Head of Red Cross on Complexity of Work in Karabakh Conflict Zone

Baku / 24.11.20 / Turan: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will significantly increase the composition of its mission in the region of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, ICRC President Peter Maurer told RBC.

A decision has already been made to increase the budget. “If before the war the budget of our mission in the region was 10 million Swiss francs (almost $ 11 million), then next year it will be 45 million Swiss francs ($ 49.4 million). That is, we will quadruple our presence. We had quite a few people there. We are now planning to send an additional 400-500 people to the region,” said Maurer.

The task of the ICRC mission staff will be to help victims from all sides of the conflict. One of the urgent tasks is the search and identification of the bodies of the victims. So far, according to the ICRC President, each side has found bodies in the territory that is under their control and which are easy to find. “The difficulty lies in working on the very line of contact, on the front line, where there were battles, there are mines; it is very difficult to find bodies there,” he pointed out.

The ICRC has established protocols and best practices for this work in order to "carry out this work with maximum dignity, identify the body and hand it over to relatives."

If this work is delayed, Maurer continued, "the most unpleasant consequences" are possible. “There may be soil contamination. Identification can be difficult if bodies are not found before winter begins. Because there is a possibility that the decomposition of the remains will begin during the winter. And we know from past experience that if we don't act quickly, we will simply complicate future discussions on the issue of missing people,” he listed the possible consequences. After the first war, in 1992-1994, the ICRC still lists 4,500 missing people. On October 21, the Armenian Ministry of Environment warned that Nagorno-Karabakh was threatened with a humanitarian and ecological disaster due to the people killed in the fighting in the region.

On November 16, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan reported on several hundred Armenian servicemen who were missing in Karabakh. The death toll from the Armenian side is about 2.4 thousand people, he said. Azerbaijan has not yet reported data on the dead and missing. The work on the exchange of bodies has already begun with the assistance of Russian peacekeepers. -02D-