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The commander of the victorious military watched on in triumph as his troops goose-stepped in columns via the central sq. of the previous breakaway capital they’d captured in a brazen assault simply weeks earlier than.
The commander, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, was taking a victory lap final week across the Nagorno-Karabakh metropolis of Stepanakert, often known as Khankendi, a ghost city after its ethnic Armenian residents fled in worry as Azerbaijani troops captured the realm.
“The enemy has knelt earlier than us,” Mr. Aliyev, wearing camouflage, stated as he hailed his troops from a small podium.
Azerbaijan seized full management over Nagorno-Karabakh, together with Stepanakert, in late September after defeating separatist forces, extending positive factors made in 2020 when a Russia-brokered cease-fire allowed it to take over many of the territory that Armenia had seized in a yearslong conflict within the Nineties.
The territory has been reworked. Greater than 100,000 of its residents have fled since September, and Azerbaijanis have streamed in since final 12 months to imagine management over the properties and communities from which their households have been expelled many years in the past.
Whereas the weapons have fallen silent, the triumphalism of the Azerbaijanis and provocative statements by Mr. Aliyev, who makes little secret of his irredentist claims in opposition to Armenia, will do little to calm long-running ethnic tensions, consultants say.
“He was a victor, and he may have used this place to fix the scenario, to cease the rhetoric of hatred and begin constructing actual peace,” Altay Goyushov, an Azerbaijani historian, stated of Mr. Aliyev’s parade and his public pronouncements about ethnic Armenians, whom he has accused of “savagery,” ethnic cleaning and genocide. (Armenia has lengthy made comparable accusations in opposition to Azerbaijan.)
Mr. Goyushov added: “Sadly, we haven’t seen that.”
The battle over Nagorno-Karabakh, a strategic sliver of mountainous land within the Caucasus, had tormented diplomats and politicians from Russia and the West for many years. Tens of 1000’s of troopers and civilians have been killed within the years of preventing.
Visits to either side of the border — in Azerbaijan in June, and Armenia in July and late September — by a staff from The New York Occasions and conversations with residents, adopted up with phone calls in October, counsel that the injuries of the battle are prone to fester, creating fertile floor for brand new violence.
Azerbaijani households are constructing new properties, planting timber and arranging furnishings to have fun their return to their ancestral villages after greater than 30 years in exile. On the opposite aspect of the border, the scene is strikingly totally different: Over 100,000 ethnic Armenians who fled the territory in a caravan of vehicles are struggling to begin anew in Armenia.
“My land feels so candy,” stated Gayane Milonyan, 36, an Armenian who fled Stepanakert, the city the place Mr. Aliyev held the parade, already nostalgic for the house she left in September with 29 members of her prolonged household, together with her two youngsters. However, she stated, “the identical land is so thirsty for blood.”
She and her household at the moment are dwelling in a lodge in Goris, throughout the mountains in Armenia.
Ramiz Gasanov, an Azerbaijani who’s now constructing a house for his household in Lachin, the Karabakh city they fled greater than three many years in the past, stated final month that he didn’t need the Armenians to go away however that he had “lived via the identical tragedy 30 years in the past.”
That sense of resentment simmers on either side.
“I’m completely happy that we returned, however we misplaced the whole lot that we had right here,” Gulbeniz Magerramova, 67, stated in June as she threaded via the overgrown ruins of her ancestral house in Shusha, a significant Karabakh city that each Armenians and Azerbaijanis regard as central to their nationwide identities.
She in contrast what occurred to her and her prolonged household with the plight of Ukrainians, thousands and thousands of whom have been displaced throughout Europe after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Her recommendation: by no means lose hope.
However many on either side of the battle say it’s troublesome to not really feel disheartened — and deep bitterness — when years flip into many years.
Standing in entrance of the home his father had inbuilt Lachin and to which he has simply returned, Iman Ismailov stated he felt “nothing however hatred” towards Armenians for forcing him to flee his house three many years in the past.
“Thirty-one years of my life have been destroyed,” stated Mr. Ismailov, 64. “After we left this home, we had 9 folks in our household,” he stated, as staff fastened his entrance door. “Now, solely my sister and I got here again.”
Armenians who’ve fled Lachin expressed comparable emotions.
Aida Balikyan moved greater than a 12 months in the past, abandoning a retailer, a carwash and a tire store within the Karabakh city and touring throughout the border to the village of Kornidzor in Armenia. From her balcony, she will see Lachin.
Within the new retailer she rents, a teary-eyed Ms. Balikyan, 73, confirmed an image of Mr. Aliyev, the Azerbaijani president, standing in Lachin in entrance of what she stated was a tree her husband had planted.
“I’m ready,” Ms. Balikyan stated in June, when a staff from The Occasions visited her. “I don’t know when and the way, however we shall be again.”
For now, Mr. Aliyev’s authoritarian authorities is attempting to show Lachin right into a affluent image of his rule. New properties and condo buildings have mushroomed round previous ruined ones. About 650 Azerbaijanis are anticipated to settle there by the top of the 12 months, stated Nasimi Asadov, who manages the Lachin undertaking.
The Azerbaijani authorities has a grasp plan for the city, developed by a Swiss firm, that envisions the development of an “occupation” museum specializing in the years that Armenians managed Nagorno-Karabakh, a theater and a cinema. General, it plans to spend greater than $17.5 billion on creating the Karabakh area by 2026, in accordance with Aydin Kerimov, one of many Azerbaijani officers overseeing the undertaking.
However none of that can erase the reminiscences of painful exile for Shafaq Abbasova. Strolling via Lachin, Ms. Abbasova was in search of the home she grew up in, solely managing to take action by recognizing acquainted ceramic tiles on its ruined partitions.
Aside from constructing infrastructure, Azerbaijan can be demining the frontier that separated the 2 armies. Over the previous three many years, it changed into some of the fortified areas on this planet, leaving a everlasting scar on the land, stated Ruslan Muradov, one of many specialists main the hassle.
Mr. Muradov stated the demining course of was a reminder that conflicts final for much longer than their lively phases. He stated it might take as much as 40 years and billions of {dollars} for the Azerbaijani authorities to finish the method.
In Nagorno-Karabakh — whose modest dimension belies its strategic significance for Russia, Turkey, Iran and the West — Armenians and Azerbaijanis as soon as lived collectively largely peacefully, even when with their very own, diametrically opposed visions of the area’s historical past.
Armenians and Azerbaijanis described how they used to coexist peacefully through the Soviet period, sure by intermarriage and commerce, with grievances stored in examine below the watchful eye of the central authorities in Moscow.
In Shusha, as an example, Ms. Magerramova stated that her youngsters performed and ate along with Armenian neighbors.
However, sitting on prime of a picturesque cliff that overlooks the encompassing space, Shusha has additionally been an emblem of decades-old interethnic strife over territory and historical past. Through the previous century, it was burned 3 times: as soon as by either side, as soon as by the Azerbaijanis, and as soon as by the Armenians. Now, Armenians have left once more, and plenty of already harbor hopes for an eventual return.
Ruben Arutyunyan, 63, fought to beat Shusha (which he and different Armenians name Shushi) from Azerbaijan in 1992. As soon as it was captured, he walked via the city to search out his ancestral house. His father’s {photograph} was nonetheless hanging on a wall.
In 2020, hours earlier than Azerbaijanis captured it, he ran from Shusha for dozens of miles with solely a bag of paperwork. He nonetheless holds a grudge.
“Irrespective of how good an Azerbaijani is, he’ll all the time shoot you within the again,” he stated in June.
However, he added, larger forces had been at play within the battle.
“This isn’t our conflict,” Mr. Arutyunyan stated. “It’s a conflict between the pursuits of Russia, America and Britain.”
Nyree Abrahamian contributed reporting from Goris, Armenia, and Naila Balayeva from Lachin, Azerbaijan.
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