Pope Francis said on Sunday he was “concerned” by the blocking of a vital supply route for the disputed enclave of Nagorny Karabakh, fearing a deterioration in the humanitarian situation as winter approaches.
“I am concerned about the situation in the Lachin Corridor, in the southern Caucasus,” the pope said during the Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been vying for control of Nagorny Karabakh for more than thirty years and clashed in the fall of 2020 in a war that ended in an Armenian military rout and the deployment of peacekeeping soldiers. Russian peace in the region.
Dozens of Azerbaijani protesters have been blocking the Lachin Corridor, the only road linking Nagorny Karabakh to Armenia, since December 12, claiming to protest against illegal mineral extraction and the environmental damage it causes.
Armenia, for its part, accuses its rival of having organized these demonstrations under a false pretext.
The sovereign pontiff said he was particularly “worried about the precarious humanitarian conditions of the population, which risk deteriorating during the winter”.
“I call on all parties to commit to finding peaceful solutions for the good of the people,” he added.
The spokesman for American diplomacy, Ned Price, warned that the closure of the Lachin corridor had “serious humanitarian consequences” and set “back the fragile peace process” between the two countries.
These two Caucasian nations clashed in the early 1990s, when the USSR broke up, to control Nagorny-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority enclave that seceded from Azerbaijan.
This first conflict, which caused 30,000 deaths, ended in an Armenian victory. But Azerbaijan got its revenge in a second war that claimed the lives of 6,500 people in the fall of 2020 and took back many territories.
In September, fighting on the direct border between the two countries, and not in Nagorny-Karabakh, left nearly 300 dead and raised fears of a new major war.