Anahit Khachatryan, who was displaced from the Martakert region, told in the framework of “Artsakh: Armenian Genocide 2023. Stories of Survivors” documentary project, about the displacement from Artsakh, the days of the siege and the problems of living here. She lived in Stepanakert for 5 years to study.

Leraning that the Azerbaijanis attacked on 19 September, she never imagined that those shootings and bombings were not ordinary, that they would capture her native land.

“I panicked, I tried to contact my relatives who were in our village, in Martakert. There was no connection at all. I could not connect on the Internet or by phone, I was getting stressed, I was constantly trying. Everything was fine in our village, but when we called my uncle, they said that they are evacuating from there village to ours,” she said.

Anahit told about the days of the blockade that it was a very big obstacle for all Artsakh citizens, a ban to do anything. The difficulty for her family was due to the fact that her father was killed, sending anything from the village to the city was a very big problem.

Remembering the whole path of their way, she notes that some of the Azerbaijanis were mocking him, others rejoicing, and even cursing. At the Hakari Bridge, the Azerbaijanis gave water in small bottles, it is true, the bottles were hermetically sealed, but they did not use the water, they threw the bottles away after passing a few kilometers.

According to her, they spent three nights on the road, there were young and middle-aged children with them in the queues. After spending the night in Syunik on the first day, they moved to Ararat Marz with their uncle’s family.

“I left Artsakh, in Artsakh, my father, to whom I could not say the last goodbye, because my father was in the village, and I was evacuated from Stepanakert. I left friends, acquaintances, and relatives there, if the people of Artsakh had not gone mad seeing all that, it is already a victory for us, because there are no such things even in horror movies, as we have seen,” Anahit says.

After the relocation, the problem of accommodation arose because some of the family members are students, most of them want to live in an area close to Yerevan, so that they can combine both study and work, and the elders are looking for more peripheral places, so that there is also an opportunity to cultivate a garden.

Mariam Shahnazaryan

Details in the video.

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