Artak Beglaryan, Advisor to the State Minister of the Republic of Artsakh, has published a number of facts regarding the deaths and injuries of many civilians from Artsakh as a result of the mines planted by Azerbaijan in Artsakh.
Today marks International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action. Here are a few facts on landmines and other unexploded ordnance in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh):
1. In the 1990s, Azerbaijan put millions of landmines and bombarded civilian areas with cluster munitions, causing suffering for the people for decades.
2. Nagorno-Karabakh is the first country in the world for landmine accidents per capita, according to the specialized international organization “Halo Trust.”
3. Thousands of Nagorno-Karabakh citizens, including at least 1,076 civilian persons (many of them children and women), have been killed or injured as a result of landmine and other unexploded ordnance explosions. I’m also one of the victims of those accidents.
4. Azerbaijan has not provided any landmine maps to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, while in 2021, Armenia provided all existing landmine maps to Azerbaijan.
5. Local agencies and the “Halo Trust” demining international non-governmental organization have cleared several hundred thousands of hectares of territories over 30 years.
6. Nagorno-Karabakh has not received substantial international support for demining, and the UN Mine Action Service has not worked here due to Azerbaijani blockage.
7. In the territories currently under Nagorno-Karabakh’s control, there are at least 700 hectares of minefields still left uncleared since the 1990s.
8. The 2020 aggression by Azerbaijan resulted in additional ten thousands of hectares of territories in Nagorno-Karabakh with new unexploded ordnance, including cluster munitions.
9. Since the end of the 2020 war, local deminers, Russian peacekeepers, and “Halo Trust” employees have neutralized more than 220,000 unexploded remnants, in addition to those cleared before 2020.
Overall, the presence of landmines and other unexploded ordnance in Artsakh is a serious problem that requires immediate attention and action from the international community, and we are still waiting for Azerbaijani maps of landmines put in Artsakh since the 1990s.
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