Travel Tips

Placed in the tumultuous Caucasus, Nagorno Karabagh's region remains suspended in a situation of "non-peace, non-war " that has been perpetuated during the last ten years, after the ceasefire agreement signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan on May 12, 1994.
The crisis started in 1988, when a group of Armenians of Nagorno Karabagh's autonomous region (at that time inside Azerbaijan) demonstrated in Stepanakert, capital of karabagh, asking for the unification with Armenia. In 1992, Armenian troops invaded Nagorno-Karabagh with the help of Russian army units. They expelled all Azeri residents and destroyed towns, villages and infrastructure,then they took over the surrounding provinces, and expelled too all Azeri residents.
Today in Azerbaijan, there are about 700,000 people uprooted from the adjoining districts. They have been living in poor conditions for almost 10 years in refugee camps, tents, railway boxcars, old schools and dormitories. Now the government is closing this camps and moving this IDP( internal displaced people) to new buildings with better conditions, but this is only to improve the conditions of life until they could return to the occupied territories, because all this 700.000 IDP are still waiting to return home.

The refugee camp C1, in sabirabad, is coordinated by the international red cross and crecent moon, and is one of the few ones that are still in use.The government is closing this camps and moving the people to new buildings.The international oil companies are paying taxes to the government, and this money is used to help this IDP and refugees.Large families live heaped in weak constructions of one room (in most cases).In these conditions the children develop respiratory diseases as asthma.

old azeri woman from Jebrail lays ill and dreams about returning to her natal village before dying, now occupied by armenian troops, destroyed and mined.

Karabagh's landscape seems not to have changed ten years after the end of the war: destroyed villages, remains of rusty tanks, cemeteries with hundreds of martyrs, mined fields and a population without employment that starts to doubt about the success of the war. Susha, the former azeri capital of Karabagh, is a phantasmagoric place, an almost totally destroyed city where still a lot of people continue living, many of them armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. Lonely streets,big empty buildings,old tanks... only the church has been reconstructed and shines with haughtiness over the rest of the city. In the low part there are still two beautiful mosques,in ruins with his high minarets looking over the destruction, mute witnesses of a past that will never come back.