Azerbaijani Refugees and IDPs

Via The Caspian Post: a story of Surayya Mammadova who was forced to flee her native Zangilan with her 5 kids in 1993. She finally got a chance to go back home.

https://youtu.be/j3NZ3hn0wLk

Going Home to Karabakh Surraya Mammadova, one of Azerbaijan's 700 000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), was born in Aghali, Zangilan - a district of Azerbaijan that was de-occupi...

"As a young woman in 1993, Azerbaijani Ramziya Sharifova waded across a river into Iran with her family to escape Armenian forces capturing her village, then watched as they burned it to the ground."

https://www.barrons.com/news/for-azerbaijanis-displaced-by-war-a-chance-to-finally-go-home-01618298715?fbclid=IwAR1V-GK4KsW5RGLBNIC9CQGcs2j0JOBpkbML6rlRqIwBdpZLXkKDDcAV1sk

For Azerbaijanis Displaced By War, A Chance To Finally Go Home As a young woman in 1993, Azerbaijani Ramziya Sharifova waded across a river into Iran with her family to escape Armenian forces capturing her village, then watched as they burned it to the ground.

FACES OF DISPLACEMENT
Azerbaijanis have been expelled from their own homes and been living in displacement for over 28 years. Now they will get a chance to return home once Azerbaijan restores and rebuilds the devastated areas that have been recently liberated from the Armenian occupation.

Once a thriving town in Azerbaijan, Agdam turned into a ghost town when the Armenian military seized it and reduced to rubbles in 1993. Before the war, Agdam had developed agriculture, wineries, food industry and machinery factories. During the war in Nagorno Karabakh, thousands of Azerbaijanis fleeing Armenia and Karabakh took refuge in Agdam. When Agdam was captured in 1993, more than 126 thousand Azerbaijanis became displaced in their own country. The city was looted and completely destroyed by the Armenian armed forces. Andrei Galafyev, a photographer who visited Agdam in 2007, reported that the city mosque in Agdam was turned into a cattle and pig barn.

Azerbaijanis fled Kalbajar region as it was occupied by the Armenian military in 1993. Prior to that Armenians never lived in Kalbajar. Now, after the recent agreement, those who settled there after the occupation are leaving the region. They burn their houses and surrounding forests as they leave. During the occupation, one of many churches of the ancient Caucasian Albania - Khudaveng monastery - was appropriated by Armenia as well.

Close to 200 000 Azerbaijanis used to live in Armenia before the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Between 1988-91, all this population was ethnically cleansed and fled Armenia for Azerbaijan.

I am a child of war and a refugee at the age of 7.

Ethnically Azerbaijani, I was born in Armenia to Azerbaijani parents. I have tried too hard and too long to suppress and forget those memories as I didn't want them to define my life and destiny. Also living with the past is damn painful. Yet, they just keep coming back and today we are living that nightmare again.

Cold and distant memory of gray and chill mornings of the autumn of 1988 kind of triggers heavy cloud of bitter emotions loaded with events of many years that followed. Our parents wouldn't tell us much then as we were small. But heaviness was all around. It was one of those gray, chill mornings that we woke up to see our parents sorting out things as to what to pack in case we had to flee. They didn't know whether we would. They didn't want to believe. They were just being careful. They didn't pack much either as they thought things would soon be over.

One gray morning the first thing I heard when I woke up was my dad saying - in Qarabag (Nagorno Karabakh) Armenians started to attack Azerbaijanis. That would mean attacking literally their neighbors and friends with whom they shared good days and bad days. Attended weddings and funerals of each other.

In face of this news, my father was vaguely predicting what could happen to us. That morning marked the beginning of a long journey - refugee fate, deprived life, working in farms and stables when I was supposed to go to school, falling into sleep with shivering cry and anguish of mothers receiving corpses of dead sons, watching silent tears of young women seeing their beloved ones or husbands being sent underground, observing wordless dialogues of men with firm faces yet shrunken under pain. That sort of life leaves an irreversible impression on self-worth and self-perception. The threshold of life standards starts so low, one can't simply see herself worthy of a decent life. And I was one of the circa 200.000 people fleeing as refugees.

Fast forward a couple of years, not long ago we had managed to settle in one of the major cities of Azerbaijan, my uncle had to flee from Aghdam because the war was in full swing. Having totally occupied Karabakh, Armenians now were expanding the war to the adjacent districts. Aghdam is one of those seven adjacent districts that are under Armenian occupation now. And my uncle was just one of the circa 800.000 people displaced from Nagorno Karabakh and those 7 districts.

As they didn't have a place to stay, we welcomed them to live with us in our tiny, poorly furbished three-bedroom apartment. We were a family of seven. They were a family of five. Total 12 people in 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment... for over 18 months....
Magnify this situation to one million refugees and internally displaced people who then made up 10 percent of the total population of Azerbaijan. And we were among the lucky ones as we managed to provide a roof overhead.

Eventually, we lost my uncle to brain bleeding. My father lived in his past memories as he helplessly watched his own life pass by. Imagine that sort of mindset on the mental health of family and kids. Magnify it to one million - then 10 percent of the population.
Now, after almost 30 years we are back again. Today, even more, civilians in major and strategic cities far from the hotline are being shelled. It is extremely hard to make peace with oneself at such times.

(@) Aynura Maye

These statues are refugees too. Damaged by bullets, they left the city of Shusha, the cradle of Azerbaijani culture, after it was occupied by Armenia in 1992, along with its 30 thousand Azerbaijani residents. Shusha is in Karabakh. Poetess Natavan, composer and the author of Azerbaijani national anthem Uzeyir Hajibeyov and singer Bulbul.

Beautiful photography from Reza Photojournalist

KHOJALY TRAGEDY
Over 600 residents of Khojaly, Azerbaijan, including 169 women and children, were killed by the Armenian military with the support from the former USSR’s 366th Motorized Infantry Regiment on a single night in February 1992. On a freezing, snowy night the inhabitants of Khojaly tried to leave the town with the hope to reach the nearest area under Azerbaijani control. However, many of them were ambushed and killed by gunfire from Armenian military posts or died from frostbite while wandering in the mountains. Only a few were able to reach the Azerbaijani-controlled town of Aghdam. 1275 were taken hostage, while the fate of another 150 people remains unknown.

When the Armenian military forces invaded Khojaly, Ramila fled with her family into a nearby forest. Her husband was killed while trying to resist the occupation. Ramila survived as the bullet hit her 2-year old son whom she was carrying on her back. Ramila and her daughter with whom she was pregnant at the time were the only survivors from her family. They became another family out of 1 million Azerbaijani refugees and IDPs displaced as a result of this conflict. (Ramila’s story told by BBC.)

The former president of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, one of the perpetrators of the massacre who was the head of Armenian military bands in Karabakh at that time, later stated:
“Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that [stereotype]. And that’s what happened…. I have absolutely no regrets …. such upheavals are necessary, even if thousands have to die”. (interview to the British journalist Thomas de Waal, “Black Garden”, 2003)

Not a single perpetrator of the Khojaly tragedy has been brought to justice.

https://www.justiceforkhojaly.org/

More than 77 thousand people fled LACHIN region of Azerbaijan when the Armenian military invaded it in 1993. Lachin is not a part of the Karabakh region. Azerbaijanis displaced from Lachin were temporarily settled in camp tents, railway carriages, and derelict public buildings. More than 200 historical monuments, 100 schools, 142 healthcare centers, and many infrastructure objects were destroyed or vandalized. The collection of Lachin History Museum that included ancient gold and silver coins was plundered by the occupants.

In 1993 Armenian military forces expelled close to 30 thousand people from the Azerbaijani province of Gubadli. Many displaced families have been living in derelict public buildings for 27 years. Now they are looking forward to going back home. Video by Meydan TV.
https://youtu.be/xJuLNgL8TMc

Gubadli resident: "We came barefoot, we'll return barefoot" Gubadli residents in Sumgait celebrated the news that Gubadli is now under Azerbaijani forces' control. Armenian forces took control of Gubadli on August 31,...

TRAGIC DAYS, OCTOBER 1993

Last days of October. Sunny days, although fall was already there. The Armenian military had already occupied parts of Jebrail, Fizuli districts in Azerbaijan, but the villages along the Araz river hadn’t been invaded yet. Shortly after, the invasion of these villages by the Armenian military forces started… Villagers who were left without homes, without shelter had no other choice but to cross the river to the Iranian side. It took 2 days to cross the border and the river. Leaving home was heartbreaking. We stayed in the neutral territory between Azerbaijan and Iran, unwilling to go, still hoping that our villages would be taken back. But that didn’t happen.

At midnight, they gathered us all at a mosque and Iranian soldiers ordered everybody to board the buses. The buses would transfer us back to Azerbaijan through the border entry at Bilasuvar (Azerbaijani city that borders Iran). There were already tent camps for the displaced people there. That was the beginning of our life at the camp… The events of that night still feel like a dream. At that time, we were still thinking: “Tomorrow things will be back to normal. We’ll go back to our lives”.

Tent camps... People waiting and searching for their loved ones at the border. It didn’t rain that day. The fall was giving us all a break. The next day it was raining non-stop. Just think about a family without a home, without even a tent. Since that day I don’t like rain. I feel just as cold as I felt on that day, many years ago.

© Farhad Yurdsever

Azerbaijani children who were killed this month as the Armenian military forces bomb Azerbaijani cities. Just as in the early 90s, children are falling victim to the war.

STOLEN DREAM

Lachin, my motherland! Once upon a time… there was a little girl. This girl had her own dream world - Lachin. She was looking forward to traveling to Lachin from her hometown of Khankendi every summer. When it was time to go, she’d get into the car with her family and the journey would begin. On the way, they would stop to have "piti" by Zarisli bridge in Shusha and get some cherries from the beautiful cherry gardens. The little girl would make cherry earrings by putting double cherry stems around her ears. On the mountainous way to the village, she would stare into the steep precipice and ask her mother: “What if we fall down there?” Dense forests followed beautiful meadows; fast rivers carried currents of melting snow from the mountains. The family would stop to get a drink of ice-cold water at the refreshing natural springs. The girl would make circlets of pretty mountain flowers.

Finally, when the family reached the village, the girl would take the small pitcher brought for her by her grandpa, hold her uncle’s hand, and head to a spring. “No, not this one, let’s go to the one in the forest!”, the girl would urge her uncle. The spring was in the middle of a dense forest, where the sunlight or human feet rarely reached. The water that ran from this spring had a peculiar light-pink hue and sourish taste. After getting a drink of water and filling their pitcher, they would collect beautiful flowers and fragrant herbs and go back home. By that time, grandma prepared the dough and rolled out thin flatbread – "yukha". The girl would have delicious fresh milk with yukha. For breakfast they had fresh farm cream, butter, milk, and wild strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries that they gathered in the forest. The little girl lived in this fairy tale until fall came. As she left the village in the fall to go back to the city, she knew that come summer she would go back to Lachin. Until there was no Lachin to go back to….

(C) Bahar Orucova

This is one of the buildings where thousands of Azerbaijanis settled after escaping the occupation by Armenian military forces that invaded Karabagh and surrounding 7 regions of Azerbaijan. It is a former dorm in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Many of those who grew up here are now fighting the war for their homes in the occupied territories. Some of them have lost their lives. They grew up in this building, but they never got a chance to go back home.

I lived here since 1993, I spent my whole childhood here. I grew up, studied, and got into university while living here. Studying was not easy: 20-25 families shared one floor of the building. We had a big family and had to share just one room. We didn’t have a desk. I made a desk for myself by covering a toilet with a wooden board and used it to study. Often times, I was writing on the floor. Sometimes I would gather all kids from our building and taught them patriotic poems and facts about the occupied regions. I thought that if we managed to recite those to the representatives of international organizations who visited the building, they would help us return home…

We didn’t have running water for days on end. Us kids would take water containers and head to the buildings where local people lived. At first, local residents would not accept us. Their kids would say: “Refugees” and hide in their homes. We could play only in the narrow hallways of our building or its yard. There was a “spider web” of electric cables hanging above the back yard. We played under this web. Once a kid got electrocuted while we were playing a game in the yard. Everyone in the building was used to accidents like this. I remember that we quickly poured sand over that kid, but we couldn’t’ save him.

There were open sewer holes around the building. One of them was close to the IDP school that I went to. We would often go and look into it with other kids. It was a scary adventure for us to peer into that hole. One day we heard that a kid from the neighborhood fell into one of these holes. We were looking for him for days, but then the sanitation workers told us that it was impossible to recover anything from those holes.

Sometimes foreign organizations would do some repairs at our buildings. We, children of these buildings, were very happy when that happened. It meant that for a while, all the mice and rats were gone. Mice and rats were the only things that scared us, kids.

© Gunay Musayeva

Escaping the war and Armenian occupation, many IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) had to settle in dilapidated public buildings – dormitories, schools, hostels. In 2005, over 34 thousand people were still living in school buildings. Barda city had the greatest number of school buildings that hosted displaced people. Today, once again, Barda schools host people seeking refuge from the shelling by separatists in Karabakh. The city itself is under attack, civilians are killed and great damage is done to houses and infrastructure.

"Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis living in Armenia were expelled from their plundered homes. They often went to Azerbaijan barefoot, through the mountain passes, with children in their arms. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenians also expelled all their Azeri neighbors who had lived there for generations, declaring that this land was Armenian and that everyone else had no business being there. Thus, Armenia’s aggression against Azerbaijan, war and occupation began." Jerusalem Post, October 2020.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/living-in-azerbaijan-as-a-jew-versus-being-jewish-in-armenia-647026?fbclid=IwAR3KOUG9XRnpKXJcTqtJiRxK5VtLhprEws2ow1Umr-Jlf1B8qH-78YTA-rs

Living in Azerbaijan as a Jew versus being Jewish in Armenia It is a well-known fact that there was virtually no antisemitism in Azerbaijan.

History of ethnic cleansing by Armenians in Karabakh: “Refugees from the enclave town of Khojaly, sheltering in the Azeri border town of Agdam, give largely consistent account accounts of how their enemies attacked their homes on the night of February 25, chased those who fled and shot them in the surrounding forests.” The Independent, March 1992.

The deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia took place as an act of forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing throughout the 20th century. Prior to the October Bolshevik Revolution, Azerbaijanis had made up 43 percent of the population of Yerevan, the current capital of Armenia. The Azerbaijani population endured a process of forced migration from the territory of the First Republic of Armenia and later in the Armenian SSR several times during the 20th century.