Let there be light, Azerbaijan has said. Hundreds of thousands of Azeris who are internally displaced want to return to the promised land that was once theirs, in Karabakh. And they are in a hurry, after almost thirty years in limbo. They are urged because there is nothing left of their houses – four walls, hopefully – and absolutely everything will have to be redone. Although before Baku will have to comb the death in installments hidden in fields and shoulders, and for that it is already conscientiously demining. It has thousands of square kilometers ahead, without mine maps, Armenia says it cannot give them because they do not exist.
Also, in landscapes that had returned to the Stone Age after decades without cultivating, electricity poles and power pylons are being planted first, with cables that gleam like silver against a pristine blue sky. power plant, under construction, with many Turks among the pawns.
Turkey claims military support to Azerbaijan with several reconstruction contracts
Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. In 1994, after six years of war, Armenia occupied it, as well as several adjacent districts, forcing the exodus of 800,000 Azeris. Azerbaijan recaptured the enclave last November, after a couple of months of war, which caused thousands of deaths and was able to win thanks to the military support of Turkey.
Where two and a half months ago there was nothing but traces of war, uncultivated fields and ruins, there is now frenzied activity on several fronts. Demining, electrifying and connecting. Because on the plain of Füsuli, where there is not a soul within twenty kilometers, what may at first appear to be a Dada joke begins to take shape: an international airport. With the same ease with which a house is started on the roof, an empty province must be resurrected by putting an airport on its highest plain, in what are pastures without herds. In which the landing strip can already be guessed, through which dozens of excavators, road rollers, trucks and cranes circulate, already centered on the foundations of the terminal. Once again, there are Turkish contractors.
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A representative of Azerbaijan Airlines assures that it will be “the second airport in the country”. The reverse of the medal is Mets Tagher. It was a fully Armenian town until last fall. Fearing the worst, the population fled to Armenia in the last stages of the conflict. It is a relatively prosperous town, facing a curtain of snow-capped mountains. Before the Azerbaijani advance, all the neighbors fled, leaving behind a ghost town. Heavy silence is out of place in a town famous for its bells.
“Now they’ll know what it feels like,” someone mutters. Some banners with Turkish and Azerbaijani flags stand out. It is then explained that the Turkish workers are housed in Armenian houses, for the simple reason that there is no other roof for many kilometers.
Massacres on both sides
The Victory Highway is an ordinary road to Shusha, an extraordinary city in the Azerbaijani imagination and also in the imagination of its generals, who from there dominate Stepanakert, the capital of the Karabakh under Armenian control, from a bird’s eye view. Azerbaijan commemorated, as every February 26, the bloodiest episode of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. Twenty-nine years ago, Joyali, one of the few fully Azeri villages in the former largely Armenian autonomous region, was the victim of ethnic cleansing. Its six thousand inhabitants were forced to flee with what they were wearing. One in ten was killed. The memory of Azerbaijanis and Armenians is selective. The former tiptoe over the pogrom of Armenians in Baku, Sumgait or Ganya on horseback of the nineties. “You cannot compare a spontaneous explosion with one planned by a general staff,” says the director of the Center for Analysis and International Relations, Ambassador Farid Shafiyev. “They were also tried in the USSR and even executed. Those responsible for Joyali have never been punished. So reconciliation is important, but so is justice, as in the Balkans, Sierra Leone or Rwanda. That impunity has allowed new bombings on the civilians of Ganya ”. “We will only find peace if justice is done,” says Samira Huseinova, who was a five-year-old girl when she had to flee. The grievance has now switched sides. “Reconciliation will take time. We need international help, ”Shafiyev concedes.
Another person in the group, who lived to the age of fourteen in the city of Agdam, emptied of its overwhelmingly Azerbaijani population in the early 1990s, says he experienced “mixed feelings” and his sad expression, as he crossed the edge of the city, confirm. “I can put myself in the shoes of these people.” However, he points out that this was a mixed town, although he cannot say to what extent. “The Azeris who had to flee will now be able to return. Their houses were occupied by Armenian settlers from Syria or Lebanon ”. A repeated and surely exaggerated statement.
It dominates the mass of the stone church of Santa María, which was a warehouse throughout Soviet times and which had been reopened for worship for just three years. This empty but intact town did not wait for the arrival of the Turkish and Israeli drones. Perhaps because here was born the marshal of the Soviet air force Sergey Judyakov, hero of the USSR before falling from grace due to the loss of a plane loaded with gold from Manchuria, which cost him his life, before being rehabilitated.
Mets Tagher is a ghost town after the flight of the Armenians
The mines will be a nightmare for many years. Baku says that Erevan is lying when he says there are no maps of the mined areas and that he only wants to delay the resettlement of the original population and cause casualties. Half a dozen deminers with dogs comb an area along the roads, which remain the only truly safe terrain.
Mets Tagher has a Paleolithic museum. The caves from when there were neither Armenians, nor Azeris, nor flags are famous.
There is no doubt that Azerbaijan has recovered one of the most beautiful parts of its territory. Azeri IDPs show surprise when asked if they will return to what was once their village. For them it is something that does not admit questions. It is where your memories and your deceased are.
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