TURKIYE'S CLIENT STATE: AZERBAIJAN

Armenia braces for mass exodus of Nagorno-Karabakh inhabitants

ETHNIC CLEANSING BY ANY OTHER NAME

Huge queues of cars are leaving the territory in the direction of Armenia.

By bne IntelliNews

 September 25, 2023

The ethnic Armenian inhabitants of the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which surrendered to Azerbaijan last Wednesday, are in mass flight to Armenia.

Social media carried photos of huge queues of cars leaving the territory in the direction of Armenia. Armenia's government said that almost 6,500 refugees had entered the country by 5pm local time on September 25.

Refugees are fleeing from areas occupied by Azerbaijani forces, as well as from areas that are poised to be occupied by them, in what risks becoming a humanitarian disaster.

“There are no words to describe [it],” one refugee told the Associated Press about their plight. “The village was heavily shelled. Almost no one is left in the village.”

In a statement the US government said it was “deeply concerned about reports on the humanitarian conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh and calls for unimpeded access for international humanitarian organisations and commercial traffic”.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had advised the territory’s 120,000 residents last week not to leave but thousands have begun a mass exodus along the Lachin Corridor to Armenia rather than risk living under Azerbaijani rule. The road, which Azerbaijan has been blocking since December, is the territory’s only link with the outside world.

In an address on September 24, Pashinyan – who is facing huge domestic criticism and protests over the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh – said Azerbaijan was planning ethnic cleansing, and he admitted that a mass exodus now looked inevitable. Space for 40,000 people from Karabakh had been prepared in Armenia, Reuters reported.

"If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity," he said.

There were more demonstrations against Pashinyan on September 25 with more than 200 protesters detained.

Nagorno-Karabakh won self-rule in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union but its declaration of independence has never been internationally recognised, even by Armenia. Its position was severely weakened in 2020 when Azerbaijan retook much of its lost territory.

Under the ceasefire Nagorno-Karabakh forces have begun handing in their arms after their surrender on Wednesday last week after a sudden 24-hour offensive by Azerbaijani forces. On the Nagorno-Karabakh side more than 200 people were killed and 400 were wounded in the Azerbaijani attack. Baku has not released casualty figures.

Ethnic Armenian residents of the territory lost in 2020 fled their homes and now many residents of the remaining rump statelet are expected to follow them.

"Ninety-nine point nine per cent prefer to leave our historic lands," David Babayan, an adviser to Nagorno-Karabakh’s’ president Samvel Shahramanyan told Reuters.

"The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilised world," Babayan said. "Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins."

Nagorno-Karabakh leaders have said that all those wanting to leave the territory would be escorted to Armenia by Russian peacekeepers. Several thousand of those displaced by the recent fighting are already camped at the main airport, the base for the peacekeepers.

Talks on guarantees for the residents are continuing between Azerbaijani officials and representatives of the Nagorno-Karabakh government. Baku has pledged to respect the rights of the inhabitants of its breakaway region. Azerbaijan dictator Ilham Aliyev has said that the region would be turned into a "paradise". Baku has also begun to allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory, after blocking shipments for nine months.

However, these statements are widely dismissed because of Azerbaijan’s previous behaviour and its repression of dissent at home.

There is widespread fear that Azerbaijani forces will expel ethnic Armenians and will make reprisals against those who took part in the fighting over the past three decades, and those who led them. In recent weeks some ethnic Armenians who travelled through the Azerbaijani checkpoint on the Lachin Corridor have been arrested.

Hikmet Hajiyev, an adviser to Aliyev, told the Financial Times that Baku plans to fully absorb and integrate Nagorno-Karabakh, giving it no special autonomous status within Azerbaijan. He also said Baku was planning an “amnesty” for all Nagorno-Karabakh residents who served in separatist forces or with the Armenian army but that would not extend to “criminals, who have . . . used crimes against humanity and war crimes against Azerbaijani civilians. That is a separate story.”

Nagorno-Karabakh's 120,000 Armenians will leave for Armenia, leadership says

Sky News
Updated Sun, September 24, 2023 


Almost all the 120,000 Armenians living in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh will leave for Armenia, the region's de-facto leadership has said, after Azerbaijan regained control of the breakaway region.

The Armenians of Karabakh were forced to declare a ceasefire on Wednesday as Azeri forces reclaimed the territory following a 24-hour offensive.

The US and EU have expressed "deep concerns" for the Armenians in Karabakh, which is recognised internationally as part of Azerbaijan but had been under Armenian control since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Armenians say they fear repression and ethnic cleansing - allegations strongly denied by Azerbaijan.

David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, which is the Armenian name for the region, has warned of a mass exodus and says his people will not be part of Azerbaijan.

"Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan, 99.9% prefer to leave our historic lands," he said. "The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilised world."

He said it was unclear when the Armenians would move down the Lachin corridor, which links the territory to Armenia, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has faced calls to resign for failing to save Karabakh.

Meanwhile, long-awaited aid has arrived in the region following a nine-month blockade imposed by Azerbaijan, which dwindled the Armenians' food, fuel and medical supplies.

Azerbaijan has repeatedly said no harm will come to civilians - though reports suggest some may have died and residential buildings were damaged during the latest attack.

The country's ambassador to the UK, Elin Suleymanov, rejected claims his country would "ethnically cleanse" the region.

He told Sky News: "That is completely untrue. First, you don't offer food and aid to people you are planning to ethnically cleanse.

"Second, it was Armenia that committed ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. The reason there are only Armenians living in the region today is because the Armenians ethnically cleansed everyone else. It was a diverse region before the 1990s.

"We don't want to do what they did to us, we want to integrate that community into the diverse fabric of Azerbaijani society."

Asked if there could be peace, he said: "Of course there can be peace, there was peace in Europe after the Second World War, people nuked each other and now they are still friends."

The military offensive exacerbated problems for the population there, with many said to be sleeping outdoors and unable to get in touch with family and friends in rural areas.

The potential exodus from Karabakh marks another twist in the region's tumultuous and bloody history, with both Armenians and Azerbaijanis suffering greatly over the years.

Read more:
Azerbaijan claims full control of Nagorno-Karabakh
Protests in Armenia after dozens killed in Azerbaijan military offensive

Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were displaced following the first war between 1988-1994, which saw Armenian forces take control of the region and occupy surrounding areas.

The fate of the conflict's latest displaced people remains unclear, but Mr Pashinyan said in an address to the nation on Sunday that Armenia is ready to accept all compatriots from Karabakh.

Armenian PM says Armenians may flee Karabakh and blames Russia

Reuters
Updated Sun, September 24, 2023 

MOSCOW, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Sunday the likelihood was rising that ethnic Armenians would flee the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh and blamed Russia for failing to ensure Armenian security.

If 120,000 people go down the Lachin corridor to Armenia, the small South Caucasian country could face both a humanitarian and political crisis.

"If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity," Pashinyan said in address to the nation.

"Responsibility for such a development of events will fall entirely on Azerbaijan, which adopted a policy of ethnic cleansing, and on the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh," he said, according to a government transcript.

He added that the Armenian-Russian strategic partnership was "not enough to ensure the external security of Armenia".

Last week, Azerbaijan scored a victory over ethnic Armenians who have controlled the Karabakh region since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. An adviser to the leader of the Karabakh Armenians told Reuters earlier on Sunday that the population would leave because they feel unsafe under Azerbaijani rule.

Russia had acted as guarantor for a peace deal that ended a 44-day war in Karabakh three years ago, and many Armenians blame Moscow for failing to protect the region.

Russian officials say Pashinyan is to blame for his own mishandling of the crisis, and have repeatedly said that Armenia, which borders Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia, has few other friends in the region.

"The government will accept our brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh with full care," Pashinyan said.

Pashinyan has warned that some unidentified forces were seeking to stoke a coup against him and has accused Russian media of engaging in an information war against him.

"Some of our partners are increasingly making efforts to expose our security vulnerabilities, putting at risk not only our external, but also internal security and stability, while violating all norms of etiquette and correctness in diplomatic and interstate relations, including obligations assumed under treaties," Pashinyan said in his Sunday address.

"In this context, it is necessary to transform, complement and enrich the external and internal security instruments of the Republic of Armenia," he said.

 (Writing by Guy Faulconbridge Editing by Peter Graff)

Fleeing bombs and death, Karabakh Armenians recount visceral fear and hunger




Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh arrive at Armenian checkpoint in Kornidzor

By Felix Light
Sun, September 24, 2023

GORIS, Armenia (Reuters) - After the village was bombed so hard there was no way to bury the truckloads of dead, he fled with his family and stuffed whatever possessions could be salvaged into two vans.

Petya Grigoryan is one of the first ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to make it to Armenia after a lightning 24-hour Azerbaijani military operation defeated the Karabakh Armenian forces.

The ethnic Armenians of Karabakh, internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, say they will not live as part of Azerbaijan and that almost all of the 120,000 Armenians there will leave for Armenia.

So far several hundred have reached Armenia.

Grigoryan, a 69-year-old driver, said his Kochoghot village in what the Armenians know as the Martakert district of Karabakh was pummelled by Azerbaijan armed forces. There were two KAMAZ-truckloads full of civilian dead in the village, he said.

"There was nowhere to bury them," Grigoryan told Reuters after making his way down the Lachin corridor and across the border into Armenia, where Reuters interviewed him and other refugees in the border town of Goris.

"We took what we could and left. We don’t know where we’re going. We have nowhere to go," he said.

Of the 500 villagers, he said 40 had got out.

Reuters was unable to independently verify his account but it chimed with the outline given by other ethnic Armenians fleeing Karabakh, which Azerbaijan says will be turned into a "paradise" and fully integrated.

Azerbaijan said it launched the operation against Karabakh forces after attacks on its own citizens. President Ilham Aliyev said his army had only targeted Karabakh fighters and that civilians had been protected.

STRICT ORDER

"Before the operation, I once again gave a strict order to all our military units that the Armenian population living in the Karabakh region should not be affected by the anti-terrorist measures and that the civilian population be protected," he said in an address to the nation on Sept. 20.

"Civilians felt protected entirely thanks to the professionalism of our armed forces," he said.

Grigoryan and thousands of other Armenians made their way to the airport near the Karabakh capital, known as Stepanakert by Armenians and Khankendi by Azerbaijan, where some Russian peacekeepers are based.

"It was scary there," he said. Thousands slept on the ground without food and little water. "There was nothing to eat or drink; three days without food," he said.

Nairy, a builder from Leninakan, Armenia, said he had been trapped in Karabakh since December by the blockade. Then the Azerbaijan military shelled the Shosh village where he was staying.

"The kids were injured. We sat in the basements until the peacekeepers came in and took the people out," he said.

He too had made his way to the airport.

"We are extremely grateful to the lads for sharing their rations with the kids," he said. "The Russian peacekeepers went hungry to give the kids their rations."

At the airport, he said, there were thousands sleeping outside.

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by David Holmes)

Russia's Lavrov says Armenia, Azerbaijan have settled Karabakh dispute

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday that time was ripe for trust-building measures between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, and that Moscow's troops would help that.

Lavrov accused the West of trying to force themselves as mediators between the two countries, which he said was not needed.

"Yerevan and Baku actually did settle the situation," Lavrov said. "Time has come for mutual trust-building. There are Russian troops who will certainly help this," he said via translation.

Russia has peace-keeping missions in Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan where Baku launched an offensive this week.

The ethnic Armenian leadership of breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh said on Saturday that the terms of their ceasefire with Azerbaijan were being implemented, with work proceeding on the delivery of humanitarian aid and evacuation of the wounded.

 (Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska)

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh
In a sense, all of this was expected. Nagorno-Karabakh and its ally, Armenia, had suffered a devastating defeat in the 2020 war.

By Neil Hauer in Yerevan September 23, 2023

After 32 years, the de facto independence of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh is reaching its end.

The tense and often-violated ceasefire that had governed the region since the end of the 2020 Second Karabakh War was overwhelmingly violated by Azerbaijan around 1pm local time on Tuesday. Azerbaijani military units, which had been gathering near the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh and on the borders of Armenia for weeks, launched a massive assault across all areas of the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline.

Artillery, precision missile strikes and airstrikes struck the beleaguered units of the Artsakh Defence Army, as the breakaway region’s military forces are known, while Azerbaijani infantry launched an offensive on the ground.

24 hours later, it was all over. Weakened by nine months of siege and starvation, without any supply lines to the outside world and hopelessly outmatched by Azerbaijan’s modern military, the president of the Republic of Artsakh, Samvel Shahramanyan, announced that his government had accepted the demands of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The Artsakh Defence Army would be dissolved, its weapons would be handed over, and the region would, finally and definitively, come under Azerbaijani control.

In a sense, all of this was expected. Nagorno-Karabakh and its ally, Armenia, had suffered a devastating defeat in the 2020 war. Much of Nagorno-Karabakh had been captured – around 75% of the lands held by Karabakh Armenians before 2020 were conquered by Azerbaijan or ceded to them in the ceasefire agreement. The Armenian army, reeling from its losses, had been forced out of the conflict, left struggling to repel even the Azerbaijani incursions into Armenia itself.

The nine months of Azerbaijani blockade that began in December 2022 had been met with indifference from the international community, with ‘urges’ and ‘calls’ for Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin Corridor – Nagorno-Karabakh’s single lifeline to the outside world – but no consequences when Azerbaijan refused to do so, ignoring even the International Court of Justice ruling on the matter.

The Russian peacekeeping mission, entrusted with ensuring that road remained open and active, similarly demurred from any real attempts to unblock it. Aliyev clearly read these signals – that there would be no consequences for violating yet another tenet of the 2020 ceasefire – and sent his army in for the kill.

Massive casualties

At the time of writing, so much is still unclear. The 24-hour war involved massive casualties: Nagorno-Karabakh’s authorities have confirmed over 200 dead and 400 wounded from their side, a number that is sure to rise as more bodies are found, while Azerbaijani social media reports place the number of Azerbaijan casualties at over 150.

What exactly happens next is anyone’s guess, including the people of Nagorno-Karabakh themselves. In the wake of the Azerbaijani assault and subsequent capture of numerous villages and key roads, tens of thousands of the region’s 120,000 inhabitants have been displaced. Stepanakert is overrun, with every public building hosting dozens of families; the city’s airport, the site of the main Russian peacekeeping base, is an even more dire site, with thousands of civilians now encamped there in the open air, having fled from the Azerbaijani soldiers who captured their villages.

Other areas are entirely isolated: the towns of Martuni and Martakert, Nagorno-Karabakh’s second- and third-largest settlements, are surrounded by Azerbaijani forces, their populations unable to escape and with little known about their condition.

In this near-total information blackout, with no independent media access and limited internet connectivity, rumors of Azerbaijani atrocities have spread. One woman claimed that Azerbaijani troops had beheaded her three young children in front of her; another said that the same had happened to a Karabakh Armenian soldier. A woman named Sofik, from the Karabakh village of Sarnaghbyur, described in video testimony how Azerbaijani artillery bombardment of her village had killed at least five children and wounded 13 more.

There is little verification or ability to confirm these claims, but there is ample precedent for them: Azerbaijani troops have previously filmed themselves beheading elderly Karabakh Armenian civilians, have executed groups of POWs, and indiscriminately bombarded Karabakh settlements. In the coming days, videos of atrocities committed over the past few days are likely to come to light.

The ultimate fate of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh is similarly unclear. While Azerbaijani officials have said that civilians will be allowed to stay there unharmed, few, if any, of the locals believe them.

Armenian Prime Nikol Pashinyan stated in a speech on Thursday that a mass evacuation was “not plan A nor plan B,” and that he hoped the Karabakh Armenians would still be able to live a “safe and dignified” life there, but that Armenia was ready and able to accept 40,000 families if the need arose.

More despair than revolution

The view of Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents is a sharply different one. Ashot Gabrielyan, a local teacher who has documented life in Nagorno-Karabakh under the blockade, summed up the local community’s views in an Instagram post on Friday. “We, the people in Artsakh, need a humanitarian corridor to leave [to Armenia],” he wrote. “We are not ready to live with a country [Azerbaijan] which starved us, then killed us. We NEED to leave.”

The catastrophic situation has understandably led to political unrest in Armenia itself. On Tuesday night, as the Azerbaijani offensive into Nagorno-Karabakh was still going strong, thousands gathered in Yerevan’s Republic Square, a common spot for demonstrations in the capital. The clashes reached a rare level of violence, with police deploying stun grenades against the crowd at one point; 16 policemen and 18 civilians were wounded in the event.

But the mood was more despair than revolution. While many of those in attendance demanded the resignation of the government, few had any suggestions for what should be done differently.

“Nikol [Pashinyan] led us to this horrible situation, this catastrophe,” said Tigran, one of those in attendance. “He must resign.” Another attendee, Daniella, a 20-year old student from Nagorno-Karabakh, had a different take. “I don’t know what [the government] can even do [about this],” she said. “My family are still there [in Karabakh] and I’m very worried for them, but I don’t know that violence here [in Yerevan] will help anything,” she said.

The public paralysation is exacerbated by Russia, which has come out staunchly against the Armenian government and sought to pin the entire blame for the present tragedy in Nagorno-Karabakh on Pashinyan. A series of Kremlin media guidelines for Russian state media was leaked to the Russian opposition outlet Meduza, in which Russian government publications are instructed to blame the Azerbaijani assault on “Armenia and its Western partners”.

Mass public outrage at Russia and its absent peacekeepers in both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh has been fanned further by posts by top Russian propagandists such as Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Solovyov, who shared identical Telegram posts suggesting that Armenians should overthrow the Pashinyan government.

Armenian journalist Samson Martirosyan summed up the mood succinctly in a Twitter post. “Most people in Armenia don’t know what to do, caught between Pashinyan and [the] opposition. By going to protests, you would stir up chaos, which serves Russia and Azerbaijan. Not going would mean silently agreeing with Pashinyan’s disastrous policies,” Martirosyan wrote.

Meanwhile, the 120,000 inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh await the outcome of the surrender negotiations currently taking place between their leadership and that of Azerbaijan in the Azerbaijani city of Yevlakh.

There are few reasons for optimism: Nagorno-Karabakh presidential advisor David Babayan said on Friday that there were “no concrete results” from Baku on either security guarantees for the population of Karabakh or regarding amnesty for its soldiers and leaders, all of whom Azerbaijan regards as criminals and terrorists.

The Azerbaijani army currently sits at the entrances to Stepanakert, poised to enter. It is difficult to imagine the scenes that will result when that happens.

EU reaction to Azerbaijan attack on Nagorno-Karabakh muted by growing dependence on Azeri gas

Azerbaijan gas is proving to be crucial to the EU in its efforts to replace Russian gas exports.

By bne IntelliNews September 21, 2023


The Western reaction to Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh this week has been muted by its growing dependence on Azeri gas supplies.

Azerbaijan launched a so-called anti-terrorist operation in the enclave on September 19, shelling cities and towns that rapidly led to Nagorno-Karabakh’s surrender within 24 hours on September 20.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine, the EU has turned to Baku to replace the lost Russian gas deliveries. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Baku to sign a 10bn cubic metre gas supply deal last year as the EU scrambled to find new sources of gas.

“The European Union has therefore decided to diversify away from Russia and to turn towards more reliable, trustworthy partners. And I am glad to count Azerbaijan among them,” von der Leyen said in a speech to President Ilham Aliyev during her visit to Baku. “You are indeed a crucial energy partner for us and you have always been reliable.”

IEA chief Fatih Birol said at the time that new supplies of Azerbaijan still fall far short of being able to meet European demand for gas in the long term.

“It is categorically not enough to just rely on gas from non-Russian sources – these supplies are simply not available in the volumes required to substitute for missing deliveries from Russia,” Birol wrote in an article published by the IEA. “This will be the case even if gas supplies from Norway and Azerbaijan flow at maximum capacity.”

The gas deal doubled the supply of gas from Azerbaijan to the EU and committed to an expansion of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) to deliver more gas in the future.

“This is already a very important supply route for the European Union, delivering currently more than 8 bcm of gas per year,” von der Leyen said in Baku. “And we will expand its capacity to 20 bcm in a few years. From [2023] on, we should already reach 12 bcm. This will help compensate for cuts in supplies of Russian gas and contribute significantly to Europe's security of supply.”



Azerbaijan’s oil and gas export pipeline routes to the West

Leyen’s deal and personal meeting with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev was heavily criticised by NGOs for ignoring Azerbaijan’s widespread human rights abuses and brutal authoritarian control of the country.

The attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, which technically belongs to Azerbaijan, but is almost entirely populated by Armenians, has also brought down international criticism, as it appears that Baku is attempting to retake control of the enclave, force the residents out and replace them with Azeris.

Europe gets around 3% of its gas from Azerbaijan. However, as Baku has been piping more gas west to the EU, it has also been importing more gas from Russia in the east, as its domestic gas production is insufficient both to meet domestic demand and its export commitments to the EU. The Azeri gas deal is in fact a backdoor route for Russian to continue its gas exports to Europe, in addition to the ongoing exports via Ukraine and Turkey.

Aliev has been able to take advantage of Armenia’s relative isolation to bring about the attack and recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia is supposed to provide security in the region under the terms of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), but has been passive in the dispute, distracted by its own war in Ukraine.

Armenia accuses Azerbaijan of "ethnic cleansing" in Nagorno-Karabakh

Chris Livesay, Tucker Reals
Updated Fri, September 29, 2023 

Armenia accuses Azerbaijan of "ethnic cleansing" in Nagorno-Karabakh


Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan accused neighboring Azerbaijan on Thursday of "ethnic cleansing" as tens of thousands of people fled the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. Pashinyan predicted that all ethnic Armenians would flee the region in "the coming days" amid an ongoing Azerbaijani military operation there.

"Our analysis shows that in the coming days there will be no Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh," Pashinyan told his cabinet members on Thursday, according to the French news agency AFP. "This is an act of ethnic cleansing of which we were warning the international community for a long time."


Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but it has been populated and run by ethnic Armenian separatists for several decades. About a week ago, Azerbaijan launched a lightning military offensive to bring the breakaway region — home to fewer than 150,000 people before the exodus began — fully under its control.

Over the last week, amid what Azerbaijan calls "anti-terrorist" operations in Nagorno-Karabakh, tens of thousands of people have fled to Armenia. Armenian government spokeswoman Nazeli Baghdasaryan said in a statement that some "65,036 forcefully displaced persons" had crossed into Armenia from the region by Thursday morning, according to AFP.

Some of the ethnic Armenian residents have said they had only minutes to decide to pack up their things and abandon their homes to join the exodus down the only road into neighboring Armenia.


"We ran away to survive," an elderly woman holding her granddaughter told the Reuters news agency. "It was horrible, children were hungry and crying."

Samantha Powers, the head of the U.S. government's primary aid agency, was in Armenia this week and announced that the U.S. government would provide $11.5 million worth of assistance.

"It is absolutely critical that independent monitors, as well as humanitarian organizations, get access to the people in Nagorno-Karabakh who still have dire needs," she said, adding that "there are injured civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh who need to be evacuated and it is absolutely essential that evacuation be facilitated by the government of Azerbaijan."

The conflict between the Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan had simmered for years, but after the recent invasion was launched, the separatists agreed to lay down their arms, leaving the future of their region and their people shrouded in uncertainty.

The fall of an enclave in Azerbaijan stuns the Armenian diaspora, extinguishing a dream

BASSEM MROUE
Updated Fri, September 29, 2023 











 Lebanese Armenians clash with police outside the Azerbaijani embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023. The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world. Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians on Thursday protested outside the Azerbajani Embassy in Beirut. They waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and burned pictures of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents. Riot police lobbed tear gas when they threw firecrackers at the embassy. 

(AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)


BEIRUT (AP) — The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and the exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world. Traumatized by a widely acknowledged genocide a century ago, they fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh on Thursday announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year’s end -– a seeming death knell for its 30-year de facto independence.

Azerbaijan, which routed the region’s Armenian forces in a lightning offensive last week, has pledged to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian community. Tens of thousands of people — more than 70% of the region's population — had fled to Armenia by Friday morning, and the influx continues, according to Armenian officials.

Many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has termed it “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing.” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the accusation, saying the departures are a "personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation.”

Armenians abroad also accuse European countries, Russia and the United States -– and the government of Armenia itself -– of failing to protect the population during months of a blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military and a swift offensive last week that defeated separatist forces.

Armenians say the loss is a historic blow. Outside the modern country of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of the only surviving parts of a heartland that centuries ago stretched across what is now eastern Turkey, into the Caucasus region and western Iran.

Many in the diaspora had pinned dreams on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history,” said Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian university instructor in Beirut.

“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours. … For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians on Thursday protested outside the Azerbajani Embassy in Beirut. They waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and burned pictures of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents. Riot police lobbed tear gas when they threw firecrackers at the embassy.

Ethnic Armenians have communities around Europe and the Middle East and in the United States. Lebanon is home to one of the largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, 4% of the population.

Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.

In Bourj Hammoud, the main Armenian district in Beirut, memories are still raw, with anti-Turkey graffiti common. The red-blue-and-orange Armenian flag flies from many buildings.

“This is the last migration for Armenians,” said Harout Bshidikian, 55, sitting in front of an Armenian flag in a Bourj Hamoud cafe. “There is no other place left for us to migrate from.”

Azerbaijan says it is reuniting its territory, pointing out that even Armenia’s prime minister recognized that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. Though its population has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris also have communities and cultural ties to the territory, particularly the city of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azerbaijani poetry.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh came under control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian military in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. Azerbaijan took parts of the area in a 2020 war. Now after this month’s defeat, separatist authorities surrendered their weapons and are holding talks with Azerbaijan on reintegration of the territory into Azerbaijan.

Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank, said Nagorno-Karabakh had become “a kind of new cause” for an Armenian diaspora whose forebearers had suffered the genocide.

“It was a kind of new Armenian state, new Armenian land being born, which they projected lots of hopes on. Very unrealistic hopes, I would say,” he added, noting it encouraged Karabakh Armenians to hold out against Azerbaijan despite the lack of international recognition for their separatist government.

Armenians see the territory as a cradle of their culture, with monasteries dating back more than a millennium.

“Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years,” said Lebanese legislator Hagop Pakradounian, head of Lebanon’s largest Armenian group, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. “The people of Artsakh are being subjected to a new genocide, the first genocide in the 21st century.”

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is not just a reminder of the genocide, “it’s reliving it,” said Diran Guiliguian, a Madrid-based activist who holds Armenian, Lebanese and French citizenship.

He said his grandmother used to tell him stories of how she fled in 1915. The genocide “is actually not a thing of the past. It’s not a thing that is a century old. It’s actually still the case,” he said.

Seroujian, the instructor in Beirut, said her great-grandparents were genocide survivors, and that stories of the atrocities and dispersal were talked about at home, school and in the community as she grew up, as was the cause of Nagorno-Karabakh.

She visited the territory several times, most recently in 2017. “We’ve grown with these ideas, whether they were romantic or not, of the country. We’ve grown to love it even when we didn’t see it,” she said. “I never thought about it as something separate” from Armenia the country.

A diaspora group called Europeans for Artsakh plans a rally in Brussels next week in front of European Union buildings to denounce what they say are human rights abuses by Azerbaijan and to call for EU sanctions on Azerbaijani officials. The rally is timed ahead of an Oct. 5 summit of European leaders in Spain, where the Armenian prime minister and Azerbaijani president are scheduled to hold talks mediated by the French president, German chancellor and European Council president.

In the United States, the Armenian community in the Los Angeles area -– one of the world’s largest -– has staged protests to draw attention to the situation. On Sept. 19, they used a trailer truck to block a freeway for several hours, causing major traffic jams.

Kim Kardashian, perhaps the best-known Armenian-American, went on social media to urge President Joe Biden “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide.”

Several groups are collecting money for Karabakh Armenians fleeing their home. But Seroujian said many feel helpless.

“There are moments where personally, the family, or among friends we just feel hopeless,” she said. “And when we talk to each other we sort of lose our minds."

___

Associated Press writers Emma Burrows in London, Kareem Chehayeb and Fadi Tawil in Beirut, Angela Charlton in Paris and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed.

Karabakh Armenians dissolve breakaway government in capitulation to Azerbaijan

Updated Thu, September 28,  2023








Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh arrive in Kornidzor


By Felix Light

GORIS, Armenia (Reuters) -Ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh said on Thursday they were dissolving the breakaway statelet they had defended for three decades, where more than half the population has fled since Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive last week.

In a statement, they said their self-declared Republic of Artsakh would "cease to exist" by Jan. 1, in what amounted to a formal capitulation to Azerbaijan.

For Azerbaijan and its president, Ilham Aliyev, the outcome is a triumphant restoration of sovereignty over an area that is internationally recognised as part of its territory but whose ethnic Armenian majority won de facto independence in a war in the 1990s.

For Armenians, it is a defeat and a national tragedy.

Some 70,500 people had crossed into Armenia by early Thursday afternoon, Russia's RIA news agency reported, out of an estimated population of 120,000.

"Analysis of the situation shows that in the coming days there will be no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh," Interfax news agency quoted Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan as saying. "This is an act of ethnic cleansing."

Azerbaijan denies that accusation, saying it is not forcing people to leave and that it will peacefully reintegrate the Karabakh region and guarantee the civic rights of the ethnic Armenians.

Karabakh Armenians say they do not trust that promise, mindful of a long history of bloodshed between the two sides including two wars since the break-up of the Soviet Union. For days they have fled en masse down the snaking mountain road through Azerbaijan that connects Karabakh to Armenia.

Azerbaijan's ambassador to London, Elin Suleymanov, told Reuters in an interview that Baku did not want a mass exodus from Karabakh and was not encouraging people to leave.

He said Azerbaijan had not yet had a chance to prove what he said was its sincere commitment to provide secure and better living conditions for those ethnic Armenians who choose to stay.

The Kremlin said on Thursday it was closely monitoring the humanitarian situation in Karabakh and said Russian peacekeepers in the region were providing assistance to residents. It said Russian President Vladimir Putin had no plans to visit Armenia.

'TROUBLING REPORTS'

Western governments have also expressed alarm over the humanitarian crisis and demanded access for international observers to monitor Azerbaijan's treatment of the local population.

Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said this week she had heard "very troubling reports of violence against civilians".

Azerbaijan said Aliyev had told her at a meeting on Wednesday that the rights of ethnic Armenians would be protected by law, like those of other minorities.

"The Azerbaijani president noted that the civilian population had not been harmed during the anti-terrorist measures, and only illegal Armenian armed formations and military facilities had been targeted," a statement said.

Aliyev's office said on Thursday he was visiting Jabrayil, a city on the southern edge of Karabakh that was destroyed by Armenian forces in the 1990s, which Azerbaijan recaptured in 2020 and is now rebuilding.

While saying he had no quarrel with ordinary Karabakh Armenians, Aliyev last week described their leaders as a "criminal junta" that would be brought to justice.

A former head of Karabakh's government, Ruben Vardanyan, was arrested on Wednesday as he tried to cross into Armenia. Azerbaijan's state security service said on Thursday he was being charged with financing terrorism and with illegally crossing the Azerbaijani border last year.

David Babayan, an adviser to the Karabakh leadership, said in a statement he was voluntarily giving himself up to the Azerbaijani authorities.

Mass displacements have been a feature of the Karabakh conflict since it broke out in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union headed towards collapse.

Between 1988 and 1994 about 500,000 Azerbaijanis from Karabakh and the areas around it were expelled from their homes, while the conflict prompted 350,000 Armenians to leave Azerbaijan and 186,000 Azerbaijanis to leave Armenia, according to "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War", a 2003 book by Caucasus scholar and analyst Thomas de Waal.

Many of the Armenians escaping this week in heavily laden cars, trucks, buses and even tractors said they were hungry and fearful.

"This is one of the darkest pages of Armenian history," said Father David, a 33-year-old Armenian priest who came to the border to provide spiritual support for those arriving. "The whole of Armenian history is full of hardships."

(Additional reporting by Nailia Bagirova and Anton Kolodyazhnyy; writing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Alexandra Hudson)

Nagorno-Karabakh to dissolve, ending independence dream
AFP
Thu, September 28, 2023 

Nagorno-Karabakh's decades-long, bloody dream of independence ended on Thursday with a formal decree declaring that the ethnic Armenian statelet in Azerbaijan "ceases to exist" at the end of the year.

The dramatic decree issued by the separatist region's leader came moments after it was announced that more than half of the ethnic Armenian population has fled in the wake of last week's assault by arch-rival Azerbaijan.

Baku's lightning offensive ended with a September 20 truce in the which the rebels pledged to disarm and enter "reintegration" talks.

Two rounds of talks were held as Azerbaijani forces methodically worked with Russian peacekeepers to collect separatist weapons silos and enter towns that had remained outside Baku's control since the sides first fought over the region in the 1990s.

Azerbaijani forces have now approached the edge of Stepanakert -- an emptying rebel stronghold where separatist leader Samvel Shakhramanyan issued his decree.

"Dissolve all state institutions and organisations under their departmental subordination by January 1, 2024, and the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) ceases to exist," said the decree.

"The population of Nagorno-Karabakh, including those located outside the republic, after the entry into force of this Decree, familiarise themselves with the conditions of reintegration presented by the Republic of Azerbaijan."

- 'Ethnic cleansing' -

The republic and its separatist dream have been effectively vanishing since Azerbaijan unlocked the only road leading to Armenia on Sunday.

Tens of thousands have since been piling their belonging on top of their cars and taking the winding mountain journey to Armenia every day.

Armenia said more than 65,000 had left by Thursday morning -- more than half of the region's estimated 120,000-strong population.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Thursday that "in the coming days" all ethnic-Armenians will have left the region, where ethnic Armenians have been living for centuries.

"This is an act of ethnic cleansing of which we were warning the international community (about for a long time."

Nagorno-Karabakh has been officially recognised as part of Azerbaijan since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

No country -- not even Armenia -- recognised the statelet's independence claim.

But ethnic Armenian separatists have been running the region since winning a brutal war in the 1990s that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The fighting was accompanied by allegations of massacres against civilians and gross violations of human rights that many in the region recall to this day.

But the bloody feud between the mostly Christian Armenian and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan dates back to the years in the 1920s when the region was handed to Baku by the Soviets.

Baku clawed back large parts of the statelet and its surrounding areas in a six-week war in 2020 that significantly weakened rebel defences.

Azerbaijan has agreed to allow rebel fighters who lay down their arms to withdraw to Armenia.

But Baku added that it reserved the right to detain and prosecute suspects of "war crimes".

Azerbaijani border guards on Wednesday detained Ruben Vardanyan -- a reported billionaire who headed the Nagorno-Karabakh government from November 2022 until February.

Baku said on Thursday it had charged Vardanyan with "financing terrorism".

The region's former foreign minister David Babayan said he had also been added to Baku's "black list" and agreed to hand himself over to Azerbaijani authorities.


Why this week's mass exodus from embattled Nagorno-Karabakh reflects decades of animosity

JIM HEINTZ
Updated Thu, September 28, 2023 











Armenia AzerbaijanEthnic Armenian elderly women from Nagorno-Karabakh rest after arriving in Armenia's Goris in Syunik region, Armenia, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023. Armenian officials say over 66,000 people — more than half of the region's population of 120,000 — has already left for Armenia. 

(AP Photo/Vasily Krestyaninov)

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The exodus of ethnic Armenians this week from the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh has been a vivid and shocking tableau of fear and misery. Roads are jammed with cars lumbering with heavy loads, waiting for hours in traffic jams. People sit amid mounds of hastily packed luggage.

As of Thursday, more than 78,300 people had left the breakaway region for Armenia. That's a huge number — more than half of the population of the region that is located entirely within Azerbaijan.

Still, it's not the largest displacement of civilians in three decades of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

After ethnic Armenian forces secured control of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding territories in 1994, refugee organizations estimated that some 900,000 people had fled to Azerbaijan and 300,000 to Armenia.

When war broke out again in 2020 and Azerbaijan seized more territory, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said 90,000 had gone to Armenia and 40,000 to Azerbaijan.

Those figures underline the fierce animosity between the two countries, and they raise questions about the region’s future.

WHAT IS THE REGION?

Nagorno-Karabakh, with a population of about 120,000, is a mountainous, ethnic Armenian region inside Azerbaijan in the southern Caucasus Mountains.

When both Azerbaijan and Armenia were part of the Soviet Union, the region was designated as an autonomous republic, but as Moscow’s central control of far-flung regions deteriorated, a movement arose in Nagorno-Karabakh for incorporation into Armenia.

Tensions burst into violence in 1988 when more than 30 — some say as many as 200 — ethnic Armenians were killed in a pogrom in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait. Armenians fled, as did many ethnic Azeris who lived in Armenia. When a full-scale war broke out, the numbers soared. That first war lasted until 1994.

Azerbaijan regained control of parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and large swaths of adjacent territory held by Armenians in a six-week war in 2020, driving out tens of thousands of Armenians that the government in Baku declared to have settled illegally.

WHAT HAPPENED IN RECENT DAYS?

Last week, Azerbaijan launched a blitz that forced the capitulation of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist forces and government. On Thursday, the separatist authorities agreed to disband by the end of this year.

The events put the region's ethnic Armenians on the move out of the territory.

Nagorno-Karabakh and the territory around it have deep cultural and religious significance for Christian Armenians and predominantly Muslim Azeris, and each group denounces the other for alleged efforts to destroy or desecrate monuments and relics.

Armenians were deeply angered by recent video that purportedly showed an Azerbaijani soldier firing at a monastery in the region. Azeris have seethed with resentment at Armenians’ wholesale pillaging of the once-sizable city of Aghdam and the use of its mosque as a cattle barn.

WHY HAVE THE SEPARATISTS QUICKLY GIVEN UP?

A Russian peacekeeping force of about 2,000 was deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh under an armistice that ended the 2020 war. But its inaction in the latest Azerbaijani offensive probably was a key factor in the separatists’ quick decision to give in.

In December, Azerbaijan began blocking the only road leading from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.

Armenians bitterly criticized the peacekeepers for failing to follow their mandate to keep the road open. The blockade caused severe food and medicine shortages in Nagorno-Karabakh. International organizations and governments called repeatedly for Baku to lift the blockade.

Russia, which is fighting a war in Ukraine, seems to be unable or unwilling to take action to keep the road open. That appears to have persuaded the separatists that they would get no support when Azerbaijan launched its blitz.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s forces were small and poorly supplied in comparison with those of Azerbaijan, thanks to the country’s surging oil revenues and support from Turkey.

WHAT WILL THE FUTURE HOLD?

Under last week's cease-fire, Azerbaijan will “reintegrate” Nagorno-Karabakh, but the terms for that are unclear. Baku repeatedly has promised that the rights of ethnic Armenians will be observed if they stay in the region as Azerbaijani citizens.

That promise appears to have reassured almost no one. Although Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said last week that he saw no immediate need for Armenians to leave, on Thursday he said he expected that none would be left in Nagorno-Karabakh within a few days.

Ethnic Armenians in the region do not trust Azerbaijan to treat them fairly and humanely or grant them their language, religion and culture.

Without an international peacekeeping or police force in the region, ethnic violence would be almost certain to flare.

Exodus and ethnic cleansing? The sudden end of a decades long dream in the Caucasus

Matt Bradley and Natasha Lebedeva
Thu, September 28, 2023 


Nagorno-Karabakh to dissolve after years-long war with Azerbaijan ends

After years of conflict, the war between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan has finally ended. The contested region now falls under Azerbaijani control as tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians flee their homeland. NBC News’ Matt Bradley reports.

After more than half the population of an ethnic Armenian enclave fled their homes in a mountainous pocket of land south of Russia, the breakaway republic’s leaders said it would soon “cease to exist.”

In what amounted to a formal capitulation to Azerbaijan, which surrounds it, the Armenian leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh said the self-declared Republic of Artsakh would be dismantled by the end of the year.

This would end three decades of intermittent conflict in and around the enclave, break a 10-month blockade of the region in the South Caucasus that residents said had starved them into submission, and dash hopes of an independent state in territory claimed by Azerbaijan.

The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh as a breakaway state is a seminal point — a rare supernova among the constellation of ethnic conflicts left by the implosion of the then-Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The conflict’s abrupt halt reflects how the geopolitical reach of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced realignments far beyond that war.

In an official decree, the region’s separatist President Samvel Shakhramanyan said that residents of Nagorno-Karabakh must now “familiarize themselves with the conditions of reintegration” into Azerbaijan and make “an independent and individual decision about the possibility of staying (or returning) in Nagorno-Karabakh.”


The announcement came as around 70,000 of the enclave’s population of about 120,000 fled from the region, which sits within Azerbaijan’s borders, to neighboring Armenia, according to Armenia’s government, with more still arriving.

Many residents hauled what few personal belongings they could gather into packed cars, trucks, buses and tractors, some pockmarked with shrapnel after days of Azerbaijani attacks.

Armenia’s leadership has accused Azerbaijan of instigating a refugee crisis by launching a swift invasion this week. Azerbaijan has denied allegations of “ethnic cleansing,” saying it is not forcing people to leave, and would peacefully reintegrate the region and guarantee rights of ethnic Armenians.

Holding a wealth of monasteries, mosques and other religious sites, Nagorno-Karabakh is culturally significant for both Muslim Azeris and what was an overwhelming Christian Armenian population. Armenians in Azerbaijan have been victims of pogroms, while Azerbaijanis claim discrimination and violence at the hands of Armenians.

“Azerbaijan has won a comprehensive military victory and what we’re looking at now is the prospect of Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians or with very few Armenians remaining,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with the London-based Carnegie Europe think tank. “So in that sense, Azerbaijan has won.”


For those fleeing, the despair of losing their homes was made worse by losing their homeland.

“Many of them are from villages which were taken by the Azerbaijani army, so they really lost their homes already,” said Astrig Agopian, a French Armenian journalist who has been reporting this week on the refugee crisis from Armenia’s border. “There is really this feeling that this time is different. It’s another war, but it’s a war that is definitely lost this time.”

Were that the case, it would bring to an end decades of violence in the region, which has been at the center of geopolitical interests between Eastern and Western nations for centuries.

The political dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh began as the then-Soviet Union weakened in the late 1980s, and Armenians demanded that the majority-Armenian region be incorporated into the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.

After the USSR collapsed in 1991, the conflict erupted into a full-scale war that persisted until a Russian-brokered peace deal in 1994. About 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people displaced.

“My husband died in the first war. He was 30, I was 26. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. It is the fourth war that I went through,” Narine Shakaryan, a grandmother of four, told the Reuters news agency after she arrived in Armenia. “My husband died back then, he was 30 in 1994. That’s the cursed life that we live.”

The fighting continued intermittently for several more decades, leaving an indelible mark on generations of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian residents. A recent war in 2020 saw the more powerful Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, reclaim much of the land surrounding the area, as well as part of the region itself.

Russia negotiated an end to that flare-up and even deployed peacekeepers to ensure security along the Lachin Corridor, the single mountain road that connected Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the events of the past year show how Moscow, which has historically played the role of both peacekeeper and ally to Armenia — which shares its Christian roots and hosts a Russian military base — has adjusted its allegiances following its invasion of Ukraine and its conflicts with the West.


“The pivotal factor was that Azerbaijan was talking separately to the Russians, and had a joint agenda with the Russians, to pressure Armenia and also to keep the West out of the Caucasus,” de Waal said. “This is why when the Azerbaijani assault happened, Russian peacekeepers who could have actually stopped it stood down. And then Russia failed to condemn the attack.”

After its invasion of Ukraine left Russia isolated, Moscow may feel it has more to gain from cozying up to Azerbaijan than Armenia, particularly after the latter made a public display of cozying up to the West and provided humanitarian aid to Kyiv.

Earlier this month, the country conducted joint exercises with the U.S. military and the Armenian Parliament is set to vote next week on whether to accede to the International Criminal Court, which classifies Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal — a move the Kremlin characterized Thursday as “extremely hostile.”

Inside Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s government has assured the region’s Armenian population that they will be treated humanely and afforded equal rights.

But after months of blockades and blistering fighting, few ethnic Armenians believe it and many feel they have no choice but to flee.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Armenians in Russia return home to help Karabakh refugees

Felix Light
Wed, September 27, 2023 





Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh arrive in Kornidzor

KORNIDZOR, Armenia (Reuters) - When Azerbaijan overran the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, David Harapetyan drove 1,000 km (620 miles) from his home in the Russian city of Stavropol to this Armenian border village to help fleeing Karabakh Armenians.

The 36-year-old taxi driver on Wednesday was handing out food, water and cigarettes to refugees arriving in Armenia after spending 10 months under an Azerbaijani blockade that led to critical shortages in Karabakh.

"I came here from Stavropol when I saw what is happening here. I came to help my people however I can," said Harapetyan, who was born in this southern corner of Armenia but holds only Russian citizenship.

Russia is home to the world's largest Armenian diaspora. The United States and France also have large ethnic Armenian communities.

Armenia’s government said on Wednesday that more than 50,000 Karabakh refugees so far had crossed the border, out of a total estimated Karabakh Armenian population of 120,000.

The sudden influx has strained resources in Goris, the border town where Armenian authorities have booked out hotels for refugees with nowhere to go.

Harapetyan said he and a group of 10 Stavropol Armenians he had arrived with were helping new arrivals with accommodation.

"We arrived and even found houses where we can accommodate some people who have no home."

Among those helped by Harapetyan were 49 men, women and children who arrived crammed into Karen Martirosyan’s KAMAZ truck.

Martirosyan, 39, a soldier in Karabakh’s defeated army, had driven from the frontline village of Badara in his truck.

BREAKDOWNS

During the 77 km (48 mile) drive from Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh, which took two days due to heavy traffic, he picked up stragglers whose truck had broken down.

"Their KAMAZ broke down on the road late at night," said Martirosyan, whose own overloaded truck was also towing a car carrying five more people who had run out of fuel.

"They were out in the open. So I took them with me and came here - 43 (people) in the back, and five more in the cabin."

As volunteers at the border gave out food and water to the 20 or so children on board, an old woman shouted from the truck that she blamed Armenian and Karabakh leaders, past and present, for the loss of her homeland.

"All of Karabakh has been taken hostage by Azerbaijan! That's it! It's all our president's fault! He did all of it, he is the one responsible!"

(Writing by Gareth Jones, Editing by William Maclean)

Azerbaijan quickly advanced on Nagorno-Karabakh 

Survivors Reveal War Crimes as Putin’s Men Stood Aside

AZERBAIJAN IS TURKIYE'S CLIENT STATE

Anna Conkling

/The Daily Beast

Fri, September 29, 2023 

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

GORIS, Armenia—Two ethnic Armenian soldiers who survived the blitzkrieg onslaught against Nagorno-Karabakh told The Daily Beast they witnessed apparent war crimes committed against civilians who lived in the disputed enclave.

The assault on Nagorno-Karabakh last week was carried out by Azerbaijan despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers who had been defending the residents of the border region. It took only two days for Azerbaijan to successfully take control of the enclave after the assault began on Sept. 19. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has since accused its Russian ally of failing to intervene.

One civilian allegedly had his leg cut in two by a bullet from a sniper that struck him during the attack, according to the soldiers. They also told The Daily Beast that they had witnessed indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, in contravention of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statue on war crimes.

The University Network For Human Rights, a non-governmental organization documenting crimes against humanity are currently in Armenia collecting witness testimonies of war crimes allegations against Azerbaijani soldiers. Among them are forced deportation, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and forced deportation.

“People are fearful to say anything, because they still have relatives in Nagorno-Karabakh,” said Anoush Baghdassarin, a consultant attorney for The University Network For Human Rights, who has spoken to around 25 families in recent days about human rights violations during the war.

First Look Inside the Historic Mass Exodus Putin Failed to Prevent

“Every single person that we have been speaking to are a victim of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. We have been documenting their departure, we’ve been documenting what happened since last Tuesday, Sept. 19,” Baghdassarin told The Daily Beast.

“People have been telling us that as fast as they could, they went into bunkers or they fled into forests, and they had to leave behind the people who were too sick or too elderly to leave with them. Telling us [that] many of them are still missing, they haven’t heard from them, haven’t had any contact with them, and they don’t know if they are dead, where they are,” said Baghdassarin.

“We’ve been hearing a lot of stories of flight, of fear, of missing people, and of loss. People have left their homes. 30 minutes before soldiers were coming to their village, they fled to the next village,” she added.

“When Armenians get to the border, Azerbaijan is scanning the car and going in and looking at the individuals in the car, and taking out the men. One woman told me she had read that a boy that they took out of the car’s ear was cut off at the border, but it’s not corroborated,” said Baghdassairn.

Refugees wait in their car to leave Karabakh for Armenia, at the in Lachin checkpoint, on September 26, 2023.
Emmanuel Dunand / AFP 

Azerbaijan’s war on Nagorno-Karabakh was not something the breakaway region’s military expected. They were not prepared for the invasion and did not have enough bullets in their rifles to ward off the enemy force. In just a matter of hours, they would surrender to Azerbaijan’s military, leaving the fate of their homeland that residents refer to as “Artsakh” to become occupied by Baku.

In a series of interviews with The Daily Beast, the two soldiers—who agreed to speak on the condition of using their first names—recounted additional horrors they allege to have witnessed as a part of Nagorno-Karabakh’s military.

The fighting began around 1 p.m., said Amik, one of the soldiers who spoke to The Daily Beast outside of a humanitarian aid center in Goris, Armenia. He was at his military post in one of Nagorno-Karabakh’s villages that he declined to name at the time.

Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh gather around a fire to warm themselves after getting stuck in a queue of vehicles on the road leading towards the Armenian border, in Nagorno-Karabakh, September 25, 2023.
David Ghahramanyan / Reuters

“We didn’t know it would start,” he said while sitting with his mother, father, and brother outside of a humanitarian aid center in Goris, Armenia. “We understood it won’t be a long war. There was no sense. We have limited people, we didn’t have weapons, we had one grenade launcher, but it didn’t shoot, there were no projectiles,” he added.

Azerbaijan quickly advanced on Nagorno-Karabakh, and Amik came face to face with the invading force. He said that first, his position was bombed by Azerbaijani soldiers. Then he saw in another area of the village that Russian peacekeepers, too, were under shelling. But shortly afterwards, Amik said, “We saw 50-60 guys started to go in our direction with weapons. We responded.”

‘No Artsakh Anymore’

Amik and his brigade fought for 24 hours before being forced to surrender to Azerbaijani soldiers. At that time, Amik said, “We saw killings of civilians; 13 kids died in Stepanakert. I saw how they bombed (civilians). They bombed with artillery, planes from Sushni,” a city in Nagorno-Karabakh that became occupied by Azerbaijan after the 2020 war in the region.

“I saw injuries from shells and from bombing. There was a man with no hand or leg. There were dead in my unit, three to four people in each post. We shot back. Stayed for almost the whole day. On September 20, [the war] ended at 1:30 p.m.,” Amik added.

On September 20, Amik’s brigade was told by his commanding officers that the war was over and that it was time to surrender their weapons. “We knew they would kill us, we knew we would die,” he said.

Amik managed to escape from his position through a forest that brought him to Stepanakert, where he met his family, who were already there waiting for him. “We felt like losers. We are here,” Amik said as he looked around at the humanitarian aid centers surrounding him.

The soldier believes that Azerbaijani citizens will move into homes in Nagorno-Karabakh that have been deserted in the aftermath of the war. Meanwhile, Amik and the 70,000 other refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh are left with “No home, nothing. We don’t know where to go.”

Thousands of refugees are now facing the same experience as Amik. They do not know where they should go next, and many are still grasping to understand how their lives could be destroyed in just one day.

Vehicles carrying refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh waiting to cross the Armenian border, in Nagorno-Karabakh, September 25, 2023.
David Ghahramanyan / Reuters

On the grounds of the same humanitarian aid center as Amik, a 22-year-old soldier named Robert was sitting with his grandmother, parents, and brother. He told The Daily Beast that he saw an Azerbaijani sniper “shoot the leg of a civilian,” which was sliced off by the bullet.

Robert was able to escape with his family while dressed in plain clothing. But he said he knew of other soldiers who were unable to get out of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“They [Azerbaijan] won’t let them leave. That’s what I have heard. I can’t explain this feeling. It’s very tough as my friends were fighting. The hardest is to lose friends,” said Robert

“There is no Artsakh anymore,” he added.

The Daily Beast.

In taking Karabakh, Azerbaijan's president avenged his father

Fri, September 29, 2023

By Andrew Osborn

(Reuters) - Early on September 19, Azerbaijan's president set in motion a lightning-fast military plan months in the making that would redraw the geopolitical map and avenge an ignominious defeat suffered by his father some 30 years before.

In power for two decades and with one successful war already under his belt, President Ilham Aliyev had often spoken of returning the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to Azerbaijan's full control after its ethnic Armenian inhabitants broke from Baku's rule in the early 1990s.

Now, a confluence of factors had convinced Aliyev, 61, that the time was right, Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan's ambassador to Britain, told Reuters.

"History takes turns and zigzags," Suleymanov said. "We could not do this earlier and it would probably not be a good idea to do it later."

"The stars aligned for certain reasons and President Aliyev saw the alignment," said Suleymanov, who previously worked in Aliyev's office.

Prominent among these "stars" was the new inability or unwillingness of Russia, the West, or Armenia to intervene to protect Nagorno-Karabakh. The self-governed enclave had 10,000 fighters at its disposal according to Azerbaijan, whose own army - estimated at over 120,000-strong by Western experts - dwarfed it.

In conversations with Reuters, two senior officials and a source who has worked with Aliyev underscored that the decision to take back the breakaway region took shape over months as diplomatic realities shifted.

It was also deeply personal for the president, they said.

Speaking to the people of Azerbaijan the day after his troops had gone in, Aliyev said he had ordered his soldiers not to harm civilians. Baku would later say that 192 of its soldiers had been killed in the operation that followed; the Karabakh Armenians that they had lost over 200 people.

"President Aliyev is completing something that his father could not do because he ran out of time," said one of the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to give comments to the media.

Aliyev's actions have loosened Russia's decades-long grip on the strategically important South Caucasus region which is crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines, lies between the Black and Caspian seas, and borders Iran, Turkey and Russia.

In three interviews, one before and two after the military operation, Aliyev's foreign policy adviser Hikmet Hajiyev said Baku's patience with the status quo had snapped.

Less than two weeks before Azerbaijani forces swept into Karabakh, Hajiyev told Reuters that Baku was not seeking any military objectives "at this stage" but remained vigilant. It could not accept what he called a "grey zone" with Karabakh's own armed security forces, which he likened to the mafia, on Azerbaijani territory, he said.

The Karabakh defence force has since disbanded under the terms of a new ceasefire deal, but they have rejected Azerbaijani criticism in the past, calling themselves a legitimate fighting force.

On the day of the military operation, after fighting abated, Hajiyev listed what he called "triggering elements" that prompted Baku to resort to military action, mentioning a landmine explosion that killed two Azerbaijani civilians earlier that day in part of Karabakh recaptured in a 2020 war.

"Enough is enough," Hajiyev said.

Aliyev also referred to the mine attack, and a similar incident which had killed four others. Karabakh Armenians called the assertions an "absolute lie." Reuters was unable to independently verify what had happened.

In the event, Russia, which has peacekeepers on the ground but is busy with its own war in Ukraine, stood to one side.

Hajiyev said Azerbaijan gave the Russians "minutes' notice" before the operation began.

Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of neighbouring Armenia, which twice fought major wars over Karabakh, did not heed calls from opposition politicians to intervene and said his country needed to be "free of conflict" for the sake of its own independence.

The West - which had previously tried to mediate - merely urged Aliyev to halt his operation and was duly ignored.

Pashinyan went on to harshly criticise Russia for not doing enough to avert the crisis. On a conference call last week, the Kremlin denied its peacekeepers should have intervened.

Russia's foreign ministry added he was making "a massive mistake" and accused him of trying to destroy Armenia's centuries-old ties with Moscow.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Trouble had been brewing for months.

With Russia distracted in Ukraine, Aliyev appeared to sense a window of opportunity.

In December last year, Azerbaijani citizens describing themselves as environmentalists unhappy about illegal mining began to block the Lachin corridor, the only road linking Karabakh to Armenia.

Karabakh officials at that time said the protesters were a front and included Azerbaijani officials. Baku denied the accusation.

Apparently reluctant to risk escalation, armed Russian peacekeepers did not act to remove the protesters by force.

In June, citing a shooting incident, Azerbaijan blocked the corridor, stopping transport including the passage of humanitarian aid. It only allowed medical evacuees out, a step that deepened Karabakh's food and medicine shortages.

Armed border guards manned a checkpoint close to a base for the Russian peacekeepers, who again did not intervene. Baku ignored calls from Washington and Moscow to unblock the road, citing a weapons-smuggling risk.

In May, in an attempt to advance peace negotiations, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan made what looked like a breakthrough offer: Armenia was ready to recognise Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, if Baku guaranteed the security of its ethnic Armenian population.

Aliyev appears to have seized on what he saw a long overdue admission of reality as a sign of weakness. The source who has worked with Aliyev called the shift "very important."

"After Armenia recognised Karabakh as an integral part of Azerbaijan, what status can the criminal regime that has been calling the shots in Karabakh for 30 years have?," Aliyev told Azerbaijanis in his victory speech last week.

On the same day, the Russian foreign ministry accused Pashinyan of sowing the seeds of Karabakh's demise as an ethnic Armenian enclave by recognising it was part of Azerbaijan. That, it said, had changed "the situation" for Russia's own peacekeeping contingent.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Karabakh slipped from Azerbaijan's grasp in the chaos that followed the Soviet Union's breakup. In a 1988-1994 war, around 30,000 people were killed and over 1 million displaced, over half of them Azerbaijanis.

Aliyev's father, then President Heydar Aliyev, was forced to agree to a ceasefire that cemented Armenia's victory.

Ilham, who had succeeded Heydar on his death in 2003, signed an oil deal with a BP-led consortium a year later that gave Azerbaijan funds to start building a modern army.

More recently, Azerbaijan benefited financially from the West's decision to cut energy purchases from Russia. The European Commission last year agreed to double imports of Azerbaijani natural gas by 2027.

For years, Moscow's alliance and defence pact with Armenia - where it has military facilities - deterred Baku from using force even as Russia sold weapons to both sides.

But Moscow's ties with Armenia began to sour in 2018 when Pashinyan, a former journalist, led street protests that brought him to power at the expense of a long line of pro-Russian Armenian leaders.

And as Azerbaijan's army overhaul and modernisation drive intensified, Armenia limped from crisis to crisis.

Seeing there was no love lost between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pashinyan, who had spoken in favour of ties with the West, Aliyev tested the waters. In 2020, he launched a 44-day war that his army won - with the help of advanced Turkish drones, clawing back a chunk of Karabakh.

Russia brokered a ceasefire that appeared to be a win for Moscow, allowing it to deploy nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to Karabakh. The step gave it a military footprint in Azerbaijan, an apparent buffer against further Azerbaijani military action.

Then Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the equation again, drawing Moscow into a war of attrition with Kyiv.

FOG IN THE AIR

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 19, residents of Stepanakert, Karabakh's capital and known as Khankendi by Azerbaijan, heard loud and repeated artillery fire as fog hung in the air.

What Aliyev called an anti-terrorism operation had begun, with ground forces backed by drones and artillery sweeping in to overwhelm Karabakh's defensive lines.

At least five Russians were killed in the violence that followed, in an apparent accident which Aliyev apologised to Putin for.

Within 24 hours, Baku declared victory and the Karabakh Armenian fighters agreed to a ceasefire that obliged them to disarm.

Karabakh Armenians said they felt betrayed on all sides.

"Karabakh has been left on its own: Russian peacekeepers practically don't fulfil their obligations, the democratic West turned away from us, and Armenia also turned away," David Babayan, an adviser to the leader of the Karabakh administration, complained to Reuters a day after the rout.

Babayan has since given himself up to the Azerbaijani authorities, he announced on Telegram. The administration he advised has announced its own disbandment.

"Azerbaijan regained its sovereignty at around 1:00 p.m. yesterday," Aliyev told the nation.

Four days after the operation, some of Karabakh's 120,000 Armenians began what became a mass exodus by car towards Armenia, saying they feared persecution and ethnic cleansing despite Azerbaijani promises of safety. Ten days after Azerbaijan struck, 98,000 people had fled into Armenia, the authorities there said.

The return of Karabakh paves the way for hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis who once fled it to return, a promise Aliyev's father gave repeatedly.

"President Aliyev has delivered the testament of his father," said Suleymanov, the ambassador to Britain.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)