Around 6,000 children in Nagorno-Karabakh’s preschool institutions, some 19,000 pupils in general education schools, and about 6,800 students in higher education institutions have already been deprived for one month of one of the most vital rights of the 21st century — the right to education — because for a month now Nagorno-Karabakh’s kindergartens, schools and universities have been closed and are not operating. This was announced today, 26 January, at a government session by RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
“The last time something like this happened was during the 44-day war. And in the situation when the artillery was not firing, educational institutions had been closed only because of the coronavirus pandemic. This time, the reason for the educational institutions not operating is Azerbaijan’s ‘environmental’ concerns. Not satisfied with closing the Lachin corridor, Azerbaijan is also closing the gas pipeline feeding Nagorno-Karabakh, then opening it by 10 percent, then closing it again, then opening it by 25 percent, and so on. Azerbaijan is also continuously applying the tool of gas pressure, which is clearly condemnable.
The next reason for not attending kindergarten is the absence of food rations set for children. This in turn is linked to the closure of the Lachin corridor.
The road of life for Nagorno-Karabakh — the Lachin corridor, which was defined by the 9 November trilateral statement, and for whose uninterrupted operation Azerbaijan and Russia gave written guarantees — has been closed for 46 days already. For 46 days already, the normal life of Nagorno-Karabakh has been disrupted, and the humanitarian crisis is unfolding in full force,” said Pashinyan.
He added that there are rolling power outages in Nagorno-Karabakh, because Azerbaijan has also disrupted the operation of the lines supplying electricity to Nagorno-Karabakh, and the population is receiving electricity only at the expense of local power capacities, which is not sufficient.
“The population is being supplied with essential goods through a ration-card system. With all this, the Azerbaijani authorities are pursuing one goal: to break the will of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their own homeland. Moreover, according to the information we have, Baku’s plan is the following: to bring economic and psychological pressure in Nagorno-Karabakh to some culmination point, then open the corridor for a few days, with the expectation that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will leave their homes en masse. Close the corridor again, then open it for a few days, and so on until the last Armenian leaves Nagorno-Karabakh. This is, of course, an obvious policy of ethnic cleansing. If until now the international community was treating our alarms about subjecting the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to ethnic cleansing with skepticism, now we see that this perception is slowly but steadily strengthening in the international community.
I think that in this regard, a role was also played by the video of Azerbaijani masked ‘environmental activists’ terrorizing children returning to Nagorno-Karabakh on 17 January under the escort of peacekeepers, which the Azerbaijanis themselves had spread, and which was widely disseminated in the world,” the Prime Minister declared.
