After the 44-day Artsakh war in 2020, the Zoryan Institute of Armenia International Foundation for Research and Development (ZIA) launched the Second Artsakh War Oral History Project (SAWOHP) to collect audio-visual testimonies from a wide demographic of people impacted by the war and its consequences.
The goal of the project is to collect more than 100 interview records. These testimonies are first-hand accounts of the catastrophic historical event, and can help gain more in-depth understanding of the events, the destruction and the traumatic experience of the survivors, not only for research and scholarship, but also for humanitarian relief and aid efforts to the region.
In 1990, the Zoryan Institute also collected first-hand tape-recorded interviews from 45 eyewitnesses and victims of the Sumgait pogroms against Armenians in February 1988. The testimonies were published in the book The Sumgait Tragedy.
To make the SAWOHP interviews available to a wider range of international audience, the Zoryan Institute is collaborating with the Zoryan Institute and AUA Center for Oral History to transcribe the interviews and eventually translate them to English.
The translation project is held in the Zoryan Institute and AUA Center for Oral History. An AUA student and project transcriber Shahen Mtafian, shared the following testimony about the value and impact of the interviews:
"SAWOHP is an opportunity to educate the world about a set of issues and their probable solutions. This is about love and pain merged to show a nation's determination. Inspired by this, as an AUA student, I am taking a big step by preparing to do an oral history-related project for my capstone. Besides, Zoryan Institute's monumental work became so heart-touching that I declared a minor in my university under the name of "Genocide Studies and Human Rights," and I am thinking of continuing my education by going deeper into oral history methods and theories. The experience that I have gained while working on the SAWOH Project will become my all-time guide in my current and future academic life."