At the other end of the videoconference, the young Armenian Huri Zohrabyan, 26, lists the products which, last December, became impossible to find in the city of Stepanakert, capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. This autonomous republic claimed by Azerbaijan has been subjected to a blockade since December imposed on it without warning by the authoritarian and undemocratic regime in Baku.
“There are no more vegetables, no more fruits, no more sugar, no more flour, no more grains, no more cold cuts, no more meat, no more eggs, no more oil…” she lists from his apartment, where again this week the gas, used for heating and cooking, was cut three times and where four hours a day the electricity also disappears. “In grocery stores, the counters are empty. Same thing in pharmacies, where there are no more medicines. Hospitals are also short of it, forcing the cancellation of surgeries. This is what our daily lives have looked like since the start of this blockade. »
Not having enough to eat, being cold, living in the dark… All of this worries Mme Zohrabyan, who, after living in Montreal as a youth, decided to settle in the mountainous lands of Artsakh (the name Armenians give to Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2021. After finding love there. But what worries her even more is the indifference of the rest of the world to this distant conflict, to this “attempt to ethnically cleanse the Armenians”, she says, in this region at the heart of a conflict historic and persistent between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“The war in Ukraine, everyone talks about that, and that’s normal. But sometimes it’s depressing for us. Watch: Earlier this week, the crash of a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal received outsized international attention. And U.S ? Nothing. We try to keep hope, but right now, we feel mostly alone in the world. »
The destiny of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh found itself once again in the crosshairs of the Baku dictatorship on December 3 with the closure of the Lachin corridor, the only road that connects the autonomous republic, landlocked in the Caucasus. Azerbaijani, to neighboring Armenia. Officially, the Azeri regime claims that it was environmental demonstrators who organized this blockade to protest against mining projects planned in the region.
“Four hundred tons of products and materials passed through it every day,” says Ms.me Zohrabyan. It is also our one and only link to get out and access the rest of the world. And we don’t have it anymore. »
The region’s only airport, located near the city of Ivanian, closed in 1991 and has never reopened since. To date, the 120,000 Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh are on their own and face a humanitarian crisis fueled by the blockade. Around 1,100 other people, who were outside the republic before the lockdown, including 270 children, are unable to return home.
A peace in the hands of the Russians
Since 2020 and the end of a 44-day war between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan that killed 6,500 people and forced Stepanakert to make significant territorial concessions in Baku, the autonomous republic enjoyed a fragile peace ensured in part by the presence along the Lachin corridor of the Russian armed forces, ironically responsible for ensuring the maintenance of peace in this region of the globe.
“Since the last war, the Azeris have been firmly determined to transform their military advantage from the last conflict into political victory, summarized in an interview with the To have to Tigrane Yegavian, researcher at the French Intelligence Research Center and author of Geopolitics of Armenia (Bibliomonde), published last year. The Russian war against Ukraine is a boon for them, insofar as Russia’s bog in this other conflict now allows them to advance their nibbling of Artsakh,” he adds, while speaking of the current blockade as an attempt to “lock the population in an open-air prison”.
At the end of December, the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinian, denounced the behavior of the Russian soldiers deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh, whom he qualified as “silent witnesses” of an Azerbaijani aggression in progress in the autonomous republic. He called on Moscow to ensure the free movement of people and goods in the Lachin corridor. In vain.
Yerevan and Baku have been at loggerheads over the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1990 and the fall of the USSR, which led to the separation of this enclave with a strong Armenian majority from the rest of Azerbaijan. Armenians represent 75% of the population.
For Azerbaijan, however, Nagorno-Karabakh is not a disputed territory, but rather an integral part of its territory which seceded 30 years ago. The former Soviet republic is now fighting to bring it back under its fold. “The war is not taking place on the territory of Armenia,” recalls Vazeh Asgarov, director general of the French University of Azerbaijan, joined by The duty in Baku this week. The Azerbaijani army is not trying to seize Armenian territory or any part of it. It wants to liberate its territories from occupation, while respecting its 1994 commitment to resolve this conflict peacefully. »
“Baku’s objective is above all to carry out an ethnic cleansing of this region, as it did in Nakhitchevan [une autre république autonome enclavée du territoire azéri, de laquelle la population arménienne a été expulsée] at the end of the last century, says Tigrane Yegavian. The same scenario is playing out in Nagorno-Karabakh, driven by Armenophobia, a doctrinal racism in Azerbaijan, which contributes to the dehumanization of the enemy and which does not contribute to a rapprochement between the two neighboring peoples. »
disturb indifference
At the end of December, nearly 300 personalities from the world of culture, letters and philosophy, including Sylvain Tesson, Michel Onfrey, Carole Bouquet, Pascal Bruckner as well as two children of Charles Aznavour, Mischa and Nicolas, called in a letter published in the pages of the French daily Le Figaro to the protection of the “120,000 Armenians of Artsakh”, threatened as much by the authoritarian regime of Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, as by the indifference of the rest of the world, according to them.
“After the war, after the phosphorus bombs, the tortures, which shattered so many lives in 2020 [lors de la dernière guerre du Haut-Karabakh], this is indeed the latest perversion conceived by the Azerbaijani dictatorship: blocking the Lachin corridor, the only access route for the Armenians of Artsakh / Nagorno-Karabakh to the outside, they wrote. Indifference, platonic protests allow today’s aggressors to shamelessly lay claim to the executioners of 1915 [les Turcs, à l’origine du génocide arménien]of their sinister heritage, to use the same methods to put an end to those they loathe […]. »
The blockade of the region is being played out in a geopolitical context favorable to Azerbaijan. In addition to the inability of Russia, occupied on another front, to ensure its mission of peace, the Armenians are also struggling to mobilize their close allies, including Belarus and Kazakhstan, whose current interests are more linked to the Azeris. The same goes for several Western capitals, including those of European Union countries and that of the United Kingdom, caught between the humanitarian considerations associated with the ongoing crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh and a new dependence on Azerbaijan in terms of energy supply, after the war in Ukraine forced the reorganization of gas and oil flows, resources of which the Asian country is rich. And this, despite the undemocratic nature of the Azerbaijani regime.
Baku’s objective is above all to carry out an ethnic cleansing of this region, as it did in Nakhchivan at the end of the last century.
More than a month ago, Canada, throughone of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter accountscalled on Baku “to reopen the corridor and ensure freedom of movement to avoid any humanitarian repercussions”.
But for Huri Zohrabyan, who from Stepanakert has seen every day worse than the last, the time has come to do more. “Asking for the reopening of the corridor does nothing. These are pressures and sanctions that are now needed on Azerbaijan to obtain this reopening. I expect Canada to be more active. It is a great country, endowed with historical influence in terms of peacekeeping, which it should use to help us,” concludes the young Armenian.