All over Yerevan, black banners can be seen with the names and ages of the boys who died during the war. There are no Christmas decorations in the streets of the capital of the country in the Caucasus, only photos and posters commemorating the victims of the latest Nagorno-Karabakh war.

The city is black with mourning. From the Opera House to Republic Square, from the suburbs overrun with Soviet-era buildings to the snow-covered countryside, everywhere you come across distant, afflicted and hermetic gazes, the expression of a collective suffering that, in the private dimension, reaches a paroxysm of pain, tragedy and loneliness.

We need to know the individual, personal stories that by their authenticity will explain the disorder of lives better than the news reports, to understand the facts in a more deeply real and human way so as to have an immediate and absolute understanding of the horror of the war.

Tens of thousands of Nagorno Karabakh citizens today live in makeshift housing in the Armenian capital. Thousands of families have been forced to leave the main cities of Artsakh and have found hospitality in hotels and private homes. In a small apartment in the capital live Karen and Lilith, the mother and father of Aren, a young man of just 18 who died after 40 days of fighting.

It is a house filled with an unspeakable torment, where time seems to have stopped forever: no hope, no future, all suspended in an accompanying limbo of perpetual melancholy, incomprehensible pain and dignified piety. Aren’s photo is placed on a small piano. His mother Lilith carefully lights some incense and gently caresses his photo.

“We are originally from Shushi, then when I was asked to go to work in Stepanakert we all moved there.” His father tells the story of the family and his son: “My son did well at school, he really liked physics, and like all boys of his age he played football. But his great passion was always the guitar.” Then on September 27 the Azerbaijani incursion into Nagorno Karabakh took place, the war started, and his draft card arrived.

“When the conflict erupted, Aren was sent to fight. He hadn’t yet finished his military service or even his training, but no one had any scruples about sending him to the front line,” explains his father calmly and lucidly, and then adds: “When he died, no one had the courage tell us exactly what had happened. We were informed that Aren had been injured and that we should go to the hospital. Only then did we learn that he had actually been killed.”

There is no rancor and no measure of hatred or vengeance in the words of his parents, but a profound desire for pity and silence: “I can’t stand the rhetoric of politicians and everyone who calls my son a hero,” continues Karen. “My wife and I do not want our son to be called a hero, we would have preferred him not to be sent to die and that he could continue studying, playing football, playing the guitar: living.”

Lilith, his mother, has eyes swollen with tears barely restrained and with a rare and firm dignity. Without ever giving way to sorrow, she watches a video of her son playing the guitar on her phone, trying to rewind the tape of time and so relive a moment of life with her son. ‘‘How can I say that the Armenians are good and the Azeris are bad?” asks Karen. And then concludes: ‘‘I can only say that war is absurd and terrible…and allow me to send my sincere condolences to all the Azerbaijani fathers and mothers as well. Because I know what it means to lose a child in the war.”

It is the fathers and mothers today who have to face the painful aftermath of the war. In some cases the void that can never be filled for the loss of a child, in others the responsibility of having to give their children hope for a future that the war seems to have denied them. In still other cases, there is the unjustifiable ordeal of having to live day by day without any news of a loved one, missing on the front line during the fighting.

In Stepanakert the streets are frozen as a timid sun tries to warm the early hours of the day. As they do every morning, Angela and Nikolay Asryan put on their heavy coats and go to the presidential palace in Stepanakert to find out whether there is any news of their 31-year-old son Sasun, who has not been heard of since mid-October. He disappeared during the conflict. Walking slowly, his elderly parents go to the seat of government and, producing photos of their son, ask the attendants and officials whether the president has any information about his fate.

No answer. Once again a laconic, ‘‘We know nothing,” and a bureaucratic, “if we come to know of anything, we’ll let you know.” His father and mother return homeward for another day, without answers and without being able to put an end to their nightmares, accompanied only by the sacred patience of living, unable to give way to fatalism or passive acceptance of the drama.

‘‘My son was very famous in Shushi. He believed a lot in his land, he lived in Shushi and loved to go hunting, fishing, swimming in the river. Many people knew him,” explains his mother, while looking in her purse for a photo and a medal for valour that her son had received during the four-day war in April 2016. The elderly parents continue to look at the photos and videos of their son and his mother says: ‘‘Sasun was not married but he had a girlfriend who calls me every day and asks me if there is any news of him. And I keep telling her I don’t know anything and then we talk about him and I tell her I wish they had had children.” 

There is only desperation on the face of Angela and Nikolay who have seen themselves deprived of even the most charitable and elementary right that is the due of every parent affected by a sorrow as absolute as it is absurd:

An exodus of thousands of citizens and houses set on fire so as not to leave the memories of  a lifetime to the winners of the conflict: these are the images that, best of all, portrayed the flight of almost 100,00 people from Nagorno Karabakh a few days before the signing of the ceasefire.

In early November the front was getting closer and closer to Stepanakert. The city of Shushi, only 8 kilometers from the capital, was under siege and in the hours before the truce, most of the citizens of Artsakh abandoned their homes and fled to Armenia along the Lachin corridor.

 ”We were in the car, stuck. There were cars and vans everywhere: in front of us, behind us, to the sides, we were surrounded. There were so many vehicles that a queue a mile long had formed.’

This is how EVN Report journalist Roubina Margossian who has reported the conflict in Karabakh since the early stages of the war, recalls the moment that became an iconic representation of the humanitarian tragedy suffered by Karabakh. ”The most impressive thing was to see the columns of smoke rising from the houses that people were setting fire to. It was absolutely shocking. Not one house, not two, but dozens of houses and farms burning, all along the road from Karabakh to Armenia. Men and women were setting fire to their homes so as to leave nothing to Azerbaijani soldiers. A moment that left me speechless, an extreme gesture which is difficult to comment on: to set fire to one’s most precious belonging, to the very place where one’s memories are preserved, one’s life, to prevent anybody from violating and insulting the sacredness of one’s past, of one’s history. It is an extremely painful act which more than any other makes us understand the absurdity and despair that wars provoke”.

A road through the Armenian countryside today leads from Yerevan to Aparan where Volodia  Tadevosyan lives. He is a citizen of the Karvachar region, one of the districts that passed under Azerbaijani control when hostilities ended. And before abandoning forever the land where he grew up and lived, he carried out the final act of burning down his house and the memories of a lifetime. ”Where did I find the courage to throw gasoline on the walls of my house and then set everything on fire? From the anger inside me and the fact that it was the only thing I could do to be able to live with dignity again.’

Volodia’s words are powerful, granitic and pungent. He goes on to explain: ”The house I lived in had been built generation after generation by my grandfather, my father and myself. Day after day, stone after stone. That house wasn’t simply built of walls, but also of the sweat, the blood, the sacrifices and the history of an entire family. We had a vegetable garden, bees, a small piece of land that we all worked together on… Could I accept that soldiers would desecrate that house, take triumphant photos and then smear and destroy everything? Could I accept and allow all this? No, of course not. Setting fire to my house was extremely painful, but if I hadn’t, someone could have violated my house and my parents’ memory, and that would have been much worse than the flames and I, faced with something like that, would have lost all dignity.’ 

That of Volodia’s family, is a present written in the distant past. Everything seems to have been buried forever under a pile of ash and rubble, and the future is a jumble of unknowns and unanswered questions. Alyona and Gagik, the mother and father of Maria and Lyova aged 7 and 5 also live the same drama of precariousness and fear.

The family, originally from Hadrut was forced to flee to Armenia due to the war and now live as displaced people in Masis. The parents were both teachers; today the mother is a hairdresser and the father is unemployed, but what worries the couple the most, much more than the economic precariousness and having seen all their efforts and sacrifices shattered, is the future of their children.

”My daughter, Maria, one day did an internet search and saw a video of Azerbaijani soldiers entering our village. She saw the images of the destroyed house and started to cry hysterically, I couldn’t stop her,’ Alyona shares with us and adds: ”The war has influenced the children. Although they do not have a full understanding of what happened, they have been marked by the conflict. And when they ask me who the Azerbaijanis are, I tell them they are people like us.

When my daughter asks me why they broke her bike I tell her they didn’t break it, they were just playing and that when we get home she’ll find an even better one. My husband and I have so many doubts and fears for our children. What will their future be?

A checkpoint manned by soldiers of the Armenian army and Russian peacekeeping forces marks the border between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The small border post where they would stamp an entry visa on travelers’ passports no longer stands in the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh. All the flags of Karabakh have also been lowered, only the emblems of Moscow and Yerevan stand on display.

After Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed the trilateral ceasefire agreement with Russia and Azerbaijan on 9 November, the face of the disputed South Caucasus region changed forever. The agreement, as well as prescribing that the seven districts occupied by the Armenians at the end of the 1990s war should be returned to Baku and that the city of Shushi should once again be put under Azerbaijani control, also provides for the deployment of a force of more than 2000 Russian soldiers, as a five-year peacekeeping force, along the main streets of Artsakh. Moscow’s soldiers check the passports, it is they who decide who enters and leaves, and it is now they who stand guard over all the villages on the road to Stepanakert.

Less than ten kilometers away from the capital, a detour leads to the historic city of Shushi. It is the Jerusalem of the Caucasus, a thriving cultural center in the past and a symbol of national identity for both Armenians and Azeris. Where the road climbs upwards and the curves that follow the walls of the old city begin, today there is a checkpoint. Azerbaijani and Russian soldiers stand on guard and two flags fly: the flag of Azerbaijan and that of Turkey, hoisted to remind to all those travelling through the main artery of Karabakh, always and forever, who the winners of the conflict are. The crescents also soar impressively from the ramparts of the walls of Shushi. The crescents of the Sublime Porte and of Baku dominate the city towers and oversee the valley below where, surrounded by mountains, by peacekeeping forces and Azerbaijani troops, Stepanakert appears, wounded and imprisoned.

A final checkpoint leads us to the capital of Artsakh. The bombings are a vivid and dramatic memory in the capital which is now, slowly, staging a faint return to life. Part of the population has returned to their homes; the city market, hit by Azerbaijani missiles during the conflict, has reopened; fruit and meat have reappeared on the stalls, school buses are taking children back to school and over three hundred buildings have been rebuilt and repaired by Russian engineers as planned by the Moscow trilateral agreement of 11 November. However, some wounds will never heal: those inflicted on and relived, day and night, by the thousands of citizens who experienced the conflict on their own skin. 

Valeri is 23 years old and during the war he was sent to fight on the southern front, in Hadrut, where he fell into an ambush and was captured by Azerbaijani soldiers. After 56 days in solitary confinement, during a prisoner exchange, he was freed and returned to his family in Stepanakert. At home, where he lives with his parents, the young soldier says: ”After I was captured I was taken to prison. I don’t know exactly where I was because I was transferred four times and I was kept in a cell alone for the entire period of incarceration.’ His eyes do not express the joy one would expect to find in a man in the prime of his life who has just been freed. They have the melancholic and fatalistic gaze of an elderly survivor whose incessant and merciless memories are those of past tortures. ”Beaten? Yes, I was beaten. But that is normal. We are at war and we must be realistic, that always happens to prisoners of war. But the worst part were the psychological violence and humiliation. All of us Armenian soldiers had a cross with us: some around their necks, others on their wrists, or in their jacket pockets over their hearts. The first thing the Azerbaijanis did was take our crosses, then they separated us and no one knew anything about the others. I kept wondering if I’d ever get out of that hell alive.’

Valeri does not  want to go into detail about what he saw and experienced and ends by saying: ”There are no words to explain how I felt when the Russian peacekeeping flight took us to Armenia. But though I am incredibly  relieved at having been freed, at the same time, since my return, I haven’t for a single moment stopped thinking about the young men who were in prison with me and I keep wondering what will become of them and when they will be able to embrace their parents again.’ At home his father opens a bottle of brandy to toast his son; his mother, with tears in her eyes, before raising her glass, confides that she still cannot believe her son is there with her and that she is still tormented by what he has experienced. Then they raise their glasses to a toast, the brandy warms their throats and Valeri and his parents finally let themselves go in smile; for a moment the nightmare of what happened seems to fade and is replaced by the joyous and intimate feelings of a family, once again reunited in their home.

Some parents will never see their children again. There will no longer be hope and expectations, no toasts and no hugs, only a void to be filled, if this could ever be possible, with memories and prayers. In Stepanakert Cathedral on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of people light candles for all those young people who died in the 44-day war. Parents, siblings and friends lay photos near the lights and then head to the Monument to the Fallen in Karabakh’s capital.

Endless night fell on Armenia on November 9, 2020. The announcement of the war’s end and the trilateral peace agreement signed by Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan entered the homes of 3 million Armenian citizens through a Facebook post by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The Nagorno Karabakh war is over, the war is lost. It would have been a night of extreme grief and silent sorrow, but the collective fury simmering at the humiliating defeat transcended the pain and gave the hours following the ceasefire a tragic and angry despair.

In Yerevan, the announcement of the surrender conditions was followed by an explosion of collective anger. Hundreds of thousands of people, a human tide demanding answers and devoted to the enterprise of rancour, occupy the streets of the capital, besieging parliament, government buildings and the premier’s home. Acceptance of the defeat, concealed from the majority of citizens, and the repetition in the history of the Armenian people of that anathema of death that has condemned them through the centuries to loss of territory, deportation and genocide, devastated and kindled the anger of the demonstrators, who demanded that the premier and his government be sacrificed to the crowd and as a pledge to history.

Today, almost two months after the end of hostilities, the darkness of that night still hangs over this country in the Caucasus, which has received over 100,000 displaced people and thousands of victims. Its population is divided between those who support the prime minister and his decision not to resign, so seeking to preserve the shaky democratic structure that his executive managed to establish in two years, and those who accuse him of betraying the nation, of surrendering Karabakh to the enemy, lying about the progress of the war and so being primarily responsible for the deaths of over 3000 young soldiers.

On September 27 Azerbaijan, with the support of Erdogan’s Turkey, launched a war of military aggression against Nagorno Karabakh, historically an Armenian land but which in 1921 was assigned by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Azerbaijan. Stalin’s aim was to make the country looking on to the Caspian Sea an outpost from which to export the Bolshevik revolution both eastwards and towards Turkey. In the late 1980s, the demand for independence by tens of thousands of Armenians was rejected and coexistence between the Azerbaijani and Armenian communities became increasingly difficult, with clashes and massacres occurring on both sides. The inevitable result was a conflict that caused the death of over 20,000 people between 1992 and 1994. Only a frail ceasefire put an end to the war in the nineties, with the final victory of the Armenians, who occupied the whole region and proclaimed the birth of the republic of Artsakh, not recognised to date by any other country in the world. Formally, however, according to international agreements and resolutions Nagorno Karabakh has always belonged to Azerbaijan and this is the reason why the region was once again the scene of a painful and bloody conflict, from September 27 to 9 November 9, 2020. After 44 days of hard fighting, Baku achieved military victory by once again taking control of seven disputed districts of the Caucasian region, the historic and iconic city of Shushi and other important towns of Karabakh.

It is morning and a light snowfall whitens the Armenian capital. But today there are no rallies or strikes, no majority and opposition. There is only absolute grief for the victims of the war. The government has proclaimed three days of mourning in the city and in Hanrapetutyan Hraparak Square the wind stirs the Armenian banner flying at half mast over parliament. Thousands of people march in silence to Yerablur, the military cemetery of Yerevan where, for more than a month, the funerals of all the fallen have been celebrated each day.

It is a hill of unquiet graves. On its slopes reality reduces the very idea of hope to dust. Everywhere there are photos of smiling young men who seem, in those smiles, to remind themselves and the whole world of when they were alive and happy. Albert was eighteen. His portrait has become an iconic image of the conflict and today his smile is carved on a slab of marble covered with a mantle of white roses. And it is the smile of Arman, Karen, Grigor, and the more than 3,000 young men aged 18,19 and 20, who now lie in a cemetery that is the epitome of all the senselessness it is impossible to come to terms with. There is no longer, here in Yerevan, the glory of the propaganda of the days of the war and not even the clamour of irredentist proclamations overflowing with simple history and immediate revenge that called for the bitter struggle in the Karabakh mountains. Instead, there is Anna, an elderly mother, who lights incense and kisses the letters of her child’s name. Not far away there is a father, a soldier, who with an unexpected sweetness in the hard lines of his face, caresses the portrait of his son and looks at his photo with dry eyes devoid even of the consolation of tears. And they are empty, distant eyes, lost in the landscape of his own memories, those of a tall, strapping man who, alone, amid the multitude of those present, caresses his brother’s monument. There will be no other horizon for these parents and these brothers than that of the past, forced to serve in solitude their sentence as survivors with memory as the sole and extreme remaining comfort from the wrongs of history and the injustices of life.

And the injustices of life are also clearly visible at the Yerevan Military Hospital where over 200 young men, seriously injured or maimed during the fighting, receive care and attention. ‘‘Most of the young people here are between 18 and 20 years old. They’re little more than boys who have just started their adult life and for them the fact of being here, in this condition, is utterly dramatic,” says the hospital’s director, Dr. Lucine Poghosyan, who explains: “We try to do more than give them just medical help. We also create a family environment and offer psychiatric support. Many suffer from mental problems caused by the horrors they’ve experienced and of which they’re the  victims.” In the physiotherapy ward, some have lost legs and arms, some are no longer able to walk or have full control of their limbs. Still others, suffering from muscular injuries caused by shrapnel, have to learn how to regain control of their limbs. Dr. Poghosyan confides: “A young man of only 19 was once brought here, he had no arms or legs and a terrible wound to the abdomen. He was conscious and we didn’t know how to help him. A tragedy.”

Some of the young patients in the hospital retain in their melancholy features the traces of the faces of the boys they were until a few months ago, others seem to have aged suddenly and are on the verge of death. Then there is a boy, a conscript, only 21-years-old, who lost both legs above the knee during the fighting. The young soldier does not want to remember the days of war and fighting, and expresses the reason for his silence with a laconic, dramatic and moving question…