Farming Dangerous For Life In Armenian Border Village

A farmer in Paravakar village talks to RFE/RL, on October 1, 2015 (Source: RFE/RL)

YEREVAN (RFE/RL)””The residents of Paravakar have stopped taking cover in their basements and other makeshift bomb shelters for the last few days, but life is still far from back to normal in this village on Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan.

For many of them, farming remains a life-threatening activity due to continuing gunfire from nearby Azerbaijani army positions overlooking their vineyards. Consequently, they are unable to harvest what has long been the main source of income in their wine-making community.

Paravakar is one of two dozen villages in Armenia’s northern Tavush province located dangerously close to the heavily militarized Azerbaijani border. Skirmishes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops stationed in the area have remained a regular occurrence even after a Russian-mediated truce halted the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994.

The Tavush villages came under unusually heavy Azerbaijani fire on September 24, which left three Armenian civilians, all of them women, dead. One of the victims, 83-year-old Paytsar Aghajanian, was killed by a mortar shell that landed in Paravakar. At least eight Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers were killed near Karabakh in the following days.

Many houses in Paravakar carry traces of the long-running ceasefire violations and are in need of repairs. “See, there is a big bullet in there,”