'I will never return' Death stalks the exodus from || Nagorno-Karabakh

The day the Azerbaijani shelling began, Genadi Hyusunts had just taken his four-day-old son home from the hospital.

- Andrew Roth

Within hours, he had to hustle his wife, newborn child and six other children to a shelter in his native Martakert, on the frontline of a three-decade conflict with Azerbaijan.

There, his family faced days of hunger and sleeplessness in an overcrowded basement - while he headed for the frontline as part of a desperate defence of what Armenians see as their ancestral homeland.

"We didn't have a place to sleep, we didn't see a bed, and in the very last days we didn't have anything to eat," said his sister, Gayane Shagants. "In the last days we were starving."

Hyusunts, one of more than 6,000 refugees to have left Nagorno-Karabakh since Sunday, said his newborn son was healthy despite the ordeal. But his face darkens when asked about the short stint he served before the Nagorno-Karabakh defence forces laid down their arms, in effect ending more than 30 years of selfrule by ethnic Armenians.

"I cannot talk about that," he says.

A week later, they are standing in the centre of Goris, a resort town near the border with Armenia that is now at the centre of an exodus of refugees that could reach 120,000 people. Every hour, hundreds more refugees arrive in the city in convoys departing from the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepanakert.