Voice of America:
In Askeran, Vardges Harutyunyan, a former deputy police chief and pomegranate grower, is waiting for an answer as to where the new borders are crossing after Armenia ceded the territory as a Russian-brokered deal to end weeks of fighting in the region. The gardener went to the garden and saw that there were already Azerbaijani soldiers there.
“His soldiers are sitting there. If this is our land, the authorities will do something. “If it is theirs, what can we do? They have given half of our country, what should we do?” He said. Vardges Harutyunyan’s question was not answered by any of the authorities. They only said that there are no borders in that section, it is not yet known where the border line will pass. While the Armenian-Azerbaijani border is causing concern to many, some are following the calls of the authorities and returning to their homes. However, they are far from the situation left by the residents.
“The windows of many houses are broken, we take cellophane to close them,” said a woman who returned to Karabakh and whose windows were shattered by Azeri bombing. In Stepanakert, which has been bombarded with various permitted weapons, volunteers come to the aid of residents to rectify the post-war chaos. They distribute aid and food to the returnees to Stepanakert. Volunteers say donations of humanitarian aid come from the Armenian Diaspora. “People are left without a home, without anything. They were evicted from their native villages, from their homes, ”said one of the volunteers. For their part, Baku reports that about 600,000 Azeris were displaced by the war in the 1990s. Since the last war, meanwhile, more territory has been returned to the Azerbaijanis under the ceasefire agreement. The AP news agency from Baku reported that Azerbaijani forces discovered most of the handed over lands uninhabited after entering Aghdam on Friday.
The city of Aghdam, once home to 50,000 people, is now in ruins. Adil Sharifov, 62, who fled his hometown in 1992 during the first war and lives in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, knows he will see such devastation if he returns to Jabrayil. “The day I return will be the greatest happiness,” he told the AP. For years, according to the Azerbaijanis, they knew that the devastation was great. “I will build an even better planting,” he said. Even today, Armenian cultural values continue to be destroyed and desecrated in the Azerbaijani-occupied territories of Nagorno-Karabakh. While the Azeris are planning to return to their homes, the Armenians leaving the territories handed over to Azerbaijan are returning to their homes so that they will not be left behind. A number of Armenian-populated settlements came under Azerbaijani rule during the war. The locals did not even have the opportunity to take out their property.