Thousands march in Armenia to commemorate Karabakh war victims
YEREVAN: Around 3,000 Armenians marched in capital Yerevan Sunday to commemorate the victims of the war with archfoe Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region a year ago.
Led by ex-president Robert Kocharyan, opposition parties staged the torch-lit march from the city centre towards the Erablur military cemetery on the eve of the conflict’s first anniversary.
On Sept 27 last year, an allout war erupted between the Caucasus neighbours for the control of Azerbaijan’ s Armenian populated breakaway enclave of Karabakh, claiming some 6,500 lives.
Hostilities ended in November with a Russian-brokered ceasefire that saw Armenia cede to Baku swathes of territories it had controlled for decades.
The peace deal was seen in Armenia as national humiliation and sparked protracted street protests against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s rule.
“We will never accept this defeat. Our soldiers’ sacrifice was not in vain,” Ishkhan Saghatelyan, deputy parliament speaker from the opposition Hayastan faction, told journalists at Sunday’s rally.
One of the demonstrators, 39year-old Anna Karapetyan, told AFP: “We will always remember our dead soldiers, they gave their young lives for the motherland.”
On Monday morning, a nationwide minute of silence will be observed both in Armenia and Azerbaijan in memory of the sixweek war’s victims.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed, and the ensuing conflict has claimed around 30,000 lives.
At the time, Armenians took control of the enclave as well as seven nearby districts of Azerbaijan — some 20 per cent of the country’s national territory.