dedicated funds to the organization I work for, the HALO Trust, since 2000. HALO’s mission is to get mines out of the ground and clear up the debris of war for good. Thanks in large part to the US Government we have now cleared 426 minefields in Karabakh and I am proud to be one of 140 Karabakhi Armenian men and women employed to do this. However, we are limited in the way that we can use our government funds: we cannot use them outside the Soviet boundary of Karabakh and the vast majority of minefields that remain are outside this territory. HALO refers to these as the “green areas.â€
