April War’s Legacy, Three Years On

CivilNet’s Podcast “Armenia Unlocked” looked back at the April 2016 war between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces and its impact since, locally in Karabakh and throughout the two countries.

From 2014 to 2017, skirmishes on the line of contact between Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan, as well as between Armenia and Azerbaijan have become ordinary events. But the April War was different in both scale and impact. In the end, it showed that even limited military victory by any side would come at a high cost.

From April 2 to 5, 2016, 64 military servicemen, 13 volunteers and 4 local civilian residents were killed and more than 120 wounded on the Armenian side. Azerbaijan officially acknowledged just 31 military dead, although various Azerbaijani media named about 100 servicemen, who were killed in combat or were missing following the war.

In part 1, CivilNet’s Syuzanna Petrosyan spoke with Bishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who lives and works in Tavush, a province in Armenia’s northeast that has a long border with Azerbaijan, with roughly 23 villages near the Line of Contact.

In part 2, Petrosyan interviewed Emil Sanamyan, a Washington D.C.-based fellow at the Institute of Armenian Studies at the University of Southern California, who has edited the Institute’s Focus on Karabakh page launched in the aftermath of April War.