This August, an EU-supported summer camp for children from mine-affected families and communities was held in Armenia. The activity was organised in Dilijan (Tavush marz) within the framework of the project on ‘Strengthening National Mine Action Capacity in Armenia’, funded by the European Union and implemented by the UNDP. 

Sixty children from Gegharkunik, Tavush, Syunik, and Vayots Dzor marzes, aged 12 to 15, took part in the camp. They were selected mainly from mine and explosive ordnance (EO) affected border communities, from families with direct mine/EO victims. 

The aim of the initiative was to educate children about the risks of mines/EOs and safe behaviour and to improve their physical, mental and psychological well-being. 

Children learnt about mine action, were taught first aid and safety rules for shelling and shooting, received critical thinking training, and participated in other activities. 

Find out more

Press release

https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/653276420/eu-funded-project-in-armenia-organises-camp-for-children-from-mine-affected-families

On Saturday, the Armenian Defense Ministry accused the Azerbaijani side of shelling the positions of the Armenian army located in the direction of the settlement of Norabak (Gegharkunik region of Armenia), the Azerbaijani defense ministry denied this information.

⠀

Earlier on Friday, Yerevan announced four dead soldiers due to shelling on the border, Baku – two wounded. Later, the Armenian Defense Ministry reported that it had received a new medical opinion, according to which, as a result of intensive resuscitation, one of the four servicemen who were considered dead, Narek Poghosyan, had a heartbeat restored. The Ministry of Defense removed him from the list of the dead.

⠀

“On September 2, from 16:00 to 16:10, units of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces opened fire from small arms on Armenian positions located in the Norabak region,” the press service of the Armenian Defense Ministry said.

⠀

In turn, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry denied this information.

⠀

“The information spread by the Armenian side about the alleged shelling of the units of the Armenian armed forces on the border by the units of the Azerbaijani army on September 2 from 16:00 to 16:10 does not correspond to reality. We categorically refute the information spread by the Armenian Ministry of Defense,” the press service of Azerbaijani Defense Ministry reports.

⠀
Skirmishes periodically take place on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The last serious aggravation occurred on the night of September 13, 2022.

⠀
Last year, Yerevan and Baku, mediated by Russia, the United States and the European Union, began discussing a future peace treaty. At the end of May 2023, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that his country would recognize the sovereignty of Azerbaijan along with the territory of Karabakh, on a total area of 86.6 thousand square kilometers. Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev said that Azerbaijan and Armenia may sign a peace treaty in the near future if Yerevan does not change its position.

https://www.politicallore.com/the-armenian-defense-ministry-accused-the-azerbaijani-armed-forces-of-shelling-positions-on-the-border/37364

The Republic of Artsakh is a breakaway state in the South Caucasus, whose territory is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. Its population consists of around 120,000 Armenians who are insisting on the right to self-determination and independence from Baku.

The disputed territory has been at the centre of a decades long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, resulting in two major wars that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

In the war of 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured most of the territory it lost in 1994, leaving the Republic of Artsakh with just a fraction of the land it once controlled and isolated from mainland Armenia.

As a part of a trilateral peace agreement, a land corridor was established that connected the Republic of Artsakh with Armenia. Known as the Lachin Road corridor, this route was intended to allow humanitarian aid and food to reach the Armenian enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh.

However, the Azerbaijanis started to blockade the road in December of last year, initially by using environmental activists who claimed they were protesting against ecological damage caused by gold and copper mining in Artsakh.

Despite the protests, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was still able to deliver limited supplies of aid, that included food and medication. But in April the Azeris installed checkpoints on their side of the border and since June 15 no humanitarian supplies have been able to get through along the road, leaving the residents of Artsakh in a desperate plight.

Mary Asatryan works as an assistant to the Human Rights Defender of Artsakh in the enclave’s capital Stepanakert. She told Express.co.uk that all spheres of life had been paralysed by the blockade and that hundreds of people were facing starvation.

With most shops and supermarkets closed, the only products readily available to buy are bread, as well as some seasonal vegetables and fruit that local farmers and villagers are able to grow on their land. However once the summer is over, the situation could become even more critical.

“In a few weeks when the growing season is over – and I am talking about tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes which are staple food products – when those products run out and the growing season ends we will face mass starvation and total hunger,” she said.

Deaths from starvation are already starting to happen. In one recent incident a 40-year-old man from Stepanakert died as a result of chronic malnutrition, protein and energy deficiency.

Ms Asatryan said people were living from day to day as regards food and were having to queue for up to six hours just to buy bread.

“People are fainting a lot, especially while queueing,” she explained. “There is widespread exhaustion and depression – people are stressed and anxious because they don’t know what to expect tomorrow.”

The Azeris have also targeted critical civilian infrastructure, cutting off gas and electricity supplies, as well as access to the internet. More than 80 per cent of the population rely on gas to heat their homes and for cooking.

The Armenians are still able to produce some electricity locally through the Sarsang Hydro Power Plant, but it is not enough to meet all the demands of the population, meaning there are daily rolling blackouts.

Water supplies have also been disrupted, resulting in households going without for over a week in some instances.

“Two weeks ago the water supply to my neighbourhood was cut and I didn’t have water for 6 to 7 days,” Ms Asatryan said.

“I had to get water from my friends. On one occasion my entire day – it was a Sunday – was spent finding water and then queuing for bread. The organisation of normal life, of meeting one’s basic needs takes so much effort now, people don’t have any time for other things – so people are struggling all day long just to meet their most basic needs.”

Ms Asatryan’s organisation closely monitors the health and wellbeing of expectant mothers, who have been disproportionately affected by the blockade.

“Basically we have 2,000 pregnant women in Artsakh – all of them lack proper nutrition, they don’t have rich vitamin diets,” she explained. “It’s not enough to provide for a healthy child and miscarriages have tripled in number through the period.”

The Azeris insist that Artsakh is a part of Azerbaijan and cannot be regarded as an independent state. They say the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh must accept that reality and live under the direct rule of Baku.

The Armenians, however, believe they will be persecuted by the Azeris if they are forced to give up their right to self-determination, given their long history of ethnic conflict. And that this persecution could have catastrophic consequences.

“The red line for people here would be becoming part of Azerbaijan which they would definitely not tolerate,” Ms Asatryan said. “The level of Armeno-phobia in Azerbaijan is unimaginable and it’s unrealistic to speak of co-existence. Nobody guarantees the security of Armenians under the rule of Azerbaijan given their openly Armeno-phobic rhetoric which has been documented by the European Court for Human Rights.

“How can you place a population of Armenian origin under the rule of an Armeno-phobic regime? There is a clear road to ethnic cleansing and genocide here – that’s what will happen if we think of this scenario.”

Hikmet Hajiyev, a special adviser to Azerbaijan’s President, told the BBC that Armenians would enjoy the same rights as any other Azeri citizen living in the country. He said they would have equal “linguistic, cultural, religious, including municipal rights”.

Azerbaijan also denies that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding. It says it has offered an alternative supply route via the town of Agdam.

“Then afterwards the Lachin road will be opened in 24 hours as well. More roads are better for everybody,” Mr Hajiyev said.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1808294/armenia-azerbaijan-conflict-lachin-road-blockade-starvation-genocide

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives.

Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy’s daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who recognised and relieved the plight of stateless Armenian refugees. Ottoman subjects—from officials and officers to ordinary townspeople and villagers—faced near-certain death for their entire family by resisting orders and helping Armenians.

Unlike the Righteous of the Holocaust, these heroes have been systematically ignored and erased—a major injustice. Based on fresh research, and hoping to repay a moral debt to Ottoman Muslims who braved everything to rescue the authors’ forebears, this book is an important, moving testament to a grievously overlooked aspect of the Armenian tragedy.

‘[This book] has a real contemporary importance.’ – Labour Hub

With its Russian torture chambers and slaughter of civilians, the war in Ukraine is horrifying enough. But what if another country is taking advantage of the distraction to commit its own crimes against humanity?

Meet Azerbaijan.

You probably haven’t heard of Azerbaijan’s brutality toward an ethnic Armenian enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh, but it deserves scrutiny. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, whom I got to know years ago when he sought accountability for the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, now describes what is happening in Nagorno-Karabakh in a similar fashion.

“There is an ongoing genocide against 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh,” he wrote in a recent report.

We tend to think of genocide as the slaughter of an ethnic group. But the legal definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention is broader and doesn’t require mass killing, so long as there are certain “acts committed with intent to destroy” a particular ethnic, racial or religious group.

That is what Azerbaijan is doing, Moreno Ocampo argued, by blockading Nagorno-Karabakh so that people die or flee, thus destroying an ancient community.

“Starvation is the invisible genocide weapon,” he wrote. “Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.”

“It is critically important to label this as genocide,” Moreno Ocampo told me, and also crucial that the United States and other world powers — including Britain, which has been too quiet — step up pressure on Azerbaijan.

The concept of genocide was developed in part as a reaction to the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing of Armenians in 1915 and 1916, so Azerbaijan’s starvation of Armenians today suggests that history risks coming full circle. The group Genocide Watch has declared a “genocide emergency,” the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention recently issued an “active genocide alert,” and the International Association of Genocide Scholars warned of “the risk of genocide” and called for Azerbaijan to be held accountable for crimes against humanity.

The current crisis began late last year, when Azerbaijanis began blockading the only road into Nagorno-Karabakh, the Lachin corridor to Armenia, on which the territory depends for food and medicine.

The International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to remove the blockade. Instead, the Azerbaijani government established a checkpoint on the road and began blocking even humanitarian aid carried by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“People are fainting in the bread queues,” the BBC quoted a local journalist as saying from Nagorno-Karabakh. The report added that the Halo Trust, a nonprofit that works to clear minefields, has had to suspend operations “because its staff are too exhausted to work after queuing for bread all night and returning home empty-handed.”

A third of deaths in Nagorno-Karabakh are attributed by the local authorities to malnutrition, the BBC said. I have no way of verifying these reports, but every indication is that the situation is dire — and getting worse by the day.

Yet I fear that the West is fatigued and looking inward, for it has likewise paid little attention to other global crises other than Ukraine, from horrendous atrocities in Ethiopia to Sudan’s warlords’ slaughtering of civilians. For dictators, tragically, this isn’t a bad time to commit war crimes.

The backdrop is that authoritarian Azerbaijan has a mostly Muslim population speaking a Turkic language, while Nagorno-Karabakh has a mostly Christian population that speaks Armenian. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Nagorno-Karabakh sought independence; a war ended with a stalemate in which the enclave operated autonomously but with close links to neighboring Armenia. In 2020, Azerbaijan fought a brief war in which it reclaimed most of the enclave, and it now wants to recover the rest — and, I suspect, to push out much of the ethnic Armenian population.

The world, including Armenia’s prime minister, acknowledges that sovereignty of Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan feels it has a right to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh politically and economically with the rest of the country. Though this is not integration but starvation, and the one point even countries as far apart as the United States and Russia agree on is that Azerbaijan should reopen the Lachin corridor and end the suffering.

One possible compromise to end the looming catastrophe is outlined by Benyamin Poghosyan of the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia: Azerbaijan would open the Lachin road and Nagorno-Karabakh would simultaneously open one or more roads into Azerbaijan (which Azerbaijan seeks). The U.S. State Department hinted at this approach in a statement denouncing the blockade. As part of that compromise, Azerbaijan would guarantee the freedom of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

This would be unsatisfying, for it rewards Azerbaijan for starving civilians, and no one could much trust promises from Azerbaijan. But the sad job of diplomats is to devise flawed, much-hated agreements that are better than any alternative outcome, and in this case a defective deal is preferable to the mass starvation and ethnic cleansing of Armenians, again.