Armenian Veterans of Afghan War Struggle

While Armenians remember their victories over Azerbaijan, or over Germany in World War Two, one group of veterans is overlooked by society: those of the ignominious Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

One of them is Levon Baldryan, 40, who has a prosthetic leg, needs sticks to walk, and cannot even afford the bus ride to the centre of Yerevan from his home in the suburb of Nor Nork.

He has recently started studies at the psychology faculty of the private Urartu University, where few of his younger fellow-students know he is a veteran not just of the Karabakh war, where he lost his leg, but Afghanistan too.

Called up to the Soviet army in 1988, he at first had no idea he was being sent to Afghanistan, which Moscow had been trying to control since troops first invaded in 1979.

“But on arrival in Uzbekistan, we realised,” he said. He was one of about 24 friends and neighbours who were sent to Afghanistan’s northern neighbour from Armenia.

He served in Afghanistan until February 1989, when Moscow finally admitted it could not impose its will on the country, and wonders if the trauma of the war explains why he has never got married, or moved out of his parents’ home.

More than 500,000 Soviet servicemen fought in Afghanistan, of whom 3,762 soldiers and 400 officers were from Armenia. Of the Soviet Union’s 14,453 losses in Afghanistan, some 89 were from Armenia. A further 300 Armenians were disabled.

Almost as soon as Baldryan returned to Armenia, he left for Nagorny Karabakh, the enclave where the local Armenians were fighting Azerbaijan for control of their homes. On August 15, 1992, he was wounded and surgeons amputated his left leg.

“War is a terrible evil,” he said.

His best friends remain his wartime comrades, “People who you made friends with on the front, their souls are closer.”

These friends helped him when he tried to return to civilian life, and he worked in a transport company owned by one of his comrades for a decade after the war. The firm struggled financially, however, and he lost his job and decided to train as a psychologist.

As a veteran of two wars, he receives a monthly pension of just over 150 US dollars, from which he has to cover the 460 dollars a year he pays for his education, as well as food and living expenses, but he does not complain.

“It is the moral state that matters, not the financial one,” he said, though he hopes the government will help provide somewhere for him to work with his new qualification.

Veterans like Baldryan are occasionally assisted by the Armenian Union of Veterans of the Afghan War, although its payments amount to little more than 50 dollars at most.

The union has 3,100 members, and they – or the relatives of killed servicemen, 160 of whom came home from Afghanistan but died in the Karabakh war - visit its central Yerevan offices for help with problems.

Armen Mkhitaryan, who as a teenager fought for 21 months in the first years of the Afghan conflict, heads the union but takes little pleasure in his status.

“The world doesn’t need any wars. God grant that there are no more,” he said.

“The money that is spent on rockets would be better spent on raising the social condition of that country, on building hospitals and schools, on raising the standard of living.”

He said that the young men going to fight simply trusted that the government had made the right decision but now have to live with the consequences.

“War has a big effect on the life of a person, affects his way of thinking, his worries, his way of life. What you had seen only in films is suddenly there in real life,” he said.

“In Afghanistan, many of us thought that at least we were fighting for our homeland. And then the Artsakh (Karabakh) war started, the Afghan veterans took part in that too.”

Mkhitaryan said many of the veterans need operations, or help with their living conditions, but the union does not have the money to pay for everything. He said the health ministry was prepared to help subsidise invalids’ stays in sanatoria, but that was not sufficient.

“Our warriors often have to travel, for operations or prostheses, to Russia or Germany,” he said.

Previously, veterans of the Afghan war had certain benefits, such as the right to free travel, and the payment of half their utility charges, but these were replaced with a monthly payment of around 12 dollars.

“It would be good if war veterans, and the families of killed warriors, enjoyed better social conditions than those who stayed a long way from the horrors of war,” Mkhitaryan said with a shrug.

As it happens, Armenian troops are back in Afghanistan. Since February this year, some 40 servicemen have been taking part in peace-keeping operations under German command. Their main task is to guard the airport at Kunduz.

Karine Asatryan is the editor of television company A1+’s web site www.a1plus.am