Author: Emil Lazarian

Forty percent of Stepanakert has been without running water for the past month. It is a new burden for a city that has struggled to revive normalcy since the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan last autumn.

Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh’s de facto capital are condemned to thirst by a confluence of factors: Internally displaced people have packed into the city, increasing the population by some 30 percent; access to most of the region’s water supply was lost in the fighting; and it has been a hot, dry summer.

“We haven’t seen rain in over 50 days and temperatures have peaked at a steady 30 degrees Celsius. Add to that the 70 to 80 thousand cubic meters more consumed monthly by the 15,000 new residents of the capital fleeing war and you get what we’re seeing,” Gagik Poghosyan, who heads Jrmugh-Koyughi, the public company responsible for local water distribution, told Eurasianet.

During the 44-day war with Azerbaijan, Armenian forces lost control of most of the lands they had held since the early 1990s, including reservoirs and canals that are now on the other side of the front line. In a June report, the International Crisis Group described several villages without water, “not only because pipes were destroyed, but because in order to fix them plumbers would have to enter an area controlled by Azerbaijani soldiers.”

At an emergency meeting on August 16, de facto president Arayik Harutyunyan unveiled plans to connect the capital’s water supply network to the nearby Patara River (Badara in Azerbaijani) through a new pipeline that will end the shortages “within one year.”

Harutyunyan also promised to build a new dam on the Patara to create a reservoir that will provide Stepanakert and 12 surrounding villages with drinking water and irrigate over 2,500 hectares. Estimated at 15 billion Armenian drams (over $30 million), the project is the most ambitious of its kind to date, Harutyunyan said.

A new government water committee is etching out plans to drill over 40 artesian wells to provide round-the-clock service to communities across the region. Georgi Hayriyan, who was appointed by the president in July to lead the committee, estimates water losses at “over 80 percent.”

“What makes this so painful is that the resources still available to Artsakh aren’t going to be enough to irrigate whatever agricultural land is left,” Hayriyan told Eurasianet, using the Armenian name for the region.

The government is counting on the state budget and help from outside organizations like the diaspora-backed Hayastan All Armenian Fund to make the three projects happen. Another diaspora group in Washington is lobbying Congress for $25 million in assistance related to water and sanitation.

Russian peacekeepers – who have patrolled Nagorno-Karabakh since the Moscow-brokered ceasefire in November 2020 – are providing water and security while Armenians repair infrastructure near the front lines. In the three weeks to September 3, the Russian contingent dispensed over 200 tons of drinking water to 1,500 Stepanakert residents, promising to continue to “provide local residents with water every day” until a new pipeline can be laid.

British charity HALO Trust and the International Committee of the Red Cross have also extended help. “The current water scarcity only added to the practical difficulties faced by the population following the autumn 2020 escalation,” Bertrand Lamon, head of the ICRC Mission in Nagorno-Karabakh, told Eurasianet.

Twenty-five large water tanks donated by the Red Cross have been installed in neighborhoods hit hardest by the shortage and are being filled daily by trucks from the city’s water company.

With this aid, and efforts by local authorities to conserve water, the situation in Stepanakert has slowly improved over the past two weeks. But Poghosyan of the public water distributor remains wary. “If this weather persists, things could get dire,” he said.

For all their inconvenience, “there’s still a silver lining to these shortages,” said Nune Martirosyan, 47, an economics teacher in Stepanakert, whose own apartment has been without water for a month. “They’ve fostered a greater sense of community among residents as they scramble to help each other pull through.”

In less than a month, nearly anyone with a job in Armenia will have to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular tests at their own expense.

On August 20, the government issued new regulations mandating that employers must get either a COVID vaccination certificate from each employee, or the employee must submit the results of a PCR test every 14 days. The regulations apply to all government workers and a long list of private sector businesses that encompasses nearly all spheres of the economy. Pregnant woman and those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons will be exempted.

“We have set October 1 [as a deadline] so that we will not have queues and waste extra time,” Minister of Health Anahit Avanesyan said in an interview with official media on September 6.

It will be an uphill struggle: As of the end of August, the last time figures were released, less than 5 percent of Armenia’s population had been vaccinated. Even that is likely an over count as the government effort to make vaccines widely available attracted many foreigners, to the point that the government had to tighten regulations because so many Iranian tourists were coming for vaccinations. The government figures don’t disaggregate vaccinations given to Armenian citizens and to foreigners.

On top of that, many Armenians remain skeptical of the vaccines: In a poll from the International Republican Institute conducted in July and released on September 6, more than 50 percent of respondents said they “definitely” or “probably” won’t get vaccinated.

But Avanesyan took the rosy view: “If in March only 10 percent of Armenians were ready to be vaccinated, today’s surveys show that 40 percent of the population is prepared to be vaccinated; this is a good indicator,” she said.

Armenia is using four vaccines: the Russian Sputnik V, Chinese CoronaVac and Sinopharm, and the British-Swedish AstraZeneca.

Meanwhile, a single PCR test generally costs 15,000 drams ($30), about a quarter of Armenia’s monthly minimum salary. In addition, inflation has been spiking and the spike in food prices is the highest the country has recorded since the 1990s. 

That leaves the highly anti-vaccine Armenian population little choice but to vaccinate.

Armenian social media has become full of angry commenters who don’t want to be forced to get a jab. One news story about the requirement posted on Facebook spawned a heated discussion. “The government has no right to get into my system and mutate it,” one user wrote. “Let’s all just leave our jobs; that way they can’t fire everyone,” another suggested.

The new requirement comes as COVID cases in Armenia are rising, and a new wave is something the country can ill afford. On September 1, the country recorded 636 new cases and 19 coronavirus-linked deaths, an infection rate about double the month before and the highest single-day death toll from COVID-19 in months. Since May 2020 the country has had very few restrictions and what regulations do remain are widely flouted; masks are almost never seen.