Upon visiting Karabakh in 1994, there were two possible routes for my return to Yerevan. The first was the same way I arrived by military helicopter, and the second was by road. With no highway in place at the time, that would take longer and prove more challenging. Even if the helicopter on the way to Karabakh had to perform an evasive manoeuvre when the pilot was informed of Azerbaijani activity in the area, it was by far the quickest and made the journey in under 45 minutes rather than an estimated 12 hours by road. I had spent less than three hours in Yerevan upon arrival from London and over a week in Karabakh. A few days would barely be enough for meetings with Vazgen Sargsyan in Yerevan and the Locum Tenens Catholicos in Etchmiadzin. I also had to meet Seta Melkonian, then recently widowed wife of Monte, and two local journalists reporting on the conflict.
In retrospect, I regret not choosing making the journey by road which would have taken me through Lachin, the main Azerbaijani town outside the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) since emptied of its ethnic Azerbaijani and Kurdish population two years earlier. It wasn’t until my next visit to Karabakh in 1999 that I finally took the newly constructed highway that served as the vital link between Armenia and the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh. I visited Lachin many times over the next decade, staying for a week at a time to document the Armenian settlers whose number always seemed to decline rather than increase. When Armenian forces set fire to parts of Lachin when they took it in 1992, it was always going to be difficult to inhabit the damage was that extensive.
Indeed, when Baku regained control of Lachin in 2022, Azerbaijani journalists were shocked. One remarked that it seemed Armenians had not been living in Lachin but simply struggling to survive. He was not wrong though it was better than elsewhere in the formerly occupied seven regions outside the NKAO. The once bustling Azerbaijani market town of Aghdam was a case in point. Atop one of the minarets of a sole mosque left standing, coincidently so Armenian forces could use as a vantage point, I remember photographing row upon row of destroyed homes reduced to rubble stretching into the distance. That was in 2001 while accompanying British writer Thomas de Waal who referred to Aghdam as a “mini-Hiroshima.”
Throughout the early 2000s, similar sights were to await me in Kelbajar, Jabrail, Fuzuli, Gubadli, and Zangilan. Even despite four outstanding UN Security Council Resolutions calling for the return of the seven regions, there was never ever any real sign if that happening over the coming two decades. Instead, toponyms were changed, nationalists lobbied to have Armenian television show maps of the NKAO and surrounding regions in weather reports, and an amalgamated Artsakh entered the local imagination rather than the political entity itself. No matter that over 600,000 Azerbaijanis fled their homes, opening another tragic chapter in a conflict that had already seen 200,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis leave Armenia and 300,000 ethnic Armenians leave Azerbaijan proper.
Even in Shusha, the hilltop citadel situated within the former NKAO, the only sign of any development on the horizon had regarded the Ghazanchetsots cathedral. That was the case on my first visit in 1994 and remained the case on my last in 2011. True, the town’s central most prominent mosque would later be renovated but only to present it as Persian rather than Azerbaijani. Another two mosques, mostly out of sight, remained untouched despite clear damage from the war. Later that decade, the largest collection of Armenian khachkar stone crosses in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan were levelled. Unfortunately, religious monuments were perceived by both sides as claims of ownership rather than as places of worship.
There has also rarely been any sense of empathy between the sides. Despite the exodus of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Karabakh in late 2023, many in Armenia or from Karabakh still fail to grasp the pain of the Azerbaijanis forced to flee before them. At the same time, it does not seem that Azerbaijani IDPs can relate to the grief felt by those ethnic Armenians displaced more recently. Not that any media reports on them regularly. Three years ago, however, a couple visiting Tbilisi from Armenia at least demonstrated that this isn’t always the case. The wife said she had no idea about the devastation unleashed on the seven regions until it was shown by Azerbaijanis post-2020. She was particularly shocked by Aghdam.
There are other cases too. While again accompanying Thomas de Waal on one of his visits to Karabakh in the early 2000s for Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through War and Peace, I told him about Mher Gabrielyan, a Karabakh Armenian who attempted to protect Azerbaijani cultural sites in Shusha when Armenian forces took it in 1992. He failed and Gabrielyan was eventually run out of Karabakh and moved to Armenia. Others have documented the village exchange between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in their rump countries. Both now care for the cemeteries of each other until better times. We seldom hear such stories. Some never do even if reconciliation will prove even more difficult without them.
First, however, Yerevan should take responsibility for what happened in the seven regions of Azerbaijan. Baku should also be more sensitive towards pre-1994 Armenian settlements now under its control.
source: Onnik James Krikorian is a journalist, photojournalist, and consultant from the U.K. who has covered the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict since 1994.
Photo: Aghdam © Onnik James Krikorian 2001
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