It’s now been more than seven months since Azerbaijan closed off Nagorno-Karabakh’s only access to the outside world, and the smouldering humanitarian crisis there is now coming to a head.
As food supplies dwindle, the residents of the territory are now reduced to a single meal a day. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, appears only emboldened to take ever more escalatory measures to finally crush the region’s ethnic Armenian population — including, for the first time, removing and detaining them from International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) vehicles.
At a press conference on July 24, Arayik Harutyunyan, the president of the unrecognised Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), declared the territory a ‘disaster zone’. He said that the 120,000 residents there had ‘only days’ until they began to run out of food entirely.
“Under these conditions of impunity, Azerbaijan is tightening its policy of ethnic cleansing against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Harutyunyan said, speaking via video link from the center of Stepanakert, the region’s capital. “Azerbaijan has not only ignored court rulings and the demands of the international community, but has increasingly expanded the blockade. Azerbaijan seeks to violently subjugate the people of Artsakh, to subject them to psychological pressure, and to discredit the international community,” the president said.
That psychological pressure was only increased on July 29. On that day, Baku escalated measures yet again, this time on the Lachin road itself. Vagif Khachatryan, a 68-year-old local man who was being transported to Armenia for medical treatment in an ICRC vehicle, was removed from the vehicle and detained by Azerbaijani security forces. Khachatryan was taken to an unknown location, while Baku announced a few hours later that he was being charged with genocide in the 1991-94 First Karabakh War. The Red Cross announced that they had stopped all medical transfers as a result.
Khachatryan’s detention confirms the fears of many Karabakh Armenians that, if Azerbaijan assumes control over Karabakh, it will detain (and torture) them arbitrarily, using their participation in one or more of the wars as justification. This criteria extends to nearly every male resident of the small enclave. “Arrests with linkages to the past wars, local army or the [Karabakh] government …would quality almost all local men for detentions,” wrote Olesya Vartanyan, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the South Caucasus. The detainees can expect torture or worse, as the Armenian prisoners of war following the 2020 war conflict experienced: Human Rights Watch, in a report, detailed “cruel and degrading treatment and torture”, describing Azerbaijan’s treatment of them as “abhorrent and a war crime”. Given the complete lack of any prosecutions for the perpetrators of these abuses, and the Azerbaijani government’s continued violent rhetoric, it seems certain that Khachatryan and any future others like him are in for the same.
Meanwhile, the threat of mass hunger is only growing. The Red Cross confirmed on July 25 that they were completely unable to transport anything to Karabakh, stating that “people lack life-saving medication” and that most food products were either “scarce and costly” or “unavailable”. Most residents of Karabakh are down to just one meal a day, often consisting only of a piece or two of bread. Up to 90% of the region’s food had previously been imported from Armenia, according to Harutyunyan, all of which has now ceased. Local farmers have struggled to harvest their crops, with Azerbaijani troops shooting at them in their fields on a near-daily basis. Even if they overcome that, farmers can hardly get their wares to market: a near-complete lack of fuel means that no vehicle transport is available, and locals are now reduced to riding horses or walking many kilometres to Stepanakert and other population centres with whatever they can carry.
Ever since Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 Karabakh War, the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh’s connection to the wider world has been tenuous. The November 2020 ceasefire agreement, signed between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, provided for a single road — the Lachin corridor, named after the town it passes through — to connect Karabakh to Armenia. Its open status was to be ensured by the Russian peacekeepers deployed to the region, an arrangement that largely functioned for the next two years.
That changed on December 11. On that day, a group of Azerbaijani demonstrators appeared on the road in front of Shusha, claiming to be protesting ‘ecological damage’ caused by mining activity in Karabakh. They promptly established a camp blocking the road, refusing to allow through any traffic except Red Cross trucks with humanitarian aid or the occasional Russian peacekeeping video. In April, Azerbaijan took the next step to make the blockade more permanent, establishing a checkpoint on the road on the Hakkari river near the Armenian border. Occasional ICRC and Russian traffic continued to pass until June 15, at which point Azerbaijan halted all humanitarian deliveries. No food, medicine or fuel has entered Nagorno-Karabakh since.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly refused to heed international calls to open the road. The US, EU and other countries have called multiple times since December for open traffic to be restored on the road. In February, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling ordering Azerbaijan to “take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles, and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions.” For more than five months, that has gone ignored. As EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell noted on July 26, “movement through the Lachin corridor remains obstructed for more than seven months, despite Orders by the International Court of Justice to reopen it.”
Amidst all of this, Russia’s peacekeeping forces have been absent or complicit in each Azerbaijani move. The 2,000 servicemen Moscow stationed in the region following the 2020 trilateral ceasefire agreement were entrusted with maintaining the free movement of people and goods along the Lachin corridor. Instead, the Russian peacekeepers have appeared wilfully impotent at each stage of the blockade. Russian peacekeepers stood by as the original Azerbaijani ‘eco-activists’ blocked the road; they then took no measures as Azerbaijan established its checkpoint within metres of a Russian position in April. Nagorno-Karabakh authorities, who have thus far been largely deferent to the Russians who are all that stand between them and Azerbaijani forces, have become more outspoken against Moscow in recent weeks. “We are calling now for Russia specifically to fulfill its obligations [under the November 2020 agreement],” Harutyunyan said during the July 24 press conference. “We’ve always been cautious in our statements, expressed our gratitude to the Russian leadership for putting an end to the war, but [Azerbaijan] is shooting every day, firing at people in the fields. The [Russian] peacekeepers are responding [to this], but it doesn’t stop,” he added.
Against this backdrop, the thought of any genuine peace agreement being reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan seems absurd. With Azerbaijan now starving the 120,000 people it claims are its citizens, many observers now agree that the idea that Karabakh Armenians can live safely in Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan is hardly credible. “The blockade renders irrelevant any talk of the civil integration of Karabakh Armenians,” wrote Laurence Broers, Caucasus programme director at Conciliation Resources. “It vindicates the worst fears of the Karabakh Armenian population vis-a-vis the Azerbaijani state… [and] will leave a new legacy of unforgiving distrust cancelling any hopes of reconstituting community relations,” Broers said.
The sense presently is that the crisis of the Karabakh blockade is coming to a head one way or another. With food running out and essential services breaking down, the Karabakh Armenian population will soon begin to succumb to mass hunger, famine and death. International pressure to force Azerbaijan to halt the blockade has so far been limited to statements and calls, but the US and EU will have to decide soon whether they can watch the slow starvation of tens of thousands without introducing harsher measures like a halt to US military aid to Azerbaijan or sanctions against leading members of the Aliyev regime. “[Nagorno-Karabakh] is the only area in the world which is under complete siege. It can now be considered a concentration camp,” said Harutyunyan. “The time has come [for the world] to take unilateral action as a last resort to prevent mass crimes.”