“While the world was fighting the pandemic, children in Artsakh were hiding in shelters.
One of them, 8-year-old Meri, notes: ‘We were lucky it was Sunday, because if we had gone to school, it would have been very bad… since if we had gone to school, we would hardly have survived.’”
Tatevik Hayrapetyan, a member of the Armenian delegation, began her speech at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in this way, speaking about the endangered rights and destroyed lives of children as a result of the war.
We present the speech below.
“As a result of the Azerbaijani aggression, which had received obvious support from Turkey, many wounded needed medical assistance, as a result of which the healthcare systems of Armenia and Artsakh came under unprecedented pressure. This forced centres specialised in the treatment of COVID-19 to transform and adapt to the new situation. In Nagorno-Karabakh, which has a population of 150,000, before Azerbaijan’s attack, 300 patients were receiving treatment for COVID, but as a result of the extensive destruction and displacement, it became impossible to have further statistics on the pandemic. In addition, the presence of many people in shelters made the spread of the pandemic uncontrollable.
According to Article 77 of Protocol 1 additional to the Geneva Conventions, ‘Children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against any form of indecent assault…’, but this was not applied at all during the 44-day war in Artsakh. As a result of the war, children suffered not only physically, but also psychologically. Many of them lost their parents, their home, their normal life and were forced to look death in the eye. Let me present a brief statistic: as a result of the Azerbaijani aggression, 71 schools and 14 kindergartens were destroyed in Artsakh. As a result of the aggression accompanied by the pandemic, more than 8,000 students were deprived of their right to education. Thus, the aggression accompanied by the pandemic has destroyed the lives of many children living in Artsakh and Armenia, creating numerous health and psychological problems for their entire lives. Thank you for the important report; I deemed it necessary that once again we all pay attention to the fact that while the entire international community was calling for a fight against the pandemic, people in Artsakh were forced to fight against Azerbaijani aggression.”
