After the first war, before the next

Once more border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan are occurring. Lika Zakaryan reflects on what happened since the last war ended.

Lika Zakaryan

Lika Zakaryan is a writer and photographer based in the Republic of Artsakh (Karabakh).

A child protestor holds a placard at a demonstration

Artsakh citizens protest against the blockade and its effects.

VoA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

More than two years ago the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan for Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh ended, but many fundamental issues remain. Who will provide security and services for the region’s residents - Armenians? How is humanitarian aid managed and by whom?. And, nobody knows if the so-called “ceasefire” will hold. 

Azerbaijan won the war, with the Armenian side losing significant territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Over one-third of the population became refugees, losing their homes and everything they managed to create during all their lives. Now Azerbaijan controls those territories, but they mainly remain not inhabited. Those territories that remained under the control of Armenians, are still populated only with Armenians, and Azerbaijanis have to approached them. In order to prevent any armed conflict in the region (in fact, to protect Armenians from Azerbaijanis) 4,000 Russian soldiers-peacekeepers and emergency services staff keep an uneasy peace. 

They were already in Artsakh within hours of the peace agreement’s signing. Artsakh is part of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan. Since then, peacekeepers have done a lot: escorting villagers to visit graves, mediating disputes, tending crops, and fixing water pipes. They set up checkpoints along the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia, to ensure a safe corridor for Armenians living in Artsakh.  

Before the war, there were 150 000 Armenians living in Artsakh. After the war, the numbers decreased to 120 000. Some people didn’t come back from Armenia, where they found a shelter, after losing their homes. Some moved to Armenia or Russia because they didn’t want to live in uncertainty. And, unfortunately, wars take lives, and some people lost their lives during that period. But mostly the people of Artsakh remained resilient and wanted to live in their homes or create new ones, even not knowing for how long they will last. 

It is said in Artsakh and Armenia, that every human being now living in Artsakh is a hero. They say that because it’s not easy to sleep every night not knowing if you are going to wake up in the morning tothe sounds of bombs, or if you are going to wake up at all. Because since the end of the war Azerbaijan has done so much to traumatize people physically and mentally.

According to the peace agreement Armenians and Azerbaijanis should remain in the positions they were in at that moment. In other words, after the signing and the cease-fire, they have no right to move forward and occupy new territory. However, after just one month, Azerbaijan entered and captured two Armenian villages, taking more than 60 Armenians as prisoners of war. After that, during those two years, similar military operations were repeated numerous times by Azerbaijan. Again, people were afraid of the sounds of war, they heard and saw military drones, and felts those feelings again.

It was also a manifestation of psychological violence that the Facebook page of the Artsakh National Assembly was hacked, with a flag of Azerbaijan posted as the main picture. The accompanying text read:

“We call on the Armenians living in Karabakh to leave the occupied territories of Azerbaijan within 168 hours, otherwise all Armenian citizens will be killed.”

People had no idea if they should believe that threat or not. Maybe this was just another provocation, but could it really happen? Did they need to evacuate everyone. Or not believe it and stay in their houses? No matter how hard people try to stay strong, no one closed their eyes that night, thinking that it was possible that Azerbaijanis will enter the cities and villages and commit a genocide against the peaceful residents. 

Many violations happened during these last two years. And then since December 12, 2022, Azerbaijan has blockaded the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia depriving residents of a basic right - a right of freedom of movement. It’s the only road people can travel in and out on, the only road through which the 120 000 people get food, medical and other supplies. It's the only road that connects Artsakh with the outside world. Blockading this road caused a humanitarian disaster. Lack of food, medicine, work, and cash. Nobody can pass along that road.

The blockade was not enough, and Azerbaijan decided to shut off gas and electricity supplies to Artsakh again during the coldest months of winter. People simply do not have the opportunity to warm up. In a sub-zero temperature, people were deprived of the opportunity to turn on a small heater for hours. The little children, unable to stand the cold, fell ill and ended up in the hospital.

The healthcare system in Artsakh is still a little weak. There are hospitals, but people who are in critical condition, between life and death, are mostly transferred to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in order to receive proper treatment there. However, due to the blockade, some people could not be evacuated, and died.

Also, a food rationing system was introduced in Artsakh, where people can get food only with a coupon. According to the system, every person gets one kilogram of rice, one kilogram of pasta, one kilogram of sugar and one kilogram of buckwheat in a month. With those coupons, people come to the stores and buy their share.

Food is so scarce that locals have begun to notice that street animals are starving to death because they can't find food in the dumps. The reason is that people have nothing to throw away.

Many families have been divided because one or another family member mistakenly stayed on the other side of the blockade. Many people went to Yerevan to see a doctor and due to the road’s blockade cannot return home. The same impact was felt for those going in the opposite direction. In total, 1,100 people remained in Armenia and did not manage to return to Artsakh.

Artsakh children are deprived of the right to education. Schools and kindergartens are closed for months because there is no way to heat them. Also, they cannot feed children in kindergartens due to the lack of food, and children in schools cannot take food to school, because there is almost no food at home. And sitting for six or seven hours without food is very difficult for children.

Azerbaijanis also regularly cut telephone and Internet wires, and people are deprived of the only opportunity to even connect with the world virtually.

People are trying to overcome all these difficulties, but no one knows when these provocations and torments will end. When they will finally be able to live decently. And the world hasn't even heard of that small area in the far South Caucasus and the resilient people of Artsakh, who are so loyal to their roots and homeland.

Article

Comment

Migration

Politics

Romance

3 July 2025

5 min read

Families like mine are impossible now, thanks to the idol that is the net migration target

Politician priests are making pointless sacrifices on the altar of numbers

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A Border Force officer wears body armour with Immigration Enforcement written on the back

UK Border Force.

Let me tell you a love story. Eighteen years ago, in a time before politicians had taken to immolating their values on the altar of the semiannual net migration totals, I fell for the pretty Scottish bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. The romance presented some challenges for an American like me, but none that were insurmountable. She found a year-long internship near me in Seattle and, just before she returned home, I popped the question.

The process of applying for a UK visa was just another bit of the tedious logistics of an overseas move, the kind of thing a romantic comedy skips over with a ‘One Year Later’ movie subtitle so that it can end with a joyous wedding ceilidh in a picturesque Scottish locale. Our first few years together in Edinburgh were lean ones. Having takeaway coffee more than once a week felt like a scandalously indulgent luxury. Even so, I was able to progress seamlessly from my marriage visa to indefinite leave to remain, to citizenship.

None of this would be possible if we were young twentysomethings in love today. We would fail every test of what the Home Office now considers to be acceptable romance.

During our first year of marriage, the stipend my wife received while training for ministry would have been well short of the £18,600 income threshold introduced in 2012 for a sponsoring spouse, let alone the £29,000 required now. While we did have some savings, they were nowhere near the £88,500 now needed to waive the income requirement, and, in any case, would have been substantially drained by the £5,000 in fees and health surcharges that a two-and-half-year spouse visa now costs. It is little wonder Brits who have found love abroad, even ones in a substantially better financial and professional position than we were then, are now finding it impossible to move back to the UK.

What is the cause of these new barriers? A hint can be found in the title of a recent Guardian article about recommendations for a slight relaxation of the income threshold to between £23,000 to £25,000. ‘Lowering UK’s income requirement for family visas ‘would increase net migration’, the piece was headlined. When even the most left wing major daily in Britain can’t report on the possibility of things being marginally easier for Brits who have the temerity to love a non-citizen, without framing it in terms of net migration, it’s a sign that we have all fallen captive to this singular statistic.

Net migration is a number created by humans and yet it has come to play the role of an angry god which demands sacrifices every time it is reported. The right of working class people to marry a non-citizen spouse, the economic viability of our universities, and the proper staffing of the NHS are all victims its politician-priests have offered up in hopes that they would satiate its hunger. Net zero maybe next.

There is no particular reason to think totting up the total number of people who arrived in the UK with the intention of staying here for a year and then subtracting the total number who left with the intention of staying abroad for a similar duration is a particularly meaningful exercise. It conflates people like me, who came here with every intention to settle and start a family, with students coming for a one-year master’s, doctors filling vital roles in NHS with children try to stay with with a migrant parent and Afghan refugees seeking long-term sanctuary with oil workers serving time in Aberdeen before moving on to Calgary or Brunei.

The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to think carefully about how much of each form of migration to allow, but when they are all grouped together under this single measure a peculiar logic sets in. Want to do the right thing by welcoming refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong? Well, then, we’ll have to offset that with restricting visas for overseas students and throwing our higher education sector into chaos. Need more highly skilled programmers working in banks in London? Well, maybe we can balance that by demanding care workers abandon their kids if they want to look after someone in Nottingham. There is no reason to weigh the needs of these different sectors against each other, and yet the logic of this statistic demands that we do.

The Bible has a word for human-made things which take on their own singular, violent logic. It calls them idols. While that word may conjure images of golden calves, the accusation which biblical writers consistently make against idolaters, that their idols blind them to what is really important and numbs their critical thinking, applies equally well when the idol is a statistic. The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments. It has made us unable to say what should be said without glancing nervously at its imposing shadow. It causes us to say things that should never be said and not notice how absurd they are.

Instead, we should be able to celebrate that hundreds of thousands of people want to come to study at our universities (the vast majority of whom return home after finishing their studies) and, hopefully, someday also be able to celebrate when hundreds of thousands of refugees are able to return to a peaceful and liberated Ukraine without having to calculate that the former will raise and the latter lower our totals. We should be able to welcome easing of income restrictions on spouse visas without noting that it will lead to a marginal increase in net migration. We should be able to see that sending an eight- and eleven-year-old back to Brazil without their parents is not, in the words of a Home Office official, “a degree of disruption in family life” which is “proportionate to the legitimate aim of maintaining effective immigration control”, but rather a gross violation of human decency.

Migrants are not just numbers on a balance sheet. The diversity of our lives, what we give to the UK, what we receive in return, cannot be summed up in a single annual figure. And yet every six months, as the figure comes out, politicians express disappointment and announce measures to put that little bit of extra pressure on us, so that maybe a few more of us who can leave will. In the process they are sacrificing to this idol not just the peace of mind and the economic well-being of many migrants, but also much of the vitality of the nation as a whole. The Bible has a solution for idols. They are only fit to be melted down, destroyed, and forgotten. It is time to consider giving this one a similar treatment.

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