“We can no longer live together, it is impossible”: what six weeks of war have done to Nagorno-Karabakh | World News

Imagine what it feels like to receive a two-day notice to pack your house.

The desperate situation follows a war that has already claimed the lives of her children and plunged her nation into bitter defeat.

Now the hastily drafted peace demands that your house be turned over to the victors and it seems you were the last to know.

This is what is happening to ethnic Armenians in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, over which there have been six weeks of struggle.

On a windswept farm above the village of Nor Seysulan, we met a mother who screamed her fury. His sacrifice in this war seems futile and painful.

“Why did they take our children and kill them?” she cries. “They could have simply said, ‘We are giving away the land, go and live your life.’

“I don’t even know where to bring and bury my dead son. Why are they doing this?”

His family has cattle and they do not know how to move it in time.

His surviving son served in Shushi, or Shusha as Azerbaijanis call it. The capture of Shusha was the turning point for Azerbaijan: the moment Armenia realized that the main city of Stepanakert would be next and its chances of victory were gone.

Her son had been in Shushi for six weeks when the order to leave came. One of his relatives was “dead next to me and I didn’t know whether to carry his body or save me,” he says.

“Why should I stay? My brother is dead, my cousin is dead.” Points to her throat. “It would only take a knife here and that’s it.”

This is the story that you hear over and over in Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding regions.

It is unbearable to hear, especially because of the way history has repeated itself in these disputed mountains: lands lost and won by Azerbaijan, won and lost by Armenia in two wars almost 30 years apart.

Civilians on both sides have had to move as borders were drawn and redrew.

Ni Seysulan is one of seven villages that surrendered to Azerbaijan this Friday, along with the city of Aghdam. All were recently built after the last war to house displaced Armenians. Now those Armenians are homeless again.

Ramila Ovanesyan opens the back of a truck. Inside are what looks like a pile of blankets and a memorial stone. “I have three corpses here,” he says. “I am removing a handful of land from my husband, my mother and my father.”

You want to know how the government can provide compensation for what you have lost.

She adds: “My husband was a veteran and he died of cancer and now I’m taking all the stones and the bodies with me and I’m going I don’t know where. At least give me a piece of land where I can bury them. “

Artash Parshanyan, 70, is from Old Maragan and tells us: “First the Turks kicked us out and we came here, and now they are kicking us out again.”

Nobody here refers to Azerbaijan as the victors. It is always the Turks. It is clear who they believe won this war for Azerbaijan.

“Azerbaijan is teaching its newborn children that we are enemies,” says Parshanyan. “They are teaching hate.”

The city of Aghdam, which was returned to Azerbaijan on Friday, was never resettled after it fell to Armenia in 1993. For the first time since then, Azerbaijan has held Friday prayers in the long-abandoned but still standing mosque. .

“The Aghdam region returns to us without firing a single shot or sacrificing a single martyr,” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev tweeted triumphantly. “This is our tremendous political success.”

But there is a terrible cost to the roughly 2,500 civilians who have had to leave nearby villages. As for all those who have already left the mountainous Kalbajar region, sandwiched between Nagorno-Karabakh and northeastern Armenia.

Or those whose houses are in the Lachin corridor, which will pass into Azerbaijani hands on December 1.

These are territories that used to be populated by Azerbaijanis and Kurds. After the ceasefire in 1994, 600,000 people fled to Azerbaijan from Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven surrounding districts of Azerbaijan. The President of Azerbaijan wants them to return. 2020 is your victory and your revenge.

Many of the houses in Kalbajar are already burned. The houses in Nor Seysulan and the villages around Aghdam continue to burn.

More will be burned before this latest territory transfer is completed, in early December. Some Armenians would rather destroy their homes than have Azerbaijanis living in them.

Azerbaijanis will start to return.

There is a welcome message for them sprayed on the wall of a vandalized gas station on the main road through Kalbajar. The spelling is peculiar but the meaning is clear. “Fuck Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani terrorists,” he says.

Georgiy Emilian is standing guard in front of a nearby restaurant. There are no customers anymore but he is keeping busy directing traffic.

He does not believe that many Azerbaijanis will voluntarily return to the Kalbajar mountains, trapped as they are between the Armenian part of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper.

“We’d both be busy then,” he says.

Remember the time when Azerbaijanis and Armenians lived together, before the first war.

“At that time it was the Soviet Union. Neither we nor they hurt each other. But now the situation is different. The bread was broken in half. Now they are two different pieces.

“We can no longer live together, it is impossible.”