Word: stepanakert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since that February morning when a Soviet-made GRAD missile destroyed part of her home, Babayan, 53, and her family have lived in the cellar, sleeping on a row of cots alongside neighbors. They are hardly alone. Babayan lives in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave fully within the borders of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Populated almost entirely by Armenians, Karabakh has seen more than 1,500 people die since 1988, when Armenians and Azeris, each side claiming the enclave as its own, began their skirmishing with hunting rifles. They have now graduated to modern...
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...
Kupreyev was struck by how petty some of the conflicts were. "Once," he says, "the Azerbaijanis were offended that their republic's flag had been taken down by the locals from a building in Stepanakert ((the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh)). Put up the flag again, they said, have the Armenians offer a public apology, and we will end our blockade and let supplies through. Then Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh refused to receive food from Azerbaijan. If it was Azerbaijani margarine, they wouldn't take it. They wouldn't accept eggs from Baku. Our chairman finally told them it wasn...
...local media are to blame for inciting people," he contends. "The Azerbaijani TV station in Shusha ((a town in Nagorno-Karabakh)) broadcast interviews with Azerbaijani refugees. I heard one commentator say, 'Don't worry, the time will soon come when we'll give you a better house in Stepanakert than you used to have.' We said let's close the station. Soviet television gains nothing from it, and friendship between peoples will gain. But it didn't happen...