Stephanie Nebehay, Geneva

THE United Nations held emergency talks with Azerbaijan yesterday on how to transfer 27,000 Azeri civilians trapped in an area seized by Armenian forces last week.

“Our main concern is the 27,000 people still trapped,” Marie Okabe, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Reuters.

She said Patrick Smith, head of a UNHCR delegation set up in Baku last December to help refugees displaced by ethnic fighting, met Azerbaijan’s First Deputy Prime Minister Abbas Abbasov to discuss the crisis. The humanitarian agency said the civilians were trapped in more than 30 Azeri villages in the area of the western town of Kelbajar, seized by Armenian troops lost weekend. Okabe said a second round of negotiations was expected later yesterday, she added. Smith met Azerbaijan’s Prime Minister Ali Masimov earlier this week.

In Baku, an Azeri defense ministry spokesman said on Tuesday that Armenian troops had swallowed up a tenth of the trans-Caucasian republic’s territory in the 10-day offensive. The intense fighting marks a major escalation in a five-year-old territorial dispute between the former Soviet republics over Nagorno-Karabakh, a largely Armenian-inhabited enclave inside Azerbaijan.

In New York, the UN Security Council expressed serious concern on Tuesday at the invasion of the Kelbajar district and demanded the withdrawal of the Armenian forces.

The UNHCR said yesterday about 200 exhausted refugees had arrived the previous day in Dashkezan, in Azeri-held territory north of the latest corridor to Nagorno-Karabakh. The exodus was down from the 500 to 700 arriving daily earlier this week.

“The heavy snow is making it very difficult to make the journey over the mountains,” Okabe said. “People have to first cross the front lines to even get to the escape route.”

Survivors have told UNHCR officials, who provided food and treatment for frostbite, that one in four refugees died crossing the snowbound Mourovdar Pass, according to the spokeswoman. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday it had delivered thousands of blankets and pairs of shoes to Azeri refugees in the past week. In a communique, the ICRC called on both parties to spare civilian lives and grant it access to all detainees. So far, its delegates have been able to visit 49 civilians and combatants held by local authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Publication date 04/08/1993

Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform