Natalya Martirosyan
Armenia

Natalya Martirosyan has been Co-Chair of the National Committee of the Helsinki Citizen's Assembly (HCA) in Armenia since 1992. In this position, she worked with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Minsk Group, to broker the 1995 cease-fire that suspended the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Her first meeting with Azeris in this effort took place in the border city of Idjevan in 1992 — the height of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. A professor of ecology and law at Yerevan University, Dr. Martirosyan also teaches a course on human rights. In 1990, she was elected to the Yerevan City Council in the first elections in Armenia following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Dr. Martirosyan's peace-building activities include:

• helping select women interested in cross-community, cooperative work in conflict resolution and peace building and helping plan a civil forum bringing together government, intergovernmental agency, and NGO representatives to discuss the role of refugee women in the peace process for the 2002 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) regional project, "Women for Conflict Resolution and Peace Building in the Southern Caucasus";
• serving as Country Coordinator for "Working Together-Networking Women in the South Caucasus," a three-year regional project of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe that has trained women trainers in democracy and community building and held civil, cross-border forums on democracy and leadership;
• participating in a 1994 meeting devoted to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that included Armenian, Azeri, and Swedish NGOs and representatives of the government of Sweden and was organized by the Olaf Palmer Center;
• representing the HCA in 1996 and 1997 at "Common Migration Space in the South Caucasus," organized by the International Organization for Migration and the Norwegian Refugee Council and participating in the 1996 "Mediation and Human Rights Monitoring Course" organized by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the United Nations Volunteers; and
• participating in the ongoing "South Caucasus Network for Civil Accord," an international project of (HCA's partner organization) the British East-West Center in which Armenians and Azeris were surveyed on their visions of a peaceful future.

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