More than a thousand ethnic Armenians were in a hurry on Wednesday to escape the breakaway area of Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia after a lightening military operation by Azerbaijan that has recast the contours of the post-Soviet South Caucasus. So far more than 28,000 of the 120,000 Armenians of Karabakh, an area internationally known as slice of Azerbaijan, have crossed in the border into Armenia, a nation of about 2.8 million.
A military victory by Azerbaijan over the enclave, which was a long time before out of Baku’s control, a week ago has les to one of the hugest movements of people in the South Caucasus since the fall of the Soviet Union. The hairpin mountain road coming out of Karabakh towards Armenia was packed with people. Several of them dozed off in cars or were looking desperately for firewood to provide warmth to themselves by the side of the road.
“I left everything behind. I don’t know what is in store for me. I have nothing. I don’t desire to have anything,” Vera Petrosyan, a 70-year-old retired teacher, conveyed to Reuters on Tuesday at the huge Soviet-era hotel on the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan that is currently her house. “I would never desire for anyone to experience what I have been through,” she said, talking about the shootings, the hunger, destruction and suffering she went through with a brave and helpless heart before fleeing to Armenia.
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev said that the rights of Armenians will be considered and given immense importance but said his “iron fist” had consigned the notion of a sovereign ethnic Armenian Karabakh to history and that the area would be grown into a “heaven.” The Armenians of Karabakh conveyed to Reuters they desired not want to exist as part of Azerbaijan and were fearful of ethnic cleansing at the hands of Azerbaijan, which has many times given no importance to such claims and recognised them as pure nonsense.