Who sets fire to Lachin's forests?
Analysis by Vestnik Kavkaza

REGION  15 August 2022 - 17:41

The number of videos depicting fires in the Lachin corridor - a temporary deployment zone of Russian peacekeepers in Azerbaijan through which Karabakh Armenians can reach the Armenian border - has recently begun to rise. The fires are not caused by the hot weather in the South Caucasus, but by intentional arson. As was the case in November 2020, residents of Azerbaijani lands emigrating to Armenia fuel the fire.

Then, from November 10 to December 1, 2020, Azerbaijan's Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin districts were burned, from which the remnants of the Armenian occupation forces were withdrawn, according to the November trilateral statement of Moscow, Baku, and Yerevan, which ended the Karabakh war. Both the occupiers and the residents who fled after them set fire to houses, lit fires in forests, cut down trees, and destroyed any working infrastructure facilities. The sappers, who mined everything in their path, were the last to leave. The goal was to destroy as much of the liberated Azerbaijani territory as possible.

Now, history is repeating itself. According to paragraph 6 of the trilateral statement, Azerbaijani road services have constructed an alternative route of the Lachin corridor through which Russian peacekeepers will cross on August 25, and Baku will have full access to its settlements - Lachin city and the Zabukh and Sus villages - on the same day. Azerbaijan has repeatedly stated that the indigenous Armenian population has the right to remain in the country and obtain Azerbaijani passports, as well as the same rights and freedoms as other citizens of the republic. However, Yerevan has ordered that residents of Lachin, Zabukh and Sus leave by August 25.

Some Armenians will remain - at least seven families are known to live in Zabukh - but the majority will leave due to nationalist propaganda or a lack of legal grounds to live in Azerbaijan. There were also pyromaniacs among the migrants who preferred to burn everything on their way to Armenia. A video of a man lighting a house appeared the day before, and today there is a video of a fire on a mountain slope near the Lachin corridor road, in a place where hardly anyone could rest and carelessly handle fire. Houses and forests are being set on fire with malicious intent.

But who can raise a hand to burn down their native forests and homes? The obvious answer is for those who are unfamiliar with both this house and these forests. Indeed, following the implementation of the ceasefire regime in Karabakh in 1994, Armenia pursued an active policy of illegal settlement of occupied Azerbaijani lands by Middle Eastern Armenians. Every conflict in the Middle East, whether between Lebanon and Israel or the war in Syria, has been used by Yerevan as an excuse to transport more Armenian refugees to Karabakh and Eastern Zangazur.

The calculation was twofold: on the one hand, Armenia portrays the occupied territories as populated, distracting attention from their desolation; on the other hand, the Armenians of the Middle East are outsiders who have no ties with the Azerbaijanis, which means it will be easier to convince them of the need to maintain the status quo in the conflict zone. The fact of the illegal settlement itself was hidden because it contradicts international law and deprives Yerevan of all its arguments in a long-standing diplomatic dispute about the future of Karabakh: why does Armenia continue to hold Azerbaijani territory by force if the local Armenian population emigrated from there, and random people live there, for whom it is a foreign land?

It was illegal migrants who, for the most part, participated in the burning of houses and forests in the Aghdam, Kalbajar and Lachin districts. Firstly, they had no chance to return to Azerbaijan because they violated the Azerbaijani border during the Karabakh war. Secondly, nothing held them and nothing was pitied on this earth, where they lived only temporarily. Thirdly, Yerevan's anti-Azerbaijani propaganda had the strongest effect on them. At least the local population understands that they have the right to live in Azerbaijan, that even if they emigrate to Armenia, they can return to their homes – so why deprive themselves of property? The fire was left behind by those who were sure that they would never return here.

We see the same thing now because there are illegal immigrants in Lachin, Zabukh and Sus. There are exactly 10 days left before the change of the route of the Lachin corridor, and it is expected that for all 10 days houses in settlements and forests along the road will burn. In Eastern Zangazur, hot sunny weather has now been established, which means that illegal migrants will light trees in conditions of high fire danger, which significantly distinguishes today from the November arson attacks two years ago. Although we are talking about only one city and two villages, Middle Eastern migrants can cause significant harm to Azerbaijan's ecology.

It is worth adding that the weather forecast promises a north-easterly and easterly wind, which means that the outcome of those sabotage attempts may be repeated when the burning of grass on the Azerbaijani side of the border spread to the Armenian side. If the pyromaniacs leaving the Lachin corridor are too zealous, the forests of Armenia can also catch fire because of them.

Caliber.Az