(Stepanakert) Several thousand demonstrators gathered in Stepanakert, the main city of Nagorny Karabakh, on Sunday, calling on the international community “to act now” against the blocking of the only road axis to Armenia by Azerbaijan, which Baku denies .
“Open the ‘road of life’,” read a drawing, held in the hands of a little girl dressed in a pink coat, in the crowd. “Self-determination”, was written on another sign, while Nagorny Karabakh, a mountainous enclave with an Armenian majority, seceded from Azerbaijan, which nevertheless considers it its own.
For nearly two weeks, Azerbaijani activists have blocked the Lachin corridor, the only road that connects Nagorny Karabakh to Armenia, saying they are protesting against illegal mines in the region.
Yerevan accuses Baku of wanting to cause a “humanitarian crisis”, which Azerbaijan rejects, assuring that it is always possible to circulate on this axis.
On Sunday, many Armenian and separatist flags were waved in the crowd gathered at Renaissance Square in downtown Stepanakert, an AFP journalist noted. In the front row stood the leader of the Nagorny Karabakh separatists, Arayik Haroutiounian.
“Act now for our future!” says a woman in the crowd.
At the microphone, in front of several thousand demonstrators, Mary Asatryan, from the office of the local human rights officer, calls – in French in the text – on the international community “to act now” with Baku, “on this holy day of Noël”, to demand the lifting of “this total blockade”.
“For 14 days, no food, medicine, fuel or other vital product was allowed to enter” Nagorny Karabkh, she laments.
She denounces in front of the crowd “a crime against humanity” organized by Baku with “this deliberate blockade of 120,000 people” and regrets the absence of “response” from the international community.
The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs castigated in a press release, for its part, “the destructive activities” of Armenia which “do not serve to restore peace in the region”.
“There is nothing to confirm that the demonstrations on the Lachin corridor constitute a threat of a humanitarian crisis and that the Armenians are under blockade”, he supported.
International concern
Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed in the early 1990s, during the breakup of the USSR, to control Nagorny Karabakh.
This first conflict, which claimed 30,000 lives, ended in an Armenian victory. But Azerbaijan took its revenge in a second war that claimed the lives of 6,500 people in the fall of 2020 and allowed Baku to retake many territories.
In recent months, while Russia is monopolized by its military intervention in Ukraine, the United States and the European Union had tried to relaunch a fragile peace process, without success.
This new resurgence of tensions has raised serious concerns on the international scene.
On Sunday morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, quoted by Interfax, that a tripartite meeting between Vladimir Putin, who is trying to play the role of mediator, and Azerbaijani leaders Ilham Aliev and Armenian Nikol Pashinian, n was not planned at the beginning of the week on the sidelines of a regional summit in Saint Petersburg (north-west of Russia).
On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron called on his Azerbaijani counterpart to allow “free movement” between the separatist enclave and Armenia.
“It is essential to lower the tension as quickly as possible,” for his part urged the head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov after a meeting the same day in Moscow with his Azerbaijani counterpart, boycotted by Yerevan.