Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

“I AM almost full for next summer”, boasts Mike Aghjayan, an Armenian from Lebanon who is managing a new hotel in the town Azeris call Shusha and Armenians Shushi. Visitors, mostly diaspora Armenians, will come from the United States, Canada, France, Russia, Lebanon and Iran. In 1988 this was a pleasant hilltop town, home to 15,000. Today barely 4,000 live on amid the ruins of war. His guests, Mr Aghjayan explains, “want to see the land people gave their blood for.” Nagorno-Karabakh is often described as one of several post-Soviet “frozen conflicts”. However, as the war in 2008 between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia showed, ice can melt quickly. In Soviet times Nagorno-Karabakh was a mostly Armenian-populated autonomous enclave inside Azerbaijan, some 4,000 square kilometres (1,540 square miles) big. Conflict erupted in 1988 as the territory’s Armenians sought to secede from Azerbaijan. By the time the war ended in 1994, the victorious Armenians had doubled the enclave’s size and carved out a land corridor to Armenia proper. Between 1988 and 1994 more than 1m Armenians and Azeris fled from both countries and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azeri-populated towns in the region were left devastated. Read the full story here.