Nagorno-Karabakh residents say ‘catastrophic’ blockade is choking supplies

Tbilisi (Reuters) – Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh say getting food, medicine and other essential supplies is getting more difficult as Azerbaijan’s blockade of the breakaway enclave enters its ninth month.

The UN Security Council debated the blockade on Wednesday, after the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said this month that the blockade could amount to “genocide” of the local Armenian population — an assertion that Azerbaijan’s lawyers said was unfounded and inaccurate.

Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but its population of 120,000 is overwhelmingly of Armenian descent. The only remaining land section of the enclave to Armenia, the Lachin corridor overseen by Russian peacekeepers, first broke through in December.

Three Karabakh residents said that basic foodstuffs, fuel and medicine were running out.

“It’s been a very long time since I’ve eaten any dairy products or eggs,” Nina Shahverdian, a 23-year-old English teacher, said in a video call to Reuters from the capital of the region, which local Armenians call Stepanakert.

“It was a disaster because we don’t have gas. We have power outages.”

The United Nations aid chief, Edem Wosoorno, told the Security Council on Wednesday that deliveries of humanitarian relief by the International Committee of the Red Cross should be allowed to resume via whatever methods are available.

“The ICRC is doing all it can, but as one organization it can only cover the most urgent needs,” she said. “Other neutral humanitarian relief items must also be allowed to reach civilians who need them, and a sustainable solution must be found for the safe and regular transit of people and goods.”

Armenia’s foreign minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, discussed the situation in Karabakh on Wednesday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and stressed the need to avoid a “humanitarian catastrophe,” Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported.

Karabakh residents say they are only able to eat what can be produced locally, and even that is only sporadically delivered to Stepanakert, where farmers lack the fuel to bring their produce to market.

Annie Balian, a high school graduate and recent photographer, said she last ate meat about two weeks ago. She said her family lived on bread, and besides, tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelons were still available in Stepanakert’s markets.

For several weeks, the footage showed Stepanakert supermarket shelves bare, with little or no sale.

“I went to bed hungry for several days because I couldn’t find bread to bring home,” said Blian.

Breakaway District

The crisis has highlighted how Russia, engrossed in the war in Ukraine, is struggling to project influence in neighboring post-Soviet states.

Karabakh was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, and separated from Azerbaijan in a war in the early 1990s.

In 2020, Azerbaijan regained territory in and around the enclave after a second war that ended in a truce brokered by Russia. The agreement requires Russia to ensure that land transport between Armenia and Karabakh remains open.

Since the ceasefire, land links between Armenia and Karabakh have stalled over the Lachin corridor, which was blockaded in December by Azerbaijani civilians who identified themselves as environmental activists, while Russian peacekeepers did not intervene.

In April, the Azerbaijani border guards set up a checkpoint on the road, tightening the blockade.

Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, told the Security Council that Russia is “in active contact with all interested parties to resume the stable supply of food, medicine and other essential goods to Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as electricity and gas.”

“Genocide”?

This month, former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo described the blockade as potentially constituting “genocide” of the Karabakh Armenians and intended to “starve” them.

Rodney Dixon, a lawyer hired by Azerbaijan to provide an assessment of Ocampo’s opinion, described the view as “strikingly” unsubstantiated, troubling and inaccurate.

Farhad Mammadov, head of the Baku Center for South Caucasus Studies, said road controls are necessary to prevent the transit of “Armenian weapons and soldiers” to and from Karabakh.

Azerbaijan said it was ready to open supplies to Karabakh through the territory under its control, but the separatist authorities must dissolve the region and incorporate it into Azerbaijan. The Armenian side said that the blockade is aimed at forcing Karabakh’s unconditional surrender to Baku.

“They do this so that people … become so desperate that they simply leave,” said English teacher Shahverdian.

However, like other Karabakh Armenians who spoke to Reuters, Shahverdian said it only strengthened their determination to remain in their ancestral homeland.

“How can you live under a government or people who starve you for eight months?”

Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.