COVID-19, unsurprisingly, is rampant in Karabakh and new arrivals at the center get their temperature checked and a face mask if they don’t have one. Many of these people had spent days or weeks in crowded underground bomb shelters in Karabakh before fleeing to Armenia. I couldn’t help but notice that the mask-wearing rate was maybe 60 percent, but who can worry about an invisible threat like the coronavirus when a very tangible one is landing and exploding around you? Besides, it’s pretty much impossible to socially distance when you’re a refugee. [...]
Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation. [...]
Losing Karabakh would be not only a national defeat but also a blow, possibly fatal, to the hopes engendered by Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, in which the man-of-the-people ex-journalist Pashinyan improbably toppled the corrupt, strongman regime that had ruled the country for two decades. For Pashinyan to be the one to lose to Azerbaijan would threaten the country’s prospects for democracy.[...]
The Armenian media had, however, uncritically picked up the official line. This was partly due to a censorship regime: Shortly after fighting started, the government instituted martial law, one of the provisions of which was that it was illegal “to call into question the military capabilities” of the armed forces. But it also seemed to be partly a self-censorship in response to popular demand: There was no appetite for news about how Armenia was losing. [...]
This war had been coming for a long time. In the late 1980s, Armenians demanded that Karabakh—which was inside the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan—be transferred to Soviet Armenia. Interethnic violence broke out and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all-out war. By the time a cease-fire was signed in 1994, Armenia controlled a substantial part of Azerbaijani territory. That included Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as large swaths of other territory surrounding it, which Armenian forces captured during the fighting. Those territories had been almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, who all fled. In total, more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from this area, according to United Nations figures.
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