Ethnic Wars Bring Orphans to a Moscow Shelter

For months 13-year-old Andrei Moskovtsev lived with violence, seeing children and adults shot randomly and bombs explode on the streets of his neighborhood in Moldova.


One day in September, a group of charity workers took Andrei out of Moldova and moved him to what seemed like another world: a former government dacha outside of Moscow.


The move took Andrei and about 200 other children out of danger and into comfortable seclusion and care in a home for children who were orphaned or displaced by ethnic wars in the former Soviet republics.


"If adults can't solve their problems without blood, we don't want to have the blood of children", said Yury Faiyerman, vice-president of the International House of Orphans, the nonprofit charity that arranged to move the children. "Many of these children lost their parents in military conflict and have nowhere to live".


The charity was created in 1991 by celebrity artists and musicians who wanted to help children in the Iran-Iraq war. The group raised more than $1 million in a London concert and donated the money to the United Nations to get the children out of war zones, Faiyerman said. The charity's head office was then moved from London to Moscow.


The children in the charity's rented dacha are from Moldova, where ethnic Russians and Romanians have been fighting since late 1990, and from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed enclave where Armenians and Azer-baijanis have been battling for the past four years.


Most of the Nagorno-Karabakh children in the orphanage are Armenians who lost their fathers in the war. The Moldovah children also lost relatives to bullets.


The children are among the 400, 000 refugees flooding into Russia from former Soviet republics. With such a large number of refugees, the Russian government has yet to set up specific, long-term programs for displaced children, said Alexander Ibragimov, deputy director of the Federal Immigration Service for the Commonwealth of Independent States.


Faiyerman, vice-president of the charity, believes that a rising tide of nationalism in Russia is preventing the development of programs designed to help people who are not Russian, even children.


"When we speak about orphans we're not talking about nationalities or politics", Faiyerman said. "We are all God's children. Children are our future. By helping them, we help our future".


From the rambling dacha outside of Moscow, the refugee children go to school and cultural events with Russian children. Eventually, the charity hopes to have teachers and war-zone children from around the world. Children from Bosnia may arrive soon, Faiyerman said.


Despite the relative tranquility of the Moscow countryside, most of the children said they would rather be at home.


"It's better at home", said Dmitry Konstantinov, 13, trying hard not to cry. "That's where my mom is. I have nobody here".


Irina Akopyan, a precocious 12-year-old in thick glasses who speaks Armenian and Russian and describes herself as "everybody's friend", tried to explain. Even though her father was killed and her home destroyed in the war, Irina said, she wants to return.


"Of course it's better for us to stay here", she said. "But we're afraid for our mothers and relatives who live on the front line".