“It was terrible, I will never forget it in my life:” Anush Avetisyan from Artsakh will not forget the atrocities that started on September 19 and have not yet ended.
Anush is the mother of a conscript soldier and the wife of a volunteer. She says, as soon as the Azerbaijani rocket attacks started, she started thinking about only two directions: Martakert and Martuni: the positions of this section were defended by her son and her husband.
“Kamo (the husband) was at the position in Martuni. It was very dangerous there. Arman (son) was in Martakert. He was a soldier, 18 years old, it was dangerous. When the war started, we we like crazy. They were shooting so much that I thought that even if I leave the basement, I will not see a person alive. I said to myself, It is better for us to die in the basement, so that I will not know what is happening outside,” says the woman who went through the horror.
On September 20, when the ceasefire was announced, women, children and the elderly came out of the basements and tried to find out information about their relatives in the positions. Mrs. Anush says that there was a ceasefire, but only on the Internet: in Stepanakert, the shootings continued to be heard.
She, believing the official information about the ceasefire, reached their house in Armenavan district of Stepanakert, but there they noticed Azeri soldiers, who fired irregular shots.
“We went to our house. There, we saw that they have already entered the residential quarters Armenavan, Krkzhan, Haykavan. We reached home. We wanted to make a fire, to drink tea to warm up. We were cold in the basement where we stayed all night. They started shooting in our neighborhood. We barely lit the fire and immediately left everything and escaped to the square. They said it was a ceasefire; we read on the Internet that there was ceasefire, but they were shooting,” she says in a conversation with Forrights.am.
“A flight has started,” she says, describing the actions of the defenseless people of Artsakh who found themselves in a desperate situation.
“Evveryone was running away. They were saying go to the Russians, Ivanyan. My mother has difficulty to walk. It was a terrible situation. They told us not to go home, they wouldn’t be able to keep the Turks from coming forward, that’s why we stayed in the square for a week. I didn’t think about running away from Artsakh: my son and husband were not there. They were running away. I said, where are you going, the boys didn’t come from the positions?”
Having no news from her son and husband for two days, she walked almost all of the city of Stepanakert, arrived at the doors of various government departments to get some information, but was treated indifferently. Se says there was no an official who would listen to the people of Artsakh and give them hope.
“Every day, for a week, I went to the National Security Service, the government building, the headquarters, I told them to make sure that the roads are opened and the soldiers come back. Neither in the NSS, nor in the government, nor in the headquarters did we see a single official who gave us an answer or at least gave us hope that they had brought or will bring our boys. The guards did not leave us to enter the presidential office, we fought a lot, we cried, they said, ‘Get out of here, so that the president can exit, go, don’t shout,” says the forcibly displaced woman from Artsakh.
During the search for her son and her husband, the woman who walked around Stepanakert recorded scenes that she cannot forget in any way.
“The square was full, the children were lying on the ground, sitting on the steps of the government building: it was terrible. People were so tired of everything, they were sitting and waiting in the rain…”
Anush and her family are among the last forcibly displaced people. Now they are in Garni: one of the residents temporarily gave his house to live for two or three months, then the family of seven does not know where to go. Ms. Anoush prefers their home in Artsakh.
“We have nowhere to go. I wish they somehow take this people back to Karabakh. Mama also wants to go. She is a Russian. I say you can go to Kaliningrad. She says no: she want to go to Karabakh.”
The family needs household items, but it is unspeakably difficult to talk to them domicilliaryEach of their sentences ends with thoughts of the pain of the loss of the motherland.
Narek Kirakosyan
Narek Kirakosyan
Narek Kirakosyan is a journalist, works on the principle of "a person is an absolute value".