The season is just beginning and, in the lobby of the Mina hotel, one of the 20 in Goris, people are already negotiating a place on the most comfortable beige sofas. These customers are not tourists. Anyway, Lillit, the receptionist, hasn’t received any since the 2020 war. They come from Nagorno-Karabakh and have been waiting to return there for four months.
Lillit calls them by their first name. “Some are worried, we have to reassure them: they are safe with us. » The employee reminds them of the reputation of Goris, impregnable since the time of Garegin Njdeh, a great Armenian military leader of the early 20th century, celebrated for his fight against the Turks and the Soviets.
Blocked since December 12, 2022
At the Mina hotel, 35 rooms out of 70 are occupied by this clientele who arrived in haste on December 12, 2022, the first day of the blocking of the Lachin corridor by Azerbaijani militants.
According to the town hall, there are 140 in Goris waiting for the reopening of this road, the entrance to which is a few kilometers from the city. It is the only access road still linking Armenia to the Republic of Artsakh, the name given by the Armenians to the unrecognized political entity of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Significant shortages
Yerevan and Baku have been fighting over these mountainous lands since the end of the USSR in 1991. By imposing a blockade, Azerbaijan hopes to extend its control over the area a little more. Residents, who face shortages of everything, say they were forced to leave.
Originally from Martakert, in Nagorno-Karabakh, Marine Hyusnunts, 33, had traveled to Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, with her husband, for the time of a medical examination for their son, who became hyperactive during an Azerbaijani assault in the fall of 2020. The date was December 12, 2022. Leaving the cabinet, Marine Hyusnunts is warned by her husband that the corridor is closed.
Like everyone else, they believed that this story would not last. That the Russian soldiers deployed in the area since the end of the 2020 war would unblock the situation. That international condemnations would flow, as with each renewed tension. The ace. The Russians remained powerless, and foreign protests were ineffective.
The family had to leave Yerevan after a week: too expensive. «At least, in Goris, we are nearby, ready to return when possible», she says. They were assigned room 201. They are still there today.
“They don’t know how to manage”
During the day, their two children draw. Marine Hyusnunts watches Artsakh TV programs, which are received in Armenia. In the corridors, we hear the other residents on the phone with their loved ones. They are for the most part single men, a labor force living astride the frontier, whom the chance of the calendar has blocked on this side.
Since December, we had to organize ourselves. The women, who take turns doing the dishes, try to vary the dishes. The men are waiting on the porch, smoking cigarettes and drinking lots of coffee. In the evening, the paper cups are filled with alcohol. There are fights. Sometimes Anahit Aleksanyan, the manager, has to step in. «Don’t get me wrong, they are hard workersshe slips. But they worked all their lives. Wait like that, they don’t know how to manage. »
Nearly 3,900 people stranded in Armenia have reportedly been allowed to return to Nagorno-Karabakh since December, some of them through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Marine Hyusnunts has been offered repatriation, but her husband is not entitled to it. The Red Cross says it respects “the requirements of the parties” to the conflict and prioritize according to “vulnerability criteria”. Women and children first, in short.
“Azerbaijan wants to separate us, let us lose hope and leave Nagorno-Karabakh”, says Marine Hyusnunts. She preferred to stay in Goris than to leave her husband alone. But never, she swears, will she settle there, or anywhere else in the Republic of Armenia.
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Nagorno-Karabakh residents trapped
Since December 12, 2022, 120,000 Armenians residing in Nagorno-Karabakh are in a most precarious humanitarian situation, made up of food shortages, lack of medicine and gas and electricity cuts.
At the end of January, the separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh has implemented a system of rationing oil, pasta, rice and other non-perishable foodstuffs.
The only organization still authorized to sail between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the International Committee of the Red Cross carries out operations to evacuate patients whose situation requires it, but can only compensate with its deliveries a part of the missing medicines.