September 19 should have been one of the hard days for Yelizaveta Mnatsakanyan, like for every Artsakh resident under siege. 60-year-old Mrs. Yelizaveta woke up early that day, baked bread and went to Stepanakert from Khachmach village of Askeran region. The bread baked for the young grandchildren had not yet arrived yet when the day turned tragic. Azerbaijani troops attacked the civilian population of Artsakh.
“Our village was already occupied. I stayed in the basement of the Artsakh district,” Mrs. Yelizaveta recalls in a conversation with Forrights.am. She lived in the basements with her son’s family until September 25. Other relatives also came from the village to Stepanakert.
“After staying for three or four days, everyone received a message on their phones saying that we were evacuating, they were giving us gasoline. My boys left. It was a few hours later when the news spread that there was an explosion…”
Her two sons, 34-year-old Yeghishe and 35-year-old Lernik, to be forcibly displaced from Artsakh, went to the Haykazov warehouses for gasoline. Their cousins, aunt’s and uncle’s sons, were also with the boys. Hearing about the disaster, the mother rushed to the hospitals, the father rushed to the place of the explosion.
“It was raining heavily, my husband’s sister and I arrived at the hospital barefoot in the rain. We look this way, we look that way, my sons were not there,” says Mrs. Yeliazaveta, noting that she searched for her sons in terrible scenes.
“The situation in the hospital was terrible: adults and children alike were yelling, crying: the scene was unimaginable. I don’t want to remember it. No one answered anyone. We were approaching the ambulances that were bringing people, but my children were not there. I looked at the burned people one by one, but there were not among them either. They said that there were burnt citizens in Ivanyan too and my husband and son-in-law went there. They learned there that they were taken to Askeran. They went to Askeran, but, again, did not find them. Somebody said that they were taken to Aghdam (Akna). We don’t know anything.”
“I looked everywhere, starting from the morgues. I opened the door of every ward, hoping to find someone,” says Lilit Balayan, who searched everywhere for her brothers. “The scene was terrible: there was a burning smell everywhere, naked people… it was a helpless situation.”
The family searched for Lernik and Yeghishe for days, but they could not find any information.
Lilit Balayan believes that if the authorities of Artsakh would have provided coordinated assistance, many could have been saved. She told that when her father and husband went to look for her brothers, they, together with other people, saved 20 people from the fire. The family has information that three-dozen wounded were taken to Aghdam. According to Lilit Balayan, such information was transmitted from the Russian military as well as from Azerbaijanis at the Hakari checkpoint. However, the family could not get official confirmation from anyone.
Lernik worked in the police and has one daughter, a minor. Yeghishe has two minor children, a son and a daughter. Now the boys’ elderly parents, wives and minor children are left helpless. On the one hand, it is the unspeakable pain of not having any information about Lernik and Yeghishe, on the other hand, the difficult social conditions. “Now I need everything. We have not taken anything with us; everything is left behind. I don’t have any documents, nothing is left for us: money, gold — nothing.
We pay a house rent of 170 thousand drams,” says Mrs. Yelizaveta.
The family is in a difficult social situation. The wives of Yeghishe and Lernik managed to find a job with small salaries, but it is not enough to take care of their children’s needs.
Narek Kirakosyan