What left the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in …

On November 9, Armenians and Azerbaijanis woke up at 3 a.m. They were awakened by an announcement “with great pain” from the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan Yes a video of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev mocking his Armenian counterpart. Amidst Borat-worthy laughter, Aliyev asked himself: “Where are Armenia’s demands? They demanded the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. When I offered them autonomy, they refused. So what happened to Pashinyan? What happened to Pashinyan? There is no state … there is no state and there won’t be ”.

Azerbaijan has won this chapter of the war. Much of Nagorno-Karabakh is once again what Google Maps has always shown. After the conquest of the city of Shushi by Azerbaijan, a bad deal was better than a good war for the Armenians, after 32 years of resistance.

What follows, what remains

In the nine-point agreement formalized on the Kremlin website, a sort of Russian protectorate is formed for 5 renewable years. A predominant part of the territory remains for Azerbaijan and part of the territory, which includes the capital Stepanakert, for the Armenians. According to the Argentinian researcher specializing in the region, Paulo Botta, “Russia is one of the big winners, a country which specializes in exploiting opportunities with few resources”.

Azerbaijan was the only country in the Caucasus without a Russian military presence. Vladimir Poutine announced that only the peacekeepers would be from his country, but Turkish President Recep Erdogan denied: “the follow-up will be done jointly”. Dmitry Peskov, who in addition to being a spokesperson for Putin, is a Turkologist and diplomat in Ankara, insisted that if there is collaboration with the Turks, it will be outside Nagorno-Karabakh. While Russia arrogates to itself the exclusivity, the Turks seek the hole to take the cup.

Leo Moum is an Argentinian journalist from the Armenian community who has covered the conflict from the territory. In a live show on Facebook, he searched for the whole part of the glass: “They didn’t take us out, they didn’t get away with it, life goes on, with an ass face, but now we don’t. no more sending the kids into the trench. ” Last Thursday, the Armenian community of Buenos Aires mobilized with candles in the Plaza de Mayo for a mass presided over by Cardinal Mario Poli.

Moved

“Now the most urgent thing is the humanitarian question,” says Paulo Botta. Sometimes there are at least 40,000 displaced people. Among them, the family of Gayane Hayrapetyan, translator who works for the Ministry of Culture of Nagorno-Karabakh. He is 29 years old and in the WhatsApp photo he appears smiling, with big eyes and accentuated features. He answers his phone in Yerevan but until September he went to work in Shushi every day: “Now I don’t know how we’re going to live with this pain. We have lost our country. Our houses”.

Over the past weekend, hundreds of Armenian cars with loaded racks hurtled down the mountains towards Yerevan.

– The agreement speaks of “the exchange of corpses” but also of the UNHCR disembarking to come to the aid of the displaced. Are you aware of that, Gayane?

– They didn’t tell us anything. To be honest, I have lost faith in international organizations. For 44 days, we alerted the world to the war crimes committed by Turkey and Azerbaijan and we heard nothing but empty positions.

– It was also said that they would be resettled in the capital Stepanakert. Is it safe now that the conflict is over?

No one can feel safe in Stepanakert if the Azerbaijanis are in Shushi. It is an enclave surrounded by them.

– What is the supposed status of Nagorno-Karabakh, will you continue to seek to be an independent country?

The document says nothing about the status. They just gave away my country or a good part of it. We now call on the National Assembly to decree the illegitimacy of the treaty. Pashinyan must withdraw his signature. It was signed without any popular consultation. Harutyunyan (President of Nagorno-Karabakh) signed it because Pashinyan forced it.

Prime Minister Pashinyan was sorry for the war: “If we had accepted this a year ago, we would be in a better situation than today.” But there was no consensus to cede land without trying their luck in a war that ultimately left at least 6,000 dead. There was also no consensus to end it, so now part of the population is demanding the resignation of the prime minister: groups of protesters entered to loot his personal house and took over Parliament for a few hours. There was a strong police crackdown on some of the protests. Prime Minister and his wife, who uploaded photos from the front line until last week, face political crisis: Armenian President Armen Sarkissian says ceasefire decision was taken without consulting him .

– What is the current climate in Nagorno-Karabakh?

Our soldiers fought to the end. They are always firm on the front and refuse to give up their positions. If things were that bad, they should have said it sooner and not waited 44 days in which thousands of people were killed. Everyone in Artsakh is furious, angry, devastated and disappointed. And in Armenia too, because they know what it means: a threat to the whole country. Most people do not have housing. They are in hotels, with relatives or friends. I can’t believe this is happening to us. We lost our home. I can’t believe it and I will never accept it. No one will accept it. Artsakh is an ancestral Armenian land. The fact that Stalin gave it to Azerbaijan doesn’t change that. We have transcended the Soviet Union on the basis of the self-determination of the peoples.

– You and your husband were arguing? Are they back to work now?

All the men in my family are there. I used to work in Shushi, so I am unemployed.

– Is emigration a possibility for you?

How am I supposed to live? I am overwhelmed just thinking about the people who have lost loved ones. My husband’s cousin and his 16 friends are missing. They are not found anywhere, no one knows if they were killed, wounded or prisoners of war.

Calculations

In the south of the world, when we think of a country, we imagine a large continuum of land made up of cities which tend to touch their peripheries. Until a month ago, Armenia had an enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh. In turn, in the west, Azerbaijan controlled a territory encapsulated mainly by Armenia and Iran called Nakhichevan. Unlike the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis did not have a common border with their enclave. With the new agreement, the Russians will control a road that will connect the two Azeri territories through Armenia. The Azeris, used to living in isolation, will surely celebrate. Even more so the Turks who, sharing a small border with Nakhichevan, smell more and more the oil of Azerbaijan. According to Paulo Botta, “it is too early to think of a permanent corridor, it is something that had not been included in any previous agreement”.

Page 12 He tried to consult Azerbaijani Ambassador to Argentina Rashad Aslanov about this. An independent employee of the press area of ​​the Embassy of Azerbaijan had contacted to propose. After accepting, there was a reservation: “before the note, Wizenberg must apologize for going to Nagorno-Karabakh”. It is one of 1020 surnames on a blacklist of journalists and academics published annually by the Azerbaijani government. According to Amnesty International, in Azerbaijan “the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly are suppressed”.

The problem is not just for foreigners, journalists and activists. Everything seems to indicate that now there are also unwanted people in Shusha who lived there until last week, like the Hayrapetyan family:

– Is there a way to get home, to get the house back, things?

-No way. We don’t even know if our building is there. All I hope is someone has set my house on fire. So that the Azeris do not live there

– Did the Armenians stay there or did they all leave?

– I don’t think there are Armenians now that it is in Azerbaijan’s hands. Armenians alive, certainly not.