scout tufankjian

Ongoing Projects: Artsakh: Between War and Peace

  • A young man walks through the main square of Nagorno Karabakh’s capital city to meet one of the busloads of returning Armenian families who had been been displaced by the war. People often talk about the fog of war, but the fog of the aftermath is just as pervasive. It engulfs the moment and spreads outward, blurring the edges so that the past is obscured, the future impossible. As busloads of displaced families make their way back to Karabakh, the weather seems complicit with the uncertainty that hangs heavy in the air. The city of Stepanakert is enveloped in a fog so thick, returnees have no idea what they are returning to.
  • Armenian soldiers walk along the only road out of Nagorno Karabakh, which now runs through territory that has formally been turned over to Azerbaijani control and is enveloped in a thick fog that makes the land impossible to see.
  • On the outskirts of Martakert, one of the most heavily shelled urban areas in Nagorno Karabakh, Gayane Mangasaryan returned to her home to find cluster munitions scattered across her apiary. “I was fixing the hives that had fallen over when suddenly I saw it there in grass,” says Gayane, pointing to a spot in the middle of the field where a latticed metal crate covers a ShOAB-0.5 submunition. She is one of many Karabakhi Armenians who have returned home to find their homes damaged, and dangerous unexploded ordnance strewn across their yards and fields.
  • An employee of the international mine clearance organization, the HALO Trust, walks through the fog past a destroyed anti-aircraft gun on November 30, 2020, during a visit to the site of a massive military ammunition depot in Aygestan, Nagorno-Karabakh that was destroyed in an Azerbaijani strike early on in the war, scattering unexploded ordnance from rockets to bullets and warheads to fuses across nearby villages.
  • Pomegranates begin to rot on the vine, waiting for families to return to their lands.
  • Spirals splash across a sidewalk after the explosion of an Israel-made m85 cluster munition in the center of the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert.
  • After an eight hour bus trip from Armenia’s capital of Yerevan to Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh, five-year-old Masis Harutyunyan waits, clutching his prized possession, for the next leg of his journey home. Masis, his mother and his five siblings are from Karmir Shuka, a village now on the edge of what is currently Armenian-held Karabakh. He and his family are among the first to try to return, and it is still unclear whether the road home will be safe to travel.
  • A man looks around his yard, stunned by the wreckage. The village of Karmir Shuka was the site of some of the most intense battles of the Second Karabakh War. As residents begin to trickle back, they hardly recognize what they are coming home to. The once bustling village is eerily quiet. Barely a building stands undamaged. Electricity, gas and phone lines are down. Pomegranates and persimmons rot on the trees and litter the ground alongside unexploded ordnance and artillery shells.
  • Larisa Aghajanyan remained at her home, close to the frontline in Martuni, throughout most of the war. She would bake bread and deliver it to the troops every day, spending most of her remaining hours in her neighbor’s cellar. She joined her daughter-in-law and grandchildren in Yerevan only in the final days, when the fighting was at its worst. Weeks after the war has ended, Martuni is still bleak and Larisa is among the first to return. Not a single shop is open for miles. A Grad rocket is lodged in her neighbor’s roof, providing a post-apocalyptic backdrop to the otherwise cheery impromptu luncheon she is preparing. “It was sad when we came back,” she says. “The house was cold. Quiet, everywhere. Even the birds weren’t singing. We were so happy to hear your voices just now. We said: ‘We are not alone.’”
  • Seven year-old Kevork Haroutunyan lives with his mother, Narine Poghosyan, and five other siblings in the town of Karmir Shuka. He and his siblings fled the war, but they are also amongst the first to return to the village, and he now spends his days helping his neighbors try to clear up the wreckage that the war has left behind.
  • Narek Atayan, the young mayor of Karmir Shuka, shows visitors where you can see the current front line between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops. Karmir Shuka was the site of heavy battles during the brutal Second Karabakh War, and even now, many of the streets are seen as being too dangerous to travel.
  • A man leading a donkey cart through Aygestan village, passes the explosive ordnance disposal team from the HALO Trust, who are beginning the laborious process of removing the dangerous explosives, including warheads, rockets, and fuses, that were strewn across the village, when a nearby ammunition storehouse was hit early on in the war.
  • A Smerch rocket protrudes from a field outside of Martuni. The entire region of Nagorno-Karabakh, already scarred with uncleared minefields from the previous wars, is now almost literally covered with unexploded ordnance from warheads to rockets to deadly cluster munitions.
  • As people return home, they are haunted by the war. Blood-stained stretchers stand outside the emergency service headquarters in the town of Martakert: a testament to the loss of thousands of young Armenian lives. With all of Karabakh mobilized, the regional emergency service departments worked as medics throughout the war, rushing wounded soldiers from the front lines to hospitals in nearby towns.
  • An older couple return home in the fog with their grocery shopping past a Russian military vehicle standing in the main square of Stepanakert, the de-facto capital of Armenian-held Nagorno Karabakh on November 30, 2020.Russian peacekeepers entered the region the day the ceasefire was announced. While there is no denying the weight of their presence, exactly how they will keep the peace remains unclear. Seen here in the main square of the de facto capital of Stepanakert, they invoke mixed feelings, at once reassuring and ominous. To many Karabakh residents, they represent the only real shot at a safe existence. To others, they are a constant reminder of a centuries-long dependence that can’t be shaken: a final nail in the coffin of the dream of sovereignty.
  • Friends attend the funeral of Boris Kasparyan, who was killed in the last days of the war while trying to rescue a wounded friend.
  • Father Hovhannes Hovhannesyan, abbot of the medieval monastery of Dadivank, performs an impromptu family baptism; anointing the children’s foreheads, palms and knees with chrism. With a minor delay in the handover of Kelbajar from Armenian to Azerbaijani control, thousands of Armenians flocked to Dadivank, one of the most beloved monasteries in all of Karabakh and Armenia, to bid it a final, painful farewell. Though uncertainty still looms over its long-term fate, in that brief window of time, Dadivank stood as a symbol for all that the Armenians had lost; absorbing the communal grief of a nation with each candle lit, and offering something that resembled comfort.
  • A family in Martakert returned home after the war to find this canister, which explosive ordnance disposal experts from the international landmine and explosives clearance organization the HALO Trust described as a pressure bottle from a guided missile or drone in their garden. A HALO staffer, noting its resemblance to one of the many pomegranates grown at this Martakert family's home, places them side by side to judge.
  • A woman in red hangs laundry out to dry in her home in Stepanakert. Even nice apartment blocks like this one, with its playground and family-friendly apartment units, were scarred by the war, and her neighbor still has a Smerch rocket embedded in his bedroom wall.
  • At her home in Nor Noragyugh, Alina Arzumanyan embraces her granddaughter, Elmira, who has just woken up from a nap. Elmira’s parents, a teacher and a gas station attendant, had spent two years and their life savings buying and renovating an apartment in Shushi (Shusha), the final front that was ceded to Azerbaijan. In the weeks before the war, everything seemed to be coming together. They had just moved in and brought their second daughter, Elina, home from the hospital. When the shelling started in Shushi, they left with nothing but a change of clothes for the girls. Now they are faced with the reality that they can never return.
  • Three and a half year-old Arman Haroutunyan plays with a flashlight in the home in the village of Karmir Shuka. Karmir Shuka, which was the site of some of the fiercest fighting during the war, is still quite dangerous and its future remains uncertain. Many of the people who have returned are like Arman's family - those with no other options.
  • A soldier’s boots stand side by side in an abandoned trench in Martuni region. While final numbers have not yet been settled, as bodies have not yet been identified nor have numbers of prisoners of war been confirmed, conservative estimates suggest that over 3000 Armenians were killed out of a total population of 2.5 million.
  • Arman Karapetyan lies in his hospital bed at the National Burn Center in Yerevan, Armenia on December 4, 2020. “When they first brought him in, I was praying to God it wasn’t him,” says Hamlet Karapetyan, by his son, Arman’s bedside at the National Burn Center in Yerevan. “He has a birthmark under his foot.
  • Nineteen-year-old Arman Karapetyan was in an ambulance helping transport the injured members of his squadron to safety when they were struck by a missile. “For ten seconds, there was nothing but fire,” he recalls. “The doors wouldn’t open. Then we were able to get out through the window.” Due to the severity of his burns, Arman was moved to the National Burn Center in Yerevan, where doctors have performed multiple skin grafts with limited success. This and other indications, including the appearance of phosphorescent blue-green specks under a Wood’s lamp, lead doctors to believe that Arman’s burns may have been caused by white phosphorus. “Whatever it is, it’s still burning him,” says Hamlet, who has barely left his son’s bedside. “It just won’t heal.” Arman doesn’t know how long his treatment will take or how fully he can expect to recover. When asked what he wishes he could do right now, he looks off in the distance: “I want to run.”
  • Children sprint through the hallways of Stepanakert School No. 2.Weeks after the ceasefire, it is heartening to see life returning to the streets of Stepanakert. Every day, another shop reopens, another alleyway is swept of shattered glass and debris, another courtyard is brightened with the appearance of colorful children’s clothing zigzagging across clotheslines. By December 1, most schools in the city have reopened. In a third grade classroom, the mood is somber as students are briefed by a HALO Trust education specialist on the dangers of unexploded munitions, which many have already found in their backyards. But when the recess bell rings, suddenly lifted from the haze, they are kids again.
  • Late fall is persimmon season in Karabakh. In the aftermath of the war, the trees are heavy with the ripe, unpicked fruit. Since the end of the First Karabakh War in 1994, the self-proclaimed republic has remained unrecognized by any other country: status-less, a no man’s land to all but the people who inhabit its mountains, who till its fields, plant and harvest its orchards. Owing perhaps to the absence of an internationally recognized political status, and undeniably to the fact that so many Karabakhi Armenians live off the land, their connection to the soil runs deep. They live by a motto derived from the name of an iconic statue on a hilltop just outside of Stepanakert: We are our mountains. Now, with so many of those mountains within plain sight but out of reach, they are left to wonder: Without our mountains, what are we? What is left of us?
  • Ongoing Projects
    • Karabakh: Մենք ենք մեր լեռները
    • Artsakh: Between War and Peace
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