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LACHIN, Azerbaijan, April 24 (AFP) - 4h29
- Turkish massacres of Armenians which began 90
years ago on Sunday have a lot to do with why a
pretty 29-year-old from Iraq is now living on one of
the most contested chunks of land on earth in the
Caucasus.
An ethnic Armenian whose grandparents fled to
Baghdad when Ottoman forces began their campaign
against Armenians in eastern Anatolia, Anakhit
Petrosyan once dreamed of coming to Armenia to work
in the Iraqi embassy in Yerevan.
But when a US bomb killed her father last year her
plans changed and like her grandparents before her,
she fled her birthplace to settle in the Lachin
district of Azerbaijan which is controlled by
pro-Armenian forces of the unrecognized
Nagorno-Karabakh republic.
"I didn't know much about Karabakh, all I knew was
that there had been a war here and these were our
territories, we hoped to get help here," Petrosyan
said.
Armenians around the world mark April 24 as the day
Ottoman Turks began the genocide of their people in
1915, something Turkey denies ever happened.
But the events of the early 20th century are today
overshadowed by Armenia's ongoing conflict with its
other Turkic-speaking neighbor, Azerbaijan.
In 1994, Armenia and its proxies captured
Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within
Azerbaijan, as well as seven surrounding Azeri
regions, through a gruelling six-year war that cost
25,000 lives and displaced about one million people,
250,000 of them Armenians.
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity
with Azerbaijan, dealing a crippling economic blow
to the former Soviet republic from which is has yet
to recover.
But Azerbaijan still claims the territories and
750,000 Azeri refugees remain in camps on the ready
to return.
A shaky ceasefire is often punctuated by
increasingly frequent shootings that have taken at
least a dozen lives this year.
The escalation prompted the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which is
charged with mediating the conflict to express
concern about the breaches as well as recent public
statements about the possibility of war.
Azerbaijan charges that Karabakh and Armenian
authorities have put in place an Israeli-style
settlement plan in the occupied regions outside of
Karabakh itself, so that they can lay future claims
to them.
The Azeri claim is highlighted by cases like
Petrosyan's who like other Armenians from the
diaspora outside the former Soviet Union settled in
the territory.
The focus of those concerns has been the mountainous
area in which Petrosyan and her family now live, the
strategically important Lachin corridor, renamed
Verdzor by the Armenians, which represents the only
land route between Karabakh and Armenia.
Unlike Karabakh, which had a 75-percent ethnic
Armenian population before the war, Lachin was
predominantly Azeri.
A recent OSCE mission sent to the separatist
republic to verify Azerbaijan's claims said in its
findings that up to 12,000 people, mostly Armenian
refugees from Azerbaijan, had been resettled in the
area.
This is immediately obvious to any visitor to Lachin
where the only sign of it ever having been in
Azerbaijan's hands are the eastern-style window
portholes in some of its war-gutted administration
buildings.
Petrosyan, whose husband was wounded in the
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and taken prisoner by US
forces in the Gulf war in 1991 said the possibility
of another war with Azerbaijan would not deter her
from staying in Lachin.
"If we could fight for Iraq, then we can surely
fight for our own homeland," she said.
Lachin's authorities deny any "foreign" Armenians
have settled in the area, or in fact that any live
there at all.
"We don't see our job as settling as many people as
possible, our aim is to give the refugees a place to
live and secure the corridor," said Gagik Kosakyan,
the deputy head of Lachin's administration.
Securing the corridor has meant rebuilding much of
the area's infrastructure and housing, so much so
that the area looks more prosperous than the
adjacent region within Armenia proper.
Armenian officials have said any settlement over
Karabakh would have to include an Azeri concession
of Lachin, an area that saw some of the heaviest
fighting during the war because of its strategic
importance.
Kosakyan estimated that the separatist republic had
invested one million dollars (765,000 euros) a year
to rehabilitate the region since 1994, with many
extra funds coming from Armenia's influential
diaspora in the West.
And like many other refugees in the region
informally polled by AFP Petrosyan she said she was
intent on staying. "They can say what they want, but
we know this is our land," she said.
AFP
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