Armenia is pushing a new wave of displaced people towards Iran.
JONATHAN RUGMAN in Kanliq, south-west Azerbaijan, reports
ON THE main road south through Kubatli province, thousands of men, women and children are packed into trucks at an Azeri checkpoint waiting for permission to leave. Helicopters shuttle in and out with the wounded, while a group of women sit wailing at the roadside, tearing at their bloodstained faces with their fingernails in a frenzy of grief. A new exodus of refugees is under way towards Azerbaijan’s border with Iran as Armenian forces continue ignoring United Nations demands that they stop their offensive. UN officials, rejecting a death toll of 3,000 usually quoted by news agencies, say at least 10,000 have been killed since the fighting began in 1988.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said yesterday that 18 villages in the province had been captured and Kubatli town was still resisting attack. Zengilan province is also reported to be under assault. All recent Armenian seizures are south-west of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, adding to the gains in the regions of Jebrail and Fizuli last month. Most of the current wave of refugees were sheltering in the village of Kanliq outside Kubatli when Armenian tanks attacked on Monday morning. Faisal Zeynalev, a 37-year-old doctor, said 16 or 17 civilians had been shot dead at close range and that about 500 had been taken prisoner.
Dr Zeynalev reached an Azeri checkpoint on foot, carrying nothing but his identity papers and a dusty anorak.
“The Armenians behaved like drunkards,’’ he said, adding that he had to leave the bodies of his two brothers behind, killed as they were getting into a waiting car.
The rest of his family, including his two children, have already been evacuated and he does not know where they are.
Sahin Latifov, a chemistry teacher, aged 34, from Kanliq, said he had also lost contact with his wife and children. Although he had packed his bags for departure, the attack was so sudden everything had been left behind.
“I heard an explosion and then they started shelling the village,” Mr Latifov said. “There are a lot of dead bodies and we can’t take them. When I reached the top of the hill I saw my house burning and I couldn’t go back.”
Several eyewitnesses confirmed that Kanliq had been set alight, a common practice as Armenian forces create a cordon sanitaire in the villages around Nagorno-Karabakh. Kanliq is just eight miles from the Armenian border and the strong suspicion is that this week’s attack was orchestrated not by Karabakh Armenians but by Armenia.
“From time immemorial they have wanted to create a greater Armenia,” Dr Zeynalev said. “Armenia is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, it has a big diaspora lobby, but we have nothing.”
On Tuesday local officials were given the extraordinary order to prevent their own civilians from leaving the Kanliq area for fear that it would encourage the Azeri soldiers to retreat.
“People have to live in their own place.” Captain Dunyamalliev said, attempting to pacify a traffic jam of refugees up to two miles long. At one point fighting broke out and shots were fired as people waved their Soviet passports in his face and screamed to be allowed through.
Scores of trucks resorted to crossing dirt tracks over the surrounding hills. While Azeri resistance crumbles, Armenian forces are now so close to Azerbaijan’s border with Iran that Armenian rockets are traveling in an arc over the frontier highway, the escape route for refugees traveling east.
“The road could be cut at any moment,” said Louis Rivera from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He added that up to 80,000 people in Kubatli and Zengilan provinces will be surrounded if the Armenians advance.
In the frontier town of Goradiz, formerly home to 10,000 people, about 100 are staying on in the hope that the Armenians will not dare travel so far south. The surrounding countryside is littered with the carcases of livestock killed in the stampede of humans and animals escaping the fighting. About 20 Azeri soldiers, half of them wearing training shoes, have taken over an orchard outside Goradiz and made it a base for the town’s defense. Their commander is Captain Bagir who was born in Armenia but forced to leave in the tit-for-tat population expulsion between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1988.
The captain explained a year-and-a-half of Azeri defeats by pointing out that most Muslim conscripts to the former Soviet army had only been allowed to perform menial and non-combat tasks. He said that when Russian troops withdrew from Azerbaijan they damaged a lot of the military equipment they left behind, and he repeated the allegation made by every Azeri that Armenian forces are supported by Russia.
“We can hear the Armenians speaking perfect Russian on their radios,” the captain said.
Diplomats in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, say soldiers of fortune from the Russian Seventh Army have been fighting on the Armenian side, but that both parties have used mercenaries. This week the UNHCR began distributing 4,000 tents and 50,000 blankets to those displaced in the recent hostilities. The organisation said about 250,000 Azeris have been displaced so far this year and about 1 million since the conflict began in 1988.
Casualties of war…A man carries his elderly mother in the capital Baku. The UN says about 25000 Azeris have been displaced this year. (Photograph: SIPA)
Publication date 09/02/1993
Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform
