Word: karabakh
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Scarcely a single building has escaped damage in Stepanakert, the target of almost daily shelling all winter from a mountaintop stronghold held by the Azeris at Shusha, just four miles away. The city has been without running water, electricity or telephones for three months; other regions of Karabakh have been without these basic services for much longer. A near total absence of fuel -- a product of Azerbaijan's economic blockade of the enclave -- has left Karabakh's factories silent, its workers unemployed and without pay. Schools that have not been leveled are closed. The basement of the partially destroyed parliament...
Once home to 70,000 of Karabakh's 200,000 residents, Stepanakert's population has been shrinking as some families send their children to outlying villages. Most of the 50,000 who remain live underground in crowded, dark basements. They emerge, as Babayan did recently, only when there is a lull in the shelling. Adapting to life in wartime, they walk the streets carefully, always trying to place the wall of a building between themselves and the likely trajectory of incoming artillery. "We will live on," said Babayan, whose sister had died the day before from shrapnel wounds...
...over the unspoiled mountains and fertile valleys of Karabakh is a blood feud with roots that reach deep into the history of the region. In 1915, during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians living in Turkish Armenia were deported into the deserts of what is now Syria. At least 1 million people of Armenian descent were either killed or died of starvation, though modern Turkey disputes that figure as exaggerated. Azeris are ethnic cousins of the Turks, and in Karabakh today some Armenian soldiers claim they are continuing the historic battle. "For the Azeris, the only solution...
...after Soviet power had been established in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Bolsheviks granted the disputed region of Karabakh to the Azeris. Before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Armenian protests over Karabakh were sporadic and quickly suppressed. But in 1988 the Armenian movement to free Karabakh from Azeri rule went public, and the fighting began...
While Gorbachev was President, the international community treated the Karabakh conflict as an internal affair of the Soviet Union. But as the fighting increased this year and former Soviet troops pulled out of the enclave, the United Nations, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (C.S.C.E.), and Iran, which shares borders with both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is trying to expand its role in the region, all launched efforts to resolve the conflict. The first cease-fire brokered by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati collapsed within a few hours. The second one lasted for several days, with both...