Since mid-December, an Azerbaijani group has blocked the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia to protest what organizers say is illegal mining that is damaging the region’s environment.
As a result of the blockade, the region with a population of 120,000 is short of food, medicine and fuel.
“Due to the Azerbaijani blockade, 117 educational institutions are temporarily closed today in the territory of Artsakh,” Nagorno-Karabakh officials said, using the official name of the region adopted by Armenians.
Several dozen kindergartens and preschools have been closed since early January, officials said.
Armenian officials accuse Azerbaijan of trying to create a general humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia also accuses Azerbaijan of causing blackouts in the middle of winter, claiming that Baku is preventing power lines from being repaired.
“The people of Artsakh are facing a humanitarian catastrophe,” David Babayan, assistant to the president of Nagorno-Karabakh, told the AFP news agency.
“Azerbaijan’s main task is to create intolerable conditions for Armenians to leave their homeland,” the official explained.
Food and medicine shortages are acute, the government said on Friday.
Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh started receiving food cards this week to buy sugar, rice, buckwheat and sunflower oil.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which was part of the Azerbaijan SSR during the Soviet era, has been a “de facto” independent Armenian republic since the early 1990s. Although Azerbaijan has not controlled Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the USSR, it considers the Armenian-populated region as its territory. The international community also considers Nagorno-Karabakh a part of Azerbaijan, and no country has recognized the independence of this region.
Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence in 1991. Its separation from Azerbaijan led to a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. About 35,000 people lost their lives in the war, and more than a million in both countries were forced to leave their homes.
In September 2020, hostilities broke out again between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in which approximately 6,500 people lost their lives.
The hostilities lasted for six weeks and ended on November 9, 2020, when Armenia and Azerbaijan concluded a cease-fire agreement through Russia.
According to the agreement, the Armenians lost part of the core territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as all the districts of the so-called security buffer zone, which had been under Armenian control since the 1990s.
