STEPANAKERT: The 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh have decided to leave for Armenia because they do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan and fear ethnic cleansing, the leadership of the breakaway region said on Sunday.

Armenia’s prime minister said the Karabakh Armenians were likely to leave the region, and that Armenia was ready to take them in, following a defeat last week at the hands of Azerbaijan in a conflict dating from the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Armenians of Karabakh — a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond Baku’s control — were forced to declare a ceasefire on Sept 20 after a lightning 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.

Azerbaijan says it will guarantee their rights and integrate the region, but the Armenians say they fear repression.

“Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, 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,” Babayan said. “Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins.”

In the Karabakh capital, known as Stepanakert by Armenians and Khankendi by Azerbaijan, Armenians attended funerals for their dead fighters while some packed up their belongings. A boy was photographed sitting in the back of a truck waiting to be evacuated.

The Armenian leaders of Karabakh said that all those made homeless by the Azerbaijani military operation and wanting to leave would be escorted to Armenia by Russian peacekeepers.

Reporters near the village of Kornidzor, on the Armenian border, saw some heavily laden cars pass into Armenia. Armenia said 377 refugees from Karabakh had arrived by Sunday evening.

It was unclear when the bulk of the population would move down the Lachin corridor that links the territory to Armenia, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has been facing calls to resign for failing to save Karabakh.

Mass exodus

In an address to the nation, Pashinyan said some humanitarian aid had arrived, but the Armenians of Karabakh still faced “the danger of ethnic cleansing”.

“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.

A mass exodus could change the delicate balance of power in the South Caucasus region, a patchwork of ethnicities crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the United States, Turkiye and Iran are jostling for influence.

Last week’s Azerbaijani victory appears to bring a decisive end to one of the decades-old “frozen conflicts” of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Ilham Aliyev said his “iron fist” had consigned the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karabakh to history and that the region would be turned into a “paradise” as part of Azerbaijan.

Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 wounded in Azerbaijan’s military operation. The fate of the ethnic Armenian population has raised concerns in Moscow, Washington and Brussels.

First Karabakh war

Nagorno-Karabakh, known as Artsakh by Armenians, lies in an area that over centuries has come under the sway of Persians, Turks, Russians, Ottomans and Soviets. It was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. In Soviet times it was designated an autonomous region within Azerbaijan.

As the Soviet Union crumbled, the Armenians there threw off nominal Azeri control and captured neighbouring territory in what is now known as the “first Karabakh war”.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2023