By Robert Zargarian
STEPANAKERT (RFE/RL) — Nearly 16,000 residents of Nagorno-Karabakh displaced by the 2020 war with Azerbaijan continue to live in temporary shelters or homes, a senior official in Stepanakert said on January 18.
Artak Beglaryan, the Karabakh state minister, said that more than 20,000 others remain in Armenia 14 months after a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the six-week war that left at least 6,500 people dead.
Most of the displaced Karabakh Armenians are former residents of Karabakh’s southern Hadrut district and the town of Shushi (Shusha) captured by Azerbaijani forces. Others used to live in districts around the Soviet-era Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast handed back to Baku after the ceasefire.
In Beglaryan’s words, the Karabakh authorities provided 467 apartments for displaced people in 2021.
“At the end of last year we provided 108 apartments built by the All-Armenian Fund Hayastan,” the official told a news conference. ”We will provide more than 200 apartments in the coming weeks.”
