Spotlight Artsakh

More than 500 forcibly displaced Armenians from Artsakh are now in the village of Zorak in Armenia’s Ararat region, where several families are living together in one house, some even in their trucks. Photojournalist Ani Gevorgyan tells their story.

Over 100,000 forcibly displaced Armenians of Artsakh are now in Armenia facing the crippling challenge of starting over after losing everything. They also face an uncertain future with regard to their status.

Mellisa, a six-year-old from the village of Harav in besieged Artsakh, should have started first grade this year. However, she will not be attending school, and neither will her four older siblings.

If they had survived it, and done so with grace and empathy, then what is to prevent us from doing the same, writes Shoushan Keshishian, about Vasuki, a survivor of the blockade of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

A young woman’s story of discovery, memory, loss and pain about a war that ripped apart the nation, but who comes to the realization that while Karabakh may have died on the battlefield, Artsakh, despite it all, is still alive.

The data collected by the Rapid Needs Assessment survey, conducted by Hub Artsakh, tells a harrowing story of increasing food insecurity and deteriorating emotional and physical wellbeing. If the blockade is not lifted, the result will be catastrophic.

Nothing in Artsakh is what it used to be. The Stepanakert market, once known as a feast of tastes and colors has now become a concentrated mosaic of all our misery, writes Tamara Grigoryan, a resident of the capital city.

After months of gradually deepening the blockade and experimenting with various methods of coercion to force Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan seems to have found a slow-paced but high-impact weapon – deliberate starvation.

If concrete measures, such as direct intervention, imposing sanctions on Aliyev's family, and targeting Aliyev's reputation, are not taken, international actors involved in the mediation process will ultimately share responsibility for the events unfolding in Artsakh.

Diplomacy, or more accurately diplomatic coercion, may ultimately avoid another war, but the endgame that the mediators seem certain to impose on the Artsakh Armenians would be nothing short of a total unilateral capitulation, writes Karena Avedissian.