Global Courant
GORIS, Armenia – Albert Petrosyan tied his son’s wheelchair and some bags to the roof of his old Russian-made car ahead of another long drive after fleeing his home in Nagorno-Karabakh this week and staying just one night had spent in a hotel in this Armenian country. village.
Petrosyan, 71, his wife Geghetsik, 65, and their 30-year-old son Agasi, who uses a wheelchair and has severe learning difficulties, are among more than 70,000 ethnic Armenians who have fled Karabakh since Azerbaijani forces retook the mountainous region. last week in a lightning offensive.
“We will never return (to Karabakh). We will never be able to do that,” said Petrosyan, a retired mechanic. ‘It is impossible to live together with Azeris.’
Ethnic Armenian authorities in Karabakh said Thursday they would dissolve the breakaway state they had defended for 30 years. Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but is mainly populated by ethnic Armenians.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has pledged to protect the rights of Karabakh’s 120,000 Christian Armenians, but most are expected to leave due to deep-seated ethnic enmity with the mainly Muslim Azeris, exacerbated by memories of the 1988-94 war and again in 2020 , when Baku’s forces retook parts of Karabakh.
LEAVING HOUSE
Petrosyan said his family had been pushed to the brink over the past 10 months due to an Azerbaijani blockade of Karabakh that had led to chronic shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
“A pack of cigarettes cost five thousand drams ($12) and you could hardly find them,” he said. “The stores were empty.”
After last week’s victory in Azerbaijan, Petrosyan packed his Zhiguli station wagon as full as he could, including the toolbox he used to earn a living, and the family, along with tens of thousands of people, began the 77km drive to the border in two days time. of other frightened refugees.
It was very difficult to leave their four-room house and a 1,000 square meter plot of land in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh.
“We built our house so that everything would be good for him (their son),” Petrosyan’s wife Geghetsik said through tears. “I won’t be able to find a place that will be good for him now.”
Armenia has made hotel accommodation available in Goris and other cities for the refugees, but Petrosyan said they would move, first to the Armenian capital Yerevan, but he was unlikely to stay there because his monthly pension of 61,000 Armenian drams ($157) was not would be enough to live in the city.
He said they were likely staying with relatives living in a village near Lake Sevan in central Armenia.
Armenia has accused its ally Russia, preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, of doing nothing to help stop the Azerbaijani offensive.
But Petrosyan said he believed that Turkey, a close ally of Azerbaijan with which the country shares close linguistic and cultural ties, was ultimately behind the defeat of the Armenian state in Karabakh.
“It’s the policy of the Turks. They wanted to kick us out,” he said.
Armenia, backed by historians and the parliaments of many countries, says the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I amounted to genocide, a charge strongly denied by Turkey.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who supported Azerbaijan’s offensive, has called for a comprehensive peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan. REUTERS
