Azerbaijan has vowed to repopulate lands recaptured in the six-week war with Armenia.
President Ilham Aliyev had promised for years to recover the lands lost in the 1990s, and the first return was a symbolic moment for Azerbaijan.
An official said nearly 60 people have moved back to the village they left in 1993 during the ethnic Armenian separatist war with Azerbaijan that claimed about 30,000 lives.
Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis fled Nagorno-Karabakh during the war.
“58 people have returned to Zangilan district”, which was recaptured by Baku in October 2020, Vahid Hajiyev, the president’s special representative in the region, told reporters.
In 1993, more than 30,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis fled from Zangilan, which is located near the Iranian border.
In the next five days, a total of 41 families will return to the recently restored village of Agalli in Zangilan, Hajiyev said.
Baku has pledged to spend billions of oil dollars on the reconstruction of Nagorno-Karabakh and nearby conquered areas.
It allocated $1.3 billion in last year’s budget for infrastructure projects such as new roads, bridges and airports in the region.
But large-scale refugee returns remain a distant prospect, given the extent of the damage and the dangers posed by landmines.
In September 2020, hostilities broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited mainly by Armenians, in which approximately 6,500 people lost their lives.
The hostilities lasted for six weeks and ended on November 9, 2020, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the support of Russia, concluded an agreement on a ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which many in Armenia consider a capitulation.
According to the agreement, the Armenians lost part of the core territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as all the districts of the security buffer zone, which had been under Armenian control since the 1990s.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which was part of the Azerbaijan SSR during the Soviet era, has been a “de facto” independent Armenian republic since the early 1990s. Although Azerbaijan has not controlled Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the USSR, it considers the Armenian-populated region as its territory.
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