Azerbaijanis who fled a separatist region decades ago ache to return
BAKU, Azerbaijan — As a young man starting out as a dentist, Nazim Valiyev was forced to flee his home as ethnic violence roiled a separatist region inside Azerbaijan. More than three decades later, with his medical career over after a stroke, the 60-year-old hopes he can return there, now that it is back under Azerbaijani control. It could still be years, however, before he realizes his dream. Valiyev is among the estimated 700,000 Azerbaijanis who fled or were forced out of the region they call Karabakh amid violence that flared beginning in 1988 and then grew into an outright war. That conflict ended in 1994, with the territory under the control of ethnic Armenian forces supported by their neighboring country. A subsequent war in 2020 returned control of much of the area to Azerbaijan, and a lightning offensive last month forced the Armenian separatists to relinquish the rest of the region known elsewhere as Nagorno-Karabakh. On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev raised his nation’s flag over the region’s capital, reaffirming control over it. Within days of the capitulation, ethnic Armenians streamed out of the region, leaving it nearly empty. A United Nations mission that visited in early October said there may be no more than 1,000 people left in the region whose population was an estimated 120,000 a month ago. The blinding speed of events raised spirits among those who had fled so long ago and longed to return to its mountains and thick forests. “I often saw in my dreams how my neighbors and I, as before, were walking in the forest and picking flowers,” Bahar Aliguleyeva said of her childhood memories in the Karabakh capital city of Khankendi, which was called Stepanakert by Armenians. When she heard that Azerbaijan had regained control of the city she left in 1988 at age 16, “I somehow didn’t even believe it. It’s as if I found myself somewhere between the past and reality, but there is a path to happiness,” she told The Associated Press in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital. Valiyev, the former dentist, said he thinks about returning every day, “but I understand that this will not be a quick process.” In 2022, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev established a program called “The Great Return to Azerbaijan’s Liberated Territories” to bring back long-displaced people. It envisions improvements in infrastructure, construction of residences, and laborious, slow-moving efforts to clear the region
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