On Tuesday night, September 12, 2023, a CSI team visited the entrance to the Lachin Corridor, the road into Nagorno Karabakh that has been blocked by Azerbaijan for the past nine months causing untold misery to the 120,000 Armenian Christians who live there. The humanitarian situation has become so bad that people are beginning to die of hunger.
CSI’s head of advocacy Joel Veldkamp is on a visit to Armenia with International President John Eibner and members of CSI’s UK partner organization, Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART). On Tuesday evening the group traveled to the Lachin Corridor – the road that connects Armenia to Nagorno Karabakh – an Armenian Christian enclave of Muslim Azerbaijan.
From a hill above the Lachin Corridor, the group could see the Azerbaijani checkpoint blocking the road and a huge tailback of trucks carrying around 400 tons of humanitarian aid that has been stuck at the entrance to the corridor since July 19.
In a video recorded at the border, Veldkamp describes the situation:
“We’re here at the entrance to the Lachin Corridor, the only road that connects the Republic of Armenia to Nagorno Karabakh, where 120,000 Armenian Christians are under siege – and have been for the past nine months.
“Behind me you can see something like 30 to 40 trucks, full of humanitarian aid – food and medicine. In that direction where we’re not allowed to point our camera is Nagorno Karabakh where people are literally dying of hunger right now. Azerbaijan is using food as a weapon to commit an act of ethnic cleansing. A new phase of the Armenian Genocide in the 21st century.
“These 40 trucks are a testament to the international community’s utter failure here to protect human life, to prevent a genocide. Time is running out. Something has to change. The road has to open.
Watch the video below:
