Nagorno-Karabakh

I feel so disturbed when I watch the images of the war that keeps going on between Azerbaijan and Armenia. One of the sides publishes a lot of videos showing the targeting of the other side’s military vehicles. Often, we can see the young soldiers trying to move out of the vehicle before the strike. They rarely succeed. It is too late to escape. And that is no video game. It is about young lives being wasted. Then, there are the bombings of civilian quarters. TV screens remind us that wars are full of human tragedies.

And in this case, there seems to be no serious attempt to stop the conflict. The Russians managed to have a humanitarian ceasefire declared only to be broken soon after. It would have been important if respected. It could open the door to the beginning of a political process. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

At the beginning I expressed the view that this would be a short duration flare up. Now, I think we are in it for a long while. More lives and livelihoods will be destroyed. The world is too busy with the pandemic, the economic crisis, the competition with China and the American elections to really care about a remote corner of the world that most people have no idea where to place in the world map.

It is sad.