Currently I am working with writer Arthur Huizinga on the story ‘OFF SIDE’, the story of FK Qarabagh Aghdam, a football club-in-exile, which will be published at the end of this year in book form.
FK Qarabagh Aghdam is an Azerbaijani refugee club that suffered terribly from the war with Armenia in the early nineties. Its hometown of Aghdam, is an unaccessible, true ghost-city in the centre of one of the seven districts of Azerbaijan surrounding Nagorno Karabagh proper occupied by Karabagh-Armenian forces. FK Qarabagh Aghdam to this day exists as a footballclub-in-exile longing for an ill-fated return to their homeground.
The club is a sole remnant of the past and a living symbol of hope and pride for over half a million Azerbaijani refugees. In recent years, thanks to their achievements on the pitch, the club has been able to inspire and initiate special projects enforcing stability and development in the refugee-settlements near the border of Nagorno Karabagh.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
FK Qarabagh Aghdam was founded in 1987 as a successor to different previous football oufits in the city of Aghdam, a major agricultural centre in Eastern Azerbaijan beneath the flanks of mountainous Nagorno Karabakh. When full scale war started during the early nineties, the Imaret-stadium in downtown Agdam remained packed for home matches. Even when bombs started falling on the city in June and July 1993, football continued.
The city was sieged by Armenian troops on July 23rd 1993. Players and staff of the club had to flee, along with over 100.000 remaining inhabitants of the city, and started a modern odyssee which eventually led them to the capital Baku. The club never stopped playing and, motivated by their pledge to the people of Agdam, reached both the cup final and the final of the league playoffs. Without having a stadium and a fanbase scattered around the country, FK Qarabagh won them both, taking the very first double in independent Azerbaijan.
Meanwhile, ties with their hometown of Agdam were cut indefinitely. When a provisional ceasefire over the Nagorno Karabakh-conflict was concluded in 1994, Agdam found itself in the core of an Armenian controlled miltary bufferzone. The city was stripped of all usable materials, leaving only piles of stone as a macabre resemblance of former life. Annual peacetalks, aiming at a formal peace-agreement which should guarantee at least the withdrawal of Armenian forces in the bufferzone, are stone dead, offering no perspective of a return for its inhabitants. The people of Agdam are scattered around the country, many of them living in refugee settlements near the border of Agdam or in squatted buildings in the major cities awaiting the day of return. Deprived from any perspective on improvement of their daily lives, many of them cling on to 'their' football outfit.
FK Qarabagh Aghdam is based nowadays in Baku. Home matches used to be played in front of a couple of hundred fans, many of them brought in with buses from the refugee-settlements near Aghdam, a seven hour ride from Baku. In June 2009 FK Qarabagh Aghdam went back to the home base – less than 20 kilometres from their destroyed city - playing most of their home matches in a new stadium among the settlements in the Aghdam-region.
FK Qarabagh Aghdam never forgot it’s resonsibility towards the refugees from Aghdam. In 2009 they returned to the unoccupied part of the Aghdam-district to play their home-matches, initiated special youth programs to engage youth from the settlements and enjoyed an unprecedented run in the Europa League with a team made up of youthful local players.