STEPANAKERT/CHANKENDI/BAKU/YEREVAN - In September last year, violence came to a head in Nagorno Karabakh, the disputed area between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Just about all 120,000 Armenians were expelled from the region then. But the conflict has been going on for much longer.
Journalist Chris Michel and cameraman Louis Beaujean draw to the region and let all parties speak. The trauma of the Caucasus. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, Armenians and Azeris were forced to live together peacefully in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. But since the early 1990s, the two countries have been in constant conflict with each other. Resulting in nearly a million displaced people.
Chris Michel went to both sides to listen to their stories and found that Armenians and Azeris fear and hate each other because of the many atrocities. The Azerbaijani regime is now building hypermodern cities in the reconquered territories. They want to repopulate the region with Azeris and erase all Armenian traces. Even though that population had been there for more than a thousand years. It is a game of cat and mouse for the sake of identity, culture, language, religion and territory. The big victims are the many hundreds of thousands of refugees forgotten by the world.
A reportage by journalist Chris Michel and cameraman Louis Beaujean
