Azerbaijan has begun the process of returning its people to land liberated from Armenia in what Baku calls "The Great Return" following a 2020 war over Yerevan-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and subsequent truce.
Almost 60 people moved back to a village they had to flee in 1993 when Armenian forces attacked and occupied a region that claimed thousands of lives, an official said on Tuesday.
"Fifty-eight people returned to the district of Zangilan," Vahid Hajiyev, a special presidential representative in the region told the media.
"At this stage, a total of 41 families will return" over the next five days to the newly rebuilt village of Agali in Zangilan, Hajiyev added.
More than 30,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis fled Zangilan, near the Iranian border, in 1993.
Emotions ran high as repatriates stepped down from buses in Agali's windswept central square, where a new fountain sparkled under a sweltering sun.
"We are so happy to be back," one of the returnees, 64-year-old Mina Mirzoyeva told the AFP news agency. "This is our homeland, our native land."
Rahilya Ismayilova, 72, said that back in 1993 she had been forced to ford a river into Iran with her small children, fleeing for life from the Armenian forces.
"May all the refugees return to their homes, just as we did today," she said.
"I fled my village with my four children and today I am back with my big family, with my nine grandchildren."
Reconstruction of Nagorno-Karabakh
The oil-rich Caucasus country has vowed to repopulate lands it freed in the six-week war with its arch-foe neighbour that killed thousands of people.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had for years promised to retake lands lost in the 1990s and the first returns marked a symbolic moment for Azerbaijan.
The government has pledged to provide jobs for the returnees, Hajiyev said. It has already built in Agali dozens of houses equipped with solar batteries, a brand new school, and a kindergarten, he added.
"Over the next months, the village will be fully repopulated."
Baku has vowed to spend billions of petrodollars on the reconstruction of Nagorno-Karabakh and nearby recaptured areas.
It allocated $1.3 billion in last year's budget for infrastructure projects such as new roads, bridges and airports in the region.
But a large-scale return of refugees remains a distant prospect given the scale of the devastation and the danger from landmines.
A Russia-brokered ceasefire deal ended the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had occupied for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.
According to Armen Grigoryan, chair of Armenia's security council, Yerevan's forces would complete their withdrawal from areas that had been under separatist control by September. /aa
