![]() ![]() The refugees of the ‘90s from Baku and Shahumyan were neglected by authorities, while IDPs from Hadrut and Shushi are now treated better. Now the blockaded people are exhausted by 30 post-war years of protracted conflict people in the late 80s had a greater sense of security and greater vigor. The blockade of Artsakh in the ‘90s preceded the war. ![]() My current experience incites a comparison with my first blockade, experienced as a 10 year old. I, for one, have lost weight without much effort, which I could have hardly achieved by sticking to diets in the good old days. ![]() They are often delighted with a handful of pasta and a warm cup of tea. All in all, people have simplified their eating and attire. Plastic is no longer thrown away, but carefully stored and reused. The positive sides of the blockade are that fuel shortages force drivers to exercise by walking to their destinations. Over the course of history, sieges like this have taught us to make practical, healthy and creative use of nature. They are traditionally cooked as soup, with garlic, baked within thin sheets of dough. Lavishly growing on slopes, they are generously sold at local bazaars. The land, which is giving us all this trouble, is supplying us with fresh vitamins in the form of greens, mostly wild ones. People are tending to their own vegetable gardens and cultivating every patch of land. The blockade has crippled big and small businesses due to lack of import of raw materials and goods. Their studies were further disrupted by regular rolling blackouts at home and university. Left high and dry in Yerevan are also people traveling back to Artsakh from abroad.Īrtsakh students, who have now graduated, were having a hard time getting to university from different regions, due to haphazardly disconnected gas supply that fuels public transport. Many students from Artsakh, around 200, studying in Yerevan cannot come here to see their parents. One may be stuck in Yerevan for months, like a student of mine, Sofi Abrahamyan. The Red Cross transports only the severely ill, those in need of medical intervention and children separated from parents. The blockade has impeded the right to move freely. I quit foraging for food to develop an itchy and festering vitamin-deficient rash on my face and limbs. This eventually seemed to me degrading and humiliating. Over months, I developed an instinct of buying almost any edible I saw without much discretion, rejoicing over every purchased bit of food like over a trophy. The edibles have disappeared from food stalls, leaving grains, local dairy and canned food on the rows, next to lonely-standing luxurious Armenian cognacs. It not only managed to stop the exploitation of the mine, but to deprive 120,000 people from meeting their basic needs and fundamental rights. This show of force of Azeri “environmentalists” has been the most “successful eco-friendly” action in the Caucasus with the most aggravated humanitarian outcomes. The blockade has completely cut off our enclave from the rest of the world, already isolated by protracted conflict and recent defeat in war. This is – as my doctor puts it – a vitamin deficiency induced by the blockade. But my small delight is unsettled with the first sip that pricks the split corners of my mouth and itchy nettle rash all over my cheeks. My early morning coffee on my balcony in front of the Artsakh Foreign Office exposes sunlit green laces of acacia, chirping birds and aquamarine mountain ranges soaring to the gray of the sky on the horizon. ![]()
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