Armenians testify about how they fled Nagorno-Karabakh, abandoned to their fate by the whole world.
Sept. 19 is yet another date etched in Armenian collective memory as a day of disaster. The civilian army of Artsakh, better known to the outside world by its Russian name of Nagorno-Karabakh, handed over its arms to the Azerbaijani army. This after a siege that lasted nine months.
President Aliyev's tanks roll into the main town of Stepanakert. The Azerbaijani authorities' words are weighed. 'We call on the Armenians who went to Armenia to return,' he said. 'We are ready to embrace them,' a representative of the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry declared to the first foreign journalists in the area.
Yet in the days that followed, the bulk of Artsakh's 120,000 ethnic Armenians fled the territory. Many declare fear of ethnic cleansing.
Soon Nagorno-Karabakh disappeared from the headlines. Before long, the term will be dropped from our dictionaries. Admittedly, the exclave never seemed to have a long life.
Journalist Johannes Decat and photographer Emiel Petrovitch spoke with numerous refugee families in Armenia. They testified about months of oppression, famine and greedy Russian peacekeepers. How did it come to this? And what does the future look like for the small country?
'We searched the forest for food'
We drive through the gray rain clouds that seem to rise from Lake Sevan to the village of Norabak, in an eastern corner of Armenia. Here, barely 10 kilometers from the border with Azerbaijan, lies the dilapidated farm of the Khandunts family. After the capture of Artsakh, 13 fleeing family members were forced to find shelter here with their grandmother.
From behind the blanket of fog, the outlines of a woman appear. She has a broad smile and her arms mill. In black heels, she searches for balance among the potholes in the road surface. Our car slows down. "Alisa," she introduces herself. In the typical dialect of Artsakh, she shows us the way to her grandmother's farm.
We are led inside to the kitchen of the house. The rain drums loudly on the roof. In the center of the room, a metal bathtub catches raindrops, one after the other, faster and faster.
The women are all sitting together at a long table. The men have migrated to Yerevan to register family members as refugees. Mother Epraksia is cleaning mushrooms.
'It takes me back to the time of the siege of Artsakh,' says Alisa. 'The supermarket shelves were empty, so we ate what we could find in the forest, supplemented with canned food.' Instead of coffee, they ground acorns into a powder that they let dissolve in hot water.
Many families testify about the effects of that blockade. An often-heard description is that a pack of cigarettes cost 14 euros converted, while in Armenia you pay about half a euro.
"There was an Azerbaijani position about 500 meters from our house," Alisa testifies. She describes how they could no longer take up their garden where they grew potatoes, watermelons and tomatoes. 'As soon as we entered the vegetable garden, we were shot at.'
The men of the house had all joined the defense army of the self-proclaimed republic of Artsach. It was an army composed mostly of ordinary citizens.
On Sept. 19, all hell broke loose. 'The Azerbaijani army opened fire on our house. 'We were right on the front line,' Alisa explained. Soldiers of the defense army had holed up in their house. Alisa herself was in Stepanakert at the time.
Mother Epraksia climbed out through the window with her seven children and grandson. 'On the street it was too dangerous because of artillery fire, so they couldn't use the front door,' Alisa said, taking her infant son, aged one year and three months, on her lap.
Not much later, the Azerbaijani army would take the house. Alisa's father and brother were taken prisoner of war.
A day later, Artsakh's defending army surrendered. Because of the blockade and without support from the motherland, the area had become indefensible. The civilian soldiers surrendered their weapons and the bulk of the POWs were released, including Alisa's father and brother. Several commanders of the defense army were reportedly detained and taken to the Azerbaijani capital Baku, however.
For tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians, the exodus from their native region began that day. For the Khandunts family, the trek to the Armenian border town of Goris, in other circumstances a one-and-a-half-hour drive, would take 38 hours. They left on foot, so took only what they could carry: their passports and some food.
'From our village we walked a long way until an armored fighting vehicle of the Russian peacekeeping forces caught up with us,' recounted Alisa's mother, Epraksia. 'They escorted us all the way to Stepanakert airport.'
Just about every fleeing Armenian passed through that airport, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed. They were given provisions there and could refuel for free. They were reunited with Alisa, Alisa's father and her wounded brother.
One moment during that trip continues to haunt her, Alisa tells us. "On the Hakkari Bridge, we stopped in front of an Azerbaijani checkpoint. They didn't even ask for our papers. ‘Either you speak Azeri or you don't, a soldier snapped at us. That's when I knew it was done, Artsakh was history.'
All available cars and trucks were used to flee to Armenia.
Abandoned
Many Armenians saw the capture of Artsakh coming from afar. Yet Armenia appeared to be barely prepared for the large influx of refugees. Some of the displaced are able to stay with relatives. Those without relatives in the motherland seek shelter in abandoned buildings.
One of them is Grisha Asryan. He waits for us at the entrance gate of an old industrial site in a suburb of Yerevan. We follow him past giant steel pipes and the carcasses of old Soviet trucks to the former administration building. There he found shelter on the second floor.
He too fled his native village, Gandzasar, on Sept. 19. 'I had left my village only twice until then, each time to go to a hospital in another city.' But this third time, the departure was probably permanent.
Throughout his life, Grisha worked as a street performer in the Gandzasar monastery. Against the door of the room, he demonstrates a handstand while singing traditional songs from his native region. Alone in this rundown building, he is like a fish out of water. Here there are no tourists to entertain.
Grisha describes his hasty departure from his native region. Besides his phone, he has only managed to snatch his personal documents with him. He did not have time to snatch his savings, some million Russian rubles (a mere 10,000 euros). Let alone his white horse.
'I've been saving all my life,' he prevaricates. 'Now I have nothing except these clothes.' The shoes he is wearing were given to him by humanitarian workers along the way, he adds. Grisha is clearly confused. The images of the events of the past few days seem to blend together. 'When the Azerbaijani army opened fire on Sept. 19, I was wounded. Two fellow villagers died. One of them was a little boy.' 'I heard children screaming. They were running away. No one understood exactly where the shots came from.' 'Members of the administration in the village called for us to run away as fast as we could.' That's how Grisha finally ended up in Stepanakert. By his own account, he lived on the streets for three days. He states that he ate nothing during those days.
"Some Azerbaijani soldiers handed out cookies, but I refused to take them. After another three days, Grisha reached the Armenian border town of Goris. He stayed there for a while, hoping to be reunited with his wife and sister. In vain. At the time of the interview, he has not heard from them. On his phone screen, Grisha shows us images of Azerbaijani soldiers shooting at the Gandzasar monastery. ' 'They even took aim at the cemetery, where there are many old tombstones.' To Grisha, Baku's intentions are clear: 'They want to wipe out not only the Armenians, but also Armenian history in Artsakh.'
'We feel abandoned by the outside world,' Grisha exclaims. 'But Artsakh is ours. One day we will return.' It sounds like vain hope. For now, it seems that Sept. 19 will go down in the history books as the day Armenian Artsakh ceased to exist.
The future seems uncertain for Armenia. Either Baku decides to leave it at that. Or, and this is what many Armenians fear, Aliyev feels emboldened by the impunity in the capture of Artsakh and sets out on a subsequent offensive. Indeed, it has long been toying with the idea of forcing a transportation corridor between motherland Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan. Such a corridor would run through southern Armenia.
Although that corridor is not there yet, Aliyev already gave the creature a name: the Zangezur Corridor. Strong neighbor Turkey would also like to see such a corridor. It would connect Turkey with the rest of the so-called Turkish world.
It seems a matter of time before Aliyev decides to force the famous Zangezur Corridor by force.
Even then, Armenia will probably be on its own. Little help can again be expected from Russia. And Europe can hardly be counted on either, as September showed.
‘Either you speak Azeri or you don't, a soldier snapped at us. That's when I knew it was done, Artsakh was history.'
- Alisa Kandunts
Text by Johannes Decat
Apache Magazine - Winter 2023 - Full article