A woman is standing in a basement in the Caucasus. In her early 40s, she is wearing jeans and her black hair falls loosely to her shoulders. She points to the corner where she once huddled with her family as a young woman and indicates the staircase where a shell bored into her brother's body. She shows the crate out of which she pulled the Kalashnikov every time her father went to the front.
The woman who is leading the way through the basement, a cellar that used to be used for food storage before becoming a bomb shelter, is Armine Aleksanyan, the deputy foreign minister of Nagorno-Karabakh (also known as Artsakh). She is a woman with power, proud and divorced.
Thanks to an historic opportunity, she has risen to a position that she otherwise never would have been allowed to take. At least not here in this macho republic, a place where men are in the military, guard the borders and shout orders. A place where women, up until two generations ago, covered their mouths with scarves and where traditional gender roles hardly budged despite 70 years of Soviet rule. A place where the pastor at weddings still asks the groom "Do you speak in her name?" and inquires of the bride "Will you be obedient?"
A Laboratory Experiment
All of it is aimed at Azerbaijan, a country with which Nagorno-Karabakh has been at war ever since it declared its independence in 1991. In total, the conflict has thus far cost the lives of 40,000 people on both sides and driven more than a million people from their homes. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the result of the violence has been a laboratory experiment: It is possible to observe here what happens if women are simply left to do their thing and their path to power is not closed off. None of them have sought out this fate.
They aren't declared feminists and are no more involved in gender debates than the women in Germany who cleaned up the rubble following World War II.But what have the women made out of this unique opportunity? What can other women learn from them?
In Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Aleksanyan has an office on the first floor of the Foreign Ministry, a small building sandwiched between two decaying concrete-block buildings. A photo of a donkey hangs on the wall above her desk.
Being an Accessory
Women in Nagorno-Karabakh assert themselves cautiously, with strategic cleverness. It is apparent when the deputy foreign minister explains her complex country to visitors or when she stays in the background so that her boss, the foreign minister, gets all the credit.
Men, Aleksanyan and all the women here well know, must be gently convinced and cannot be given the impression that they are no longer necessary or that they are being pushed aside. It is important that their public roles not be infringed upon -- which is apparent on the streets of Stepanakert. In public, women are accessories, dressed to the nines like the Kardashian sisters and strutting about in knee-high boots beneath short skirts on the arms of their men, who wear angular fur hats.
'So Few of Us'
What you won't hear from either women or men here are stories of paternalism or officiousness that women must endure from male colleagues or men at large despite the large number of women in leadership positions."We are unfamiliar with violence against women," says the education minister. She says she can't think of any other country in the world that is safer for women. Is it because of all the soldiers and security personnel? "It's because there are so few of us," she says, echoing something that almost all women in Nagorno-Karabakh say. Because everybody knows everybody else, men cannot afford any kind of a scandal.
Artsakh State University, where Manush Minasyan works, is located not quite two kilometers from the ministry. With her dark, pageboy haircut and warm voice, Minasyan is the first female rector of the university, and she always saw numbers as a challenge, never viewing math as a male domain. She studied statistics and went on to lead the country's tax office. "Our country offers tremendous opportunities for women," she says.
Blossoming Hope
The front line runs through Talish, a border town at the foot of a green range of hills, with young men wearing wispy moustaches facing each other, each with their blood types sewn onto their uniforms. Talish is little more than a field of rubble, with almost every house in the village having been damaged or destroyed in the hostilities, yards littered with shell craters. Almost every night, residents say, artillery can be heard. It is a village of men. They bulldoze the rubble away and work on rebuilding the festival hall -- all while drinking vodka out of soft drink bottles.
But there are also places where hope is blossoming like a delicate flower, places that are home to people less involved in this eternal conflict between Muslims and Christians. They are people like Nana, a dark-haired 27-year-old who is bursting with curiosity.
Nana is a political scientist whose job it is to lead the institutions of higher education in Nagorno-Karabakh into the modern era, to attract professors from abroad and establish exchange programs. She went to university in Armenia and could have launched her career there, but she decided to return. "Because I'm more needed here," she says in explanation. When Nana hears the proverb that is familiar to everyone in the country, "Women are the backbone that supports the head, which is male," she becomes enraged.
'Back to the Mines'
Nana is part of a new generation in the country, one that is a step further along than the education minister and the deputy foreign minister. Their notion of a peaceful Nagorno-Karabakh goes beyond the establishment of a peace deal with Azerbaijan. These younger women didn't live through the war in the 1990s and the Four Day War in April 2016 was for them just a brief nightmare. They think less in terms of perpetrators and victims and hardly differentiate anymore between men and women.
Thus far, just 10 percent of those working in minesweeping are women. But in summer, when the ground becomes softer, the number is set to double. This small country full of weapons needs them badly: Nagorno-Karabakh has one of the highest concentrations of landmines and cluster bombs in the world.
"I never again want to live through this hell," Warditer says, who was standing next to her uncle when he stepped on a mine and was blown to bits. "My work," she says, putting her hand on her heart, "will not have been done in vain."
Fiona Ehlers writesin DER SPIEGEL news magazine.The article appeared in SPIEGEL ONLINE.
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