NGOs call on international community to prevent humanitarian catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh

The international community is focused on the events in Ukraine and fails to pay enough attention to the looming humanitarian catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh, the NGOs have stated.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in recent days the situation on the Azerbaijani-Nagorno-Karabakh border has aggravated. At night on March 10, Azerbaijani militaries fired about 23 mortar shells in the direction of the Khramort village of the Askeran District, the Nagorno-Karabakh Ministry of Defence (MoD) has informed. A villager was wounded in the back in the yard of his house.

In total, 19 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh have appealed to the international community asking to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe." They have noted that given the geopolitical tensions, when the attention is focused on the developments in Ukraine, "the official Baku has sharply increased tensions and pressure on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh)," says the statement received by the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

"Since March 8, the entire population (of Nagorno-Karabakh) has been deprived of the natural gas supplied to the republic. The Azerbaijani party continues impeding the repair of the gas pipeline. As a result, the republic's vital facilities – hospitals, maternity clinics, bakeries, educational and cultural institutions, are deprived of heating. All this, together with constant outages of electricity supplies and communications caused by Azerbaijan, creates unbearable conditions for normal life," the statement says.

NGO activists have also noted that Azerbaijani militaries are shelling Armenian border villages with weapons of medium and large calibre, and are also making use of "methods of obvious psychological pressure" on residents of border villages by "using loudspeakers to voice out threats and urged the Armenian population to abandon the territory." However, these actions are not properly assessed by the international community, the authors of the statement have noted. They have called on the international community to take all the necessary steps to prevent an impending humanitarian catastrophe and protect the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on March 15, 2022 at 10:09 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.