“We resumed yesterday the transfer of patients to Armenia through the Lachin corridor,” Eteri Musayelian, a spokeswoman for the ICRC office in Stepanakert, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday. “We evacuated 15 patients yesterday and 16 others today.”
Videos released by Azerbaijani government-controlled media showed those patients, family members accompanying them and ICRC vehicles undergoing meticulous checks at an Azerbaijani checkpoint controversially set up in the corridor in April.
According to health authorities in Stepanakert, nearly 190 Karabakh residents were waiting to be evacuated to Armenian hospitals for urgent treatment as of Saturday.
The medical evacuations have been carried out only by the ICRC ever since Azerbaijan stopped last December commercial traffic though the sole road connecting Karabakh to Armenia. Baku blocked them as well as Russian peacekeepers’ food supplies to Karabakh on June 15 following a shooting incident near the Azerbaijani checkpoint.
The evacuations resumed one day after Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov met with an ICRC delegation in Baku. The situation in the Lachin corridor was reportedly high on the meeting’s agenda.
Gegham Stepanian, Karabakh’s human rights ombudsman, linked the development to serious concerns expressed by Russia, the European Union and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) at the tightening of the Azerbaijani blockade, which aggravated food shortages in Karabakh.
“But we cannot consider [the international pressure] fully effective because although the transport of patients and medicine through the Red Cross has been restored, 120,000 people are still denied access to food and other essential items,” said Stepanian.