LACHIN, Azerbaijan -- Lachin is a ghost-town -- a crowd of burned-out, deserted and pillaged cottages scattered across a Karabakh hillside. It is a picture of desolation, of the incalculable human cost of war. But for the Armenians who now control it, it is the gateway to salvation.
Perched on a strategic mountain road linking the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to neighboring Armenia, Lachin was taken last month by Armenian fighters to create a corridor to their compatriots to the West. The capture broke an Azeri blockade that had cut off the enclave from the outside world for the last four years.
The seizure of Azerbaijani territory in and around Lachin earned almost universal opprobrium from the outside world. Suddenly the long- suffering defenders of Karabakh were cast as aggressors and expansionists.
But Armenians insist that Lachin was not merely a strategic victory in a long-running military campaign to drive Azeri forces from the mountainous region. For them Lachin meant only one thing: survival and salvation.
'When they opened up the corridor Karabakh finally began to breathe again,' said Lenser Agolovyan, a Karabakh representative in the Armenian capital Yerevan. Since the fall of Lachin, convoys of trucks stacked with food and medicine have been pouring into Karabakh, providing relief to an exhausted population only now emerging from their cellars after months of continual shelling by Azeri forces. Karabakh- dwellers who once existed on two pounds of flour a month suddenly saw their rations grow.
Buses now run daily from Yerevan to the Karabakh capital, Stepanakert, a twelve-hour journey along precarious mountain roads past abandoned towns and villages ravaged by artillery fire. Although the price of a ticket is steep -- 210 rubles, about a week's salary -- the bus always is full.
Karabakh-dwellers are leaving their besieged fortress to visit friends and relatives in Armenia for the first time in months. One woman was riding from Stepanakert to Goris, a pretty town near the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, to visit her daughter after a long and painful separation.
'My husband was shot and killed by Azeris while he was working in the garden,' said the woman, 60-year-old retired kindergarten teacher Bartush Bakhshian. 'My daughter could not even come to the funeral -- the road was still closed.'
The Lachin corridor is a lifeline for the embattled hill people of Karabakh. But in other ways it is a liability. It has become an escape route for those who are sick of the struggle and yearn for peace and quiet.
Many fear the Lachin lifeline could yet turn into a fatal wound from which all of Karabakh's life-blood could trickle away.
'The opening of the corridor was a double-edged sword,' said Liudmila Ovcharenko, chief epidemiologist at Stepanakert local hospital. 'There are migrationary processes at work now which did not exist before.'
Ovcharenko fears resistance to Azeri aggression may slacken now that people are free to leave the enclave and seek refuge with relatives and friends in Armenia.
It is a problem Karabakh military leaders are aware of. Every Yerevan-bound bus passes through at least five checkpoints between Stepanakert and Lachin. Young bearded men in combat fatigues board the bus and check passengers' papers. If males of fighting age do not have official permission to leave Karabakh they are pulled off the bus and forced to return to Stepanakert.
'What do you expect? There's a war on,' said one man accompanying his heavily pregnant young wife to Yerevan. He too is a candidate for the Armenian self-defense forces. He nervously pulls the curtain by his window seat so soldiers at the checkpoint do not see him.
The Armenian militia in Karabakh is a Home Guard made up of hundreds of unpaid volunteers. Their Azerbaijani adversary is a modern professional army. Karabakh leaders are desperate to bring back the many thousands of emigrants from the region and enlist them in the fight for independence.
'In Armenia there are 300,000 emigrants from Karabakh, but their mothers and fathers are still here,' said Karabakh parliamentary leader Vadik Hakupyan. 'We are calling on them to return and defend their homeland.'
Nationalists in Yerevan are sounding the alarm and mustering support for the fighters of Artsakh, the Armenian word for Karabakh. They have been instrumental in urging emigrants to return to the enclave and help stave off Azeri attacks.
'We are actively encouraging people to move back to Karabakh,' said Apo Boghigian, a leader of the opposition party Dashnaktsutiun, which continually blasts the Armenian government's do-nothing approach to the Karabakh conflict.
An Armenian from Beirut with a doctorate from the University of California, Boghigian came to his ethnic homeland two years ago when it was still a Soviet republic. He has been closely involved in the Karabakh independence movement ever since.
The 'Dashnaks' are active on university campuses. They have encouraged young party members to take leave from college in order to help rebuild schools in Karabakh and teach there.
While volunteers and patriots come to show the aid of the Artsakh cause, the flight of indigenous population to the safer lowlands of Armenia continues. And it will continue as long as the Lachin corridor remains open.
Besides providing an escape route for the war-weary, the Karabakh lifeline has brought a new and unexpected threat -- capitalism.
Karabakh's economy is a hangover from the Soviet past. It probably is the only place in the former Soviet Union where all prices are still fixed and commercial activity is strictly controlled by the local authorities.
In the four years since the Azeri blockade began, capitalism has swept into this part of the world. With the isolation of Karabakh broken, the free market surge is putting new strains on an economy already on the brink of collapse.
Liudmila Ovcharenko of the Stepanakert hospital thinks there is more privation since the Lachin corridor opened up.
'People are now taking food out of Karabakh to sell for higher prices in Yerevan,' she said.
A kilo of cheese that costs 50 rubles in Stepanakert will bring 180 rubles in Yerevan. Karabakh farmers are guided by the pursuit of profit like anyone else. The result a new threat to Artsakh's economy.
Boghigian agreed it is a major problem. 'There is no money in Karabkah, so people are tempted to take everything they produce to sell in Armenia,' he said.
Local authorities have reacted with draconian restrictions on the export of food out of the enclave. At checkpoints beyond Stepanakert, soldiers search Armenia-bound buses for food and confiscate what they find.
Authorities in Stepanakert are in no position to free food prices. Factories are at a standstill in the capital. Few people earn real wages and welfare handouts are low. People probably would starve if the Karabakh economy were subjected to the same crash course in capitalism now under way in places like Armenia and Russia.
Although it has re-opened, the Lachin corridor remains subject to attack. A month after it was opened Azerbaijani forces began shelling the five-mile pass as part of a massive offensive on the entire eastern border of Karabakh.
As the Yerevan-bound bus crawls up a steep bend in the road, rockets fired out of multiple rocket-launchers from the nearby Kubatly district of Azerbaijan explode close by. Passengers on the bus wince as the boom of exploding rockets resounds around them, sending plumes of smoke across the hillside.
Despite the dangers, there was no turning back for these people. Their destination was Armenia, their aim: to escape the fighting at any price, for as long as they could, maybe even forever.NEWLN:
