My Heart is Breaking: Mkhitaryan on the Situation in Artsakh

After ten months of blockade, on September 19, the Azerbaijani armed forces launched a brutal attack on Nagorno-Karabakh. My heart breaks when I learn about the pain, loss, and gross violations of human rights faced by thousands of Armenian families fleeing from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia due to forced displacement and mass exodus. This was mentioned by Henrikh Mkhitaryan, midfielder of Milan's Inter and former captain of the Armenian national team, on his Facebook page.

“The situation that people in Nagorno-Karabakh are currently suffering from brings back memories of the darkest hours in history. We often look back regretfully at those dark pages of random killings, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps, lamenting that no one did enough to stop it. We cannot bring back the victims of past atrocities, but we still have time to prevent genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh.

In this horror, we urgently need to mobilize humanitarian assistance through the Lachin corridor and deploy international monitoring missions to stop these crimes against humanity. It is now urgent for international leaders to stand up against ethnic cleansing and use all possible political tools to end military actions in the region. Children have the right to live peacefully in their homeland,” Mkhitaryan wrote.