When the Arpen Center for Expectant Mothers opened in December 1995 in Stepanakert, the capital of the landlocked enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh (known to its Armenian inhabitants as Artsakh), it focused on providing critical prenatal assistance and nutrition to expectant mothers, starting from their third month of pregnancy. As economic conditions improved in the predominantly indigenous Armenian-populated war-torn enclave following a war and independence from the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Center limited its services to the financially distressed pregnant women expecting their fourth child.
Lucine Arakelyan, a Stepanakert resident, is now expecting her fifth child. Unemployed and with her husband serving in the military, she has been receiving assistance from the Arpen Center.
Arakelyan is among the 120,000 residents of the Republic of Artsakh who, since December 12, 2022, have lived under the siege of Azerbaijan’s blockade on the Lachin corridor–the only road linking the unrecognized republic with the Republic of Armenia. Since the blockade by a group of “eco-activists” identified as government officials and ex-soldiers, Artsakh has lived under rolling blackouts, resulting in unpredictable gas supplies and Internet connectivity. Over 33,200 children have remained deprived of education as schools closed. The blockade continues in spite of the international community’s pressure for its end, and the February 22, 2023 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered Azerbaijan to end Nagorno-Karabakh roadblock and ensure unimpeded traffic along the corridor.
There have been over 329 children born since the blockade. Now over 5,700 of Artsakh’s population is now unemployed as over 750 businesses stopped operations, unable to provide products and services. The blockade has stopped the transport of over 400 tons of critical goods, food, and medicine from Armenia–forcing a food rationing system which has been in place since late last year.
“We’re somehow coping with this blockade. We are happy to have whatever we can from the Arpen Center…but we also need funds to afford critical medical procedures for my children,” says Arakelyan. “My eldest has third degree scoliosis and needs a surgery which requires large sums. We’ve been seeing a doctor once a month in Armenia, but since the blockade, it hasn’t been possible to travel. My youngest child needs an eye surgery–she’s blind in one eye.”
The blockade has also delayed some 800 surgeries in Artsakh. Through mediation, the International Committee of the Red Cross has transferred 153 critical patients to Armenia.
The Arpen Center continues to provide services to 72 expectant mothers registered at the Stepanakert public maternity hospital. With one full-time staff managing the daily operations, the Center provides five rations–supplies of sugar, rice, buckwheat, vermicelli, oil, pasta, and newborn clothing–primarily to residents of Stepanakert and the immediate surrounding region Askeran that includes many displaced refugees from the war-torn towns of Hadrut, Kashatagh, and Shushi.
Since its inception 28 years ago, the Arpen Center has assisted some 34,000 mothers who gave birth to 33,726 children. Even after Azerbaijan unleashed a 44-day war on the enclave in 2020, resulting in over 7,000 civilian casualties, the Center’s uninterrupted services continued to provide non-perishable food supplies to expectant mothers with multiple children.
The Artsakh Ministry of Healthcare reports that newborns and their mothers in the region now face dire shortages of baby food, diapers, medicines, and other necessities.
The dispute between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh dates back to the fall of the Soviet Union and the enclave’s constitutionally legal referendum in 1991 for independence and secession from Azerbaijan–the republic was carved out based on the gerrymandering undertaken by Josef Stalin a century ago. When Azerbaijan declared its own independence from Moscow, as Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Rubin explains, “it explicitly embraced pre-Soviet borders that omitted Nagorno-Karabakh.”
In Memory of An Armenian Genocide Survivor
The Arpen Center, founded by American-Armenian physician and philanthropists, Dr. Carolann Najarian and her husband, George Najarian, is named after Arpen Abrahamian, Dr. Najarian’s mother–an Armenian Genocide refugee from Arapgir who after surviving the Ottoman Empire’s atrocities settled in America. Since its inception, the Center has expanded services throughout the years to meet the local population’s developing needs.
“It has been a great satisfaction for our family to know that in our mother’s name, pregnant women have received sustenance and support during their pregnancies throughout the years. Some women have returned to the Arpen Center three or four times for help. That gives us great satisfaction, especially now, amidst this blockade and humanitarian crisis,” says Dr. Najarian. “I cannot imagine what it is like to have three children, pregnant with your fourth child, and not have enough food to eat. Arpen Center doesn’t provide everything, but it is a lifeline to mothers in need.”
Gurgen Melikyan, founder of the Gurgen Melikyan Multi-children Family Foundation of Kashatagh (a 501 C3 non-profit) which provides aid to the Center, explains how the current expectant mothers traveling from far distant locations receive two to three months’ supply in one visit.
“The Arpen Center contributes to a healthy increase of birth rates in Artsakh. It provides the direly needed nutrition and essentials to ease hardships facing families with multiple children and alleviates the daily struggles and social burden expectant mothers face,” says Melikyan.
The Center has also assisted orphans under the age of 18 and the disabled in the aftermath of the first Karabakh war. Melikyan says some children born to the mothers who received assistance from the Arpen Center, now serve in the army defending the borders of their homeland. Donations to his Foundation allow for continued “made in Armenia” clothing supplies for the children born to Arpen Center mothers.
As the blockade continues, recent skirmishes between Azerbaijani troops and Artsakh police resulted in five deaths. With trickles of goods and products reaching the enclave, Karabakh and Azerbaijan officials have held meetings to discuss possible resolutions to the stand-off. Whether “2023 will be a breakthrough year in the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia” as Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev expressed recently to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Baku, Melikyan says the Arpen Center will continue to provide for expectant mothers to ensure healthy birth rates in the region.
