Waiting for the 'Bizimder' to Arrive and Tell Us Which Side to Stand, Says Shurnukh Village Head

Until yesterday, there was no talk of Shurnukh, but suddenly it became clear that there are issues regarding the division of the Shurnukh village in half. When you ask who the lower neighborhood of the village belongs to, they still don't know and are discussing it. However, by 5:00 PM, people are supposed to know who their houses belong to. It turns out that under a person's garden, there should be Turks, and the border guard should stand on the highway and look at what is happening. This was stated by Hakob Arshakyan, the village head of Shurnukh, in an interview with ArmDaily.am.

In response to the question of where the information about the division of Shurnukh into two parts came from, he answered that these are the coordinates indicated by the Azerbaijani, Turkish GPS. "If we pass through this section of the Goris-Kapan highway, the highway becomes the border; the lower neighborhood, as they say, fell under the border during the Soviet era, but that is not the case. Even during the Soviet era, it did not belong to them; there is no such thing on any map, it just so happens that now the Prime Minister says that the border will be defined with that device, and they themselves are deciding."

When asked if there had been any clarifications on this matter from Defense Minister Vagharshak Harutyunyan, who was in Syunik the day before, the village head said he had come for nothing and had no answers to any questions. "He should have come to comfort the people, my colleagues, and the mayors to say that this is how it will be, but he was sent as a person causing tension. Yesterday, all armed forces were cleared from the area, only border guards are left, and they are probably waiting for the 'Bizimder' to come and tell us, 'You stand on this side, we will stand on that side.' In the middle, the Russian is walking, but I don't know how the border guard will keep the entire area. Thank God, our guys have all been volunteers, both since the 1990s and those from 2016 who were in Artsakh; they are defenders, and we have combat friends from Goris who appear beside us with their weapons. If we do not have a supreme commander, we will see how to cope; as the saying goes, if you have a nail, scratch your heads, we will have to scratch. Our goal is to stand until the end, for this reason, we were asking the volunteers to join us with weapons; it's a shame after all this."

It should be noted that yesterday, Arshakyan sent a video message calling on volunteers to present themselves with weapons in Shurnukh at 10:00 AM to defend the village from Azerbaijani-Turkish invaders.