Karo Aziryan from Shushi was in the basement of his house when the first bad news started coming from the front line during the 44-Day War, as a result of which he had a heart attack and was transferred to Stepanakert for surgery. “I learned that we had lost Hadrut. At that time, both my son and my sister’s son were in Hadrut. My heart couldn’t take it. When I was transferred to the hospital, I didn’t know yet that I would never return to Shushi,” he says.
This wasn’t the first war Karo Aziryan had seen. During the first Artsakh war, when he was only 22 years old, he lost his leg.
Since 2020, the family has been living in Yerevan, in a student dormitory. Having gone through forced displacement in 2020, in 2023 Karo helped and supported the new displaced persons.
“It was terrible. Before that, there was at least hope that we would return to Artsakh, but with the deportation of all Armenians from there, we no longer have any hope. How can we go? Until 2023, my sons served in Artsakh, guarding the border. They left everything and came here. Like the others, they took nothing, they left without anything. Just as we left Shushi without anything, so my sons left Artsakh without anything.”
Speaking about the support received from the state, Karo says, “They cut off our monthly 50 thousand drams. They say, you live in a dormitory, you have no right to use that money. There are seven people in our family. It turns out that the state is taking away 350 thousand drams only from our family, the state is making money from us, but it doesn’t come to see how its refugee people are… The country’s leadership has left us at a dead end.”
According to Aziryan, neither he nor his sons have been able to take advantage of the state housing program to this day, because its conditions are simply incomprehensible and unfair, and he does not want to change his passport [renunciation of NK citizenship and adoptance of RA citizenship are one of the conditions for benefiting from housing program]. “I won’t change it, so that they don’t say that Artsakh never existed, so that they can’t erase our history. My passport says my address is in Shushi, Amiryan 9, apartment 19. It’s our home. They’ve destroyed the city, they’re destroyed your street, they’ve demolished the old Armenian houses, they’re putting up buildings, they’ve erased the history, all those houses were Armenian history…”
How long will the family live in the dormitory, Karon doesn’t know, he says, “our heads do not work anymore, we don’t know what to do.”
“The wars tortured us a lot. My cousin is gone; he’s missing. They fought until the last day, he was alive. They went to take out the wounded, the victims, and three of them are missing. “Whether the Turks took them or what happened is unknown… the Russians took my sons out. If they hadn’t taken them out, the Turks would have killed them too… We are alive, we are here, but we don’t know where we are going and what for.”
Ani Gevorgyan
Ani Gevorgyan is a journalist, photographer, and the winner of the Freedom of Speech Award. She has participated in photo exhibitions at the UN headquarters (New York) and the Geneva office, the Palace of Europe (Strasbourg), Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere.