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CHAREKTAR, Azerbaijan (Reuters) – Still wearing the camouflage uniform in which he had fought Azeri forces a week earlier, Arsen, an ethnic Armenian, lit a fire Saturday under his sister’s dining room table in the small town. of Charektar.
When the flames took over the flames with the help of cardboard strips, he used a wooden chair to break the windows and sheets of the ground-floor house and try to spread the fire, which soon consumed the entire house.
“They’ll be here tomorrow morning. The Azeris. Fuck them. Let them live here, if they can,” he said, as the fire started.
At the next door, gray smoke rose from what was left of his own house.
Armenians are resorting to a scorched earth policy as the clock ticks towards handing over territory to Azerbaijan under a Russian-brokered peace agreement that followed six weeks of fighting between ethnic Armenian forces and Azerbaijani troops in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and surrounding areas. .
Nestled in the mountains, Charektar is a small town in the Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan, which borders Nagorno-Karabakh.
It is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but has been controlled by ethnic Armenians since the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s. On Sunday, the Azeris will return and regain control of the area.
Arsen, 35, who declined to give his last name, said he and other ethnic Armenians did not want to leave anything useful to the Azeris.
“They will have to build their own houses from scratch,” he said.
Reuters reporters saw six houses, around half the town, on fire in Charektar on Saturday.
One man, who declined to give his name, said that the Armenians carried as much as they could in nearby trucks loaded with household belongings.
Tears and fears
Some Armenian residents visited the area on Saturday to see it, possibly for the last time, and to witness the village burning.
An Armenian woman was crying as she watched.
Arsen said he learned about the peace deal from other fighters.
“They called me and told me: go home and take everything you have. They (the Azeris) must enter the region on 15 (November),” he recalled.
He and his wife planned to go with their four children to Armenia and rent a flat there, he said.
When asked why he and other villagers were afraid to stay, he said they were afraid the Azeris would kill them.
“Have you ever seen Armenians and Azeris living together?” he said.
“We are going to leave all the tombstones (of our relatives) here. Nightmare is not the right word.”
(Reuters reporters report, edited by Andrew Osborn and Timothy Heritage)
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