(Goris) Worried volunteers have their eyes glued to the winding road that leads to the green mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is desperately empty, whereas in recent days it was overflowing with cars loaded with the few things that the Armenians were able to take.
A dozen women in white coats, from the nearby hospital, bite their lips while waiting. “This doesn’t bode well,” Nora said with a sigh, her face hollow from the long days and sleepless nights at the Kornidzor border post, ensuring that she provided the necessary first aid to refugees exhausted after days on the road.
PHOTO AZIZ KARIMOV, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Many belongings were left behind.
“There must be a problem somewhere along the way, I fear that Azerbaijan has once again closed the only road that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Who knows what the Azerbaijanis will commit with the remaining Armenians…” The worst rumors are circulating here about the fate reserved for the Armenians by the Azerbaijani soldiers.
“A whole life in a few bags”
A few dozen buses should soon pick up the last 20,000 Armenians still in Nagorno-Karabakh: the most reluctant to leave, those who did not have a car and the injured. Many could not be treated on site, in a region under fire from Baku and besieged by a blockade for months. Some died without being able to be buried.
PHOTO ANTOINE MARTIN, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in the Goris region
Will the buses return before dark? Or will something happen to them along the way? Some 100,000 Armenians have already left Nagorno-Karabakh. Many stop in Goris, a border town, in hotels requisitioned by the government for refugees or at the homes of distant acquaintances. Others prefer to take the road directly to Yerevan, furthest from the front.
The entire road to the capital is crisscrossed with cars, with some luggage on the roof, sometimes a scooter or a child’s bike strapped on top. A whole life in a few plastic bags.
“The only thing I would really like to take is my cat,” Igor Akopian sighs for a long time, remembering his beloved companion, sleeping on his knees during long evenings spent alone in his grandfather’s house. father. “I had just finished restoring the arcades and the second floor…” Shivering with cold and fever, the old man, wrapped in his black coat, remembers the long hours spent at Stepanakert airport, where the Russian soldiers who were to be guarantors of peace were based, then the agitation of the crowd trying to board the buses to flee the city as quickly as possible.
PHOTO ANTOINE MARTIN, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in the Goris region
Blockade lasting several months
“Many broke their televisions, even burned their houses, I just said goodbye to every room of my family home,” remembers Igor Akopian, delicately lighting his cigarette. “The first thing I did when I arrived in Goris was to buy a pack of cigarettes. During the blockade, we smoked tree leaves wrapped in newspaper. We lacked everything. They were starving us. »
Before the signing of the ceasefire, then the announcement of the self-dissolution of this separatist republic, the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh spent several months in shortage of medicine, fuel and food, due to the closure of the Lachin corridor through Azerbaijan.
PHOTO EMMANUEL DUNAND, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The roads were packed with cars just a few days ago.
“You should have seen how my granddaughters’ eyes lit up when they were able to eat a cookie again. Even I almost had tears in my eyes when I got the sweet taste in my mouth again. Then this tenderness of the volunteers, who offered their help with such kindness,” says, moved, Suzanne Badeian, grandmother of three grandchildren.
PHOTO ANTOINE MARTIN, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Clothes are given to refugees.
Holding plastic bags filled with food and toilet paper offered by the Red Cross, the old woman is preparing with her daughter, her son and her grandchildren to join acquaintances in another city by bus. Little Aida hugs small yellow cars still in their plastic packaging, offered by a volunteer. All over the central square of Goris, volunteers are busy in white tents providing help and advice.
Abandonment of native lands
“But all this suffering is nothing compared to the consciousness of having abandoned our native lands. These Azerbaijani barbarians are trampling our Christian crosses in the mud, they have taken down the symbol of Nagorno-Karabakh to put up their own, they are murdering our children in our villages. All I want is to return home, I don’t see myself living here, on these lands which are certainly Armenian, but which are not mine,” admits Suzanne Badeian, 72, bitterly. She had lived in Stepanakert since the deportation of Armenians from Baku in 1992, during the first war against Azerbaijan. “After all the horrors committed by the Azerbaijanis, I could never live alongside them. »
INFOGRAPHICS THE PRESS
Despite Baku’s assurance that the two peoples will now be able to live in peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenians are convinced that they were on the eve of a second Armenian genocide, remembering the terrible massacre of 1915, i.e. the organized extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.