Armenpress: France donates 5 tons of medical supplies to Armenia for forcibly displaced persons from NK

Kajoyan Gevork

 23:38,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 29, ARMENPRESS. The French government has sent 5 tons of humanitarian aid to Armenia for the forcibly displaced persons who’ve arrived from Nagorno-Karabakh.

The plane carrying the aid (medical items and medications) landed in Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport Friday evening.

Armenia’s Deputy Minister of Healthcare Lena Nanushyan and French Ambassador to Armenia Olivier Decottignies personally inspected the transfer.

“We are here today to receive the cargo of medications and medical equipment donated by France to Armenia,” Nanushyan said. “I’d like to thank our partners and friends in France who are helping us overcome these difficult days and ensure the necessary medical items for the patients.”

French Ambassador to Armenia Olivier Decottignies said the aid will allow to meet the needs of 250 gravely wounded persons.

“As you know, nearly 100,000 Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh have already left their homes. They were forced to leave. This is a humanitarian tragedy and a very difficult situation. France supports Armenia and the Armenian people. We just received medical items from France, which will allow to meet the needs of 250 gravely wounded persons, as well as 40 medical kits, with medicine and medical equipment. I believe this is a very important step in a situation like this,” the French ambassador said.

Photos by Hayk Manukyan




Cyprus condemns Azerbaijan for ethnic cleansing in NK, expresses readiness to take in forcibly displaced persons

Jagharian Tania

 12:01,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 30, ARMENPRESS. Cyprus has strongly condemned Azerbaijan’s military action in Nagorno-Karabakh and noted that it constitutes ethnic cleansing.

In a statement, the Cypriot foreign ministry said Cyprus is ready to take in forcibly displaced Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in case of necessity.

Cyprus strongly condemns Azerbaijan’s military actions in NK and the gross violation of the 2020 November 9 trilateral statement, it added.

“Undoubtably, these unilateral actions by Azerbaijan are acts of ethnic cleansing, and therefore it must receive a relevant and resolute reaction by the international community,” the Cypriot foreign ministry said, calling on Baku to refrain from any further military actions and to respect its obligations towards Armenia’s territorial integrity under the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration.

Cyprus also reiterated its call for dialogue to ensure the rights and security of the Armenians of NK and to achieve lasting peace and stability in the region.

It also expressed readiness to provide humanitarian aid to the forcibly displaced Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Among other issues, ways for accommodating a number of displaced Armenians in our country are being considered in case of such necessity,” the Cypriot foreign ministry said.

100,417 forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh cross into Armenia

Hambik Zargarian

 12:09,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 30, ARMENPRESS. The number of forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh who’ve crossed into Armenia reached 100,417 as of Saturday morning, the prime minister’s spokesperson Nazeli Baghdasaryan said.

According to the latest information, 32,200 of the forcibly displaced persons had accepted the accommodation provided by the Armenian government.

The Armenian government offers accommodation to all arriving forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh. Some of the forcibly displaced persons chose to stay with their relatives or friends in Armenia.

Both sides claim ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Nagorno-Karabakh

Emil Lazarian
RTE , Ireland
Sept 29 2023

Some 88,780 people have crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, according to Armenian government figures, quoted by the RIA news agency.

The exodus of ethnic Armenians from the breakaway region began after the fall of its separatist government last week following a military operation by Azerbaijan.

The enclave is to become a full part of Azerbaijan by the end of the year.

The Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Ireland said that his country offered the ethnic Armenian people an option to remain, but “we cannot force them to stay”.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Elin Suleymanov claimed they are leaving because of “uncertainty which follows 30 years of occupation of Azerbaijan by Armenia”.

He asked: “Why is the formally diverse region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan now 100% Armenian?

“That is because everybody else has been ethnically cleansed.

“One million people in Karabakh and surrounding regions were ethnically cleansed in the 1990s.

“Now we don’t want to do what they’ve done to us and that’s why everybody, including the president and everybody in Azerbaijan, is offering them to stay.

“We understand that there is uncertainty. We understand that there is a fear of safety …. Those are understandable concerns given they are part of a conflict for a long time”.

Mr Suleymanov said the same standard should apply to Nagorno-Karabakh as it does in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

He said that Azerbaijan has restored its integrity and constitutional law in accordance with international law.

Yesterday, Armenia’s Ambassador to Ireland told the same programme that the “forced depopulation” of the indigenous Armenian people from Nagorno-Karabakh was “a tragic loss for the Armenian people and for civilisation”.

Varuzhan Nersesyan said that Azerbaijan made a “fake promise” of reintegration but it is “nothing but a policy of ethnic cleansing” and “nobody wants to stay … under Azerbaijani rule”.

Armenians were subjected to a nine-month blockade, he said, and the “mass exodus” from the region began once the corridor reopened.

“Most likely, we’re going to see the departure of most – the predominant part – of the population.

“There might be some who will decide to stay, but basically this population has the right to stay on its own indigenous land.”

It is unfortunate that the international community did not create “robust conditions” to prevent this from happening, Mr Nersesyan said.

Death toll from fuel depot blast in Karabakh rises to 170 – media

The death toll from an explosion and fire at a fuel depot in Nagorno-Karabakh has risen to 170, Armen press news agency has reported, citing local officials in the region.

The blast occurred as thousands of ethnic Armenians fled the area.

The authorities have not given any explanation of the cause of the blast.

Rescue work at the site continues.

The Violent End of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Fight for Independence

Vorskanian Yeghisabet
The New Yorker
Sept 29 2023
Our Columnists
In less than a day, indiscriminate shelling in the region killed hundreds, displaced tens of thousands, 
and wiped out a thirty-five-year battle for political autonomy.

By Masha Gessen

Athirty-five-year war reignited last week. Hundreds of people died. Tens of thousands may have been displaced. The world, focussed on the United Nations General Assembly and the war in Ukraine, barely noticed. On September 19th, Azerbaijan started shelling towns and military bases in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that had long fought for independence. In less than a day, the self-proclaimed republic was effectively disarmed and forced to capitulate. Russian forces, ostensibly there to prevent just this kind of outcome, offered little or no resistance. The most generous reading of the situation is that they were caught unawares. The least generous is that Russia had given its approval to the attack, perhaps in exchange for maintaining a military presence in the region.

The Karabakh conflict dates back to 1988. It prefigured a dozen others that would erupt in what was then the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Nagorno-Karabakh was, legally, an autonomous region within Azerbaijan, a constituent republic of the U.S.S.R. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s government loosened political restrictions, Karabakh Armenians demanded the right, which they argued was guaranteed to them by the Soviet constitution, to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, also a Soviet constituent republic. Moscow rejected the demand. Meanwhile, shoot-outs between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh sparked violence elsewhere. In February, 1988, anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait left dozens dead. Two years later, a week of anti-Armenian violence in Baku, Azerbaijan’s historically multiethnic capital, killed dozens more. Thousands of ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, where their families had lived for generations. Some left on a plane chartered by the chess champion Garry Kasparov, probably the best-known Azerbaijani Armenian, who was also leaving his motherland forever.

In 1991, the Soviet Union broke apart and each of its fifteen constituent republics became a sovereign state. For Karabakh Armenians, this meant that any legal basis for their secessionist aspirations had vanished. Nagorno-Karabakh became one of several ethnic enclaves in the post-Soviet space that was fighting for independence from the newly independent country of which they were a part—South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to break free from Georgia, the Transnistria Region fought to separate from Moldova, Chechnya wanted out of Russia. In the early nineteen-nineties, each of these conflicts became a hot war. In every case outside its own borders, Russia supported the separatist movements—and, in most cases, used the conflicts to station its own troops in the region. Two decades later, Russia used the same playbook to foment armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh lasted until 1994. Both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing: the deliberate displacement and killing of people based on their ethnicity. Moscow secretly supported Azerbaijan in the conflict. The war ended with a de-facto victory for the Armenians, who were able to establish self-rule on a large part of the territory they claimed, even though not a single country—not even Armenia—officially recognized the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. Whether it was because the Armenians won, or because the conflict ended when Russia had been destabilized by its own bloody constitutional crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh was the only conflict region in the former empire where Russia did not station its troops.

For the next three decades, the political paths of Armenia and Azerbaijan, two neighbors inextricably linked by blood and war, diverged. Azerbaijan transitioned from Soviet totalitarianism to post-Soviet dictatorship, with a ruling dynasty, censorship, and widespread political repression. One of the world’s original oil powers, Azerbaijan also grew comparatively wealthy. It nurtured diplomatic, economic, and military ties with neighboring Turkey and with Israel, which views Azerbaijan as an ally in any confrontation with Azerbaijan’s next-door neighbor Iran. Armenia, at least formally, undertook a transition to democracy. That transition hit a dead end in October, 1999, when a group of gunmen burst into the parliament and assassinated nine people, including all the leaders of one of the two ruling parties. The leader of the surviving party, Robert Kocharyan, led the country for another decade, and his clan remained in power until 2018, when a peaceful revolution seemed to start a new era. The new leader of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, is a former journalist.

In both countries, Nagorno-Karabakh remained the focus of political life. For Azerbaijan, the pain and humiliation of the 1994 defeat formed the centerpiece of the national narrative. “Azerbaijan got its independence in parallel with the war, so Nagorno-Karabakh has played a major role in shaping Azerbaijani national identity,” Shujaat Ahmadzada, an independent Azerbaijani political scientist, told me. “There was the memory, the images of internally displaced people, adding to the narrative of having suffered injustices. And conflict is important to keeping and solidifying power.”

In Armenia, what became known as the Karabakh Clan has held power for most of the post-Soviet period. Kocharyan is a former leader of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Armen Martirosyan, an Armenian publisher and longtime political activist, told me that, in 2018, he had hoped that Nikol Pashinyan would finally represent a “party of peace.” But even Pashinyan, who was born in 1975, was compelled to claim that he had got his political start in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Seven out of eight of our political parties are parties of war,” Martirosyan said.

Both sides continued to arm themselves. The self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic formed its own armed forces, aided and supplied by Armenia. Azerbaijan imported arms from Israel. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that an oil-rich country with an authoritarian regime can put together a well-trained, cohesive army,” Alexander Cherkasov, a Russian researcher in exile who has been documenting ethnic conflicts in the region for thirty-five years, said. In 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh. Fighting lasted forty-four days. Thousands of people died. Azerbaijan reëstablished control over much of the self-proclaimed republic and adjacent territories. In the end, Moscow brokered a ceasefire that rested on the presence of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. The status of the self-proclaimed republic remained undecided but, for the time being, it seemed that a shrunken Nagorno-Karabakh would continue to be self-governed.

Less than fifteen months later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing political persecution, the draft, and Western economic sanctions flooded into Armenia. Security guarantees offered to Armenia by Russia began to seem less reliable, and the price of these guarantees seemed to rise. According to Arman Grigoryan, an Armenian-born political scientist at Lehigh University, Pashinyan launched a “grandiose project of pulling Armenia out of Russia’s orbit.” Apparently counting on Russia’s waning influence in the world and weakening interest in the region, Pashinyan dragged his feet on signing a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, at least one that involved having Russia at the table. He also did not deliver on one of the obligations Armenia had accepted as part of the 2020 ceasefire agreement: to provide Azerbaijan with an overland corridor to Nakhchivan, the country’s exclave on the other side of the Armenian border, three hundred miles from Baku. Such a corridor would, under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, be controlled by the Russian security services. Pashinyan’s reluctance was understandable, but his hope that Western support would allow him to stall indefinitely proved unfounded. Pashinyan also took a number of diplomatic—or, rather, undiplomatic—steps that galled Russia. Most recently, he asked the Armenian parliament to ratify the Rome Statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Vladimir Putin for war crimes allegedly committed against Ukraine. (Russia, like the United States, has not ratified the Rome Statute.)

Late last year, Azerbaijan started ratcheting up pressure on Nagorno-Karabakh. In December, a blockade was imposed, apparently aimed at cutting off the only supply route to the enclave. People found some ways to circumvent it, but over time the situation grew dire. Thomas de Waal, a London-based senior fellow with the Carnegie Europe Endowment for International Peace, who has been documenting the Karabakh conflict for nearly thirty years, told me that “thousands of people were without gas and there was bread rationing, down to two hundred grams a day. This and having to walk everywhere for miles, for anything. And then, out of nowhere, getting shelled.”

The shelling on September 19th was shocking, but it was by no means unexpected. Ahmadzada, the Azerbaijani researcher, told me that Azerbaijan had been pursuing what he calls a “three-‘D’ strategy”: deinternationalization, deinstitutionalization, and deterritorialization. The conflict was effectively deinternationalized when all sides agreed to a peace agreement brokered by Russia, leaving out the more conventional (and arguably more trustworthy) European or U.N. actors. Deinstitutionalization has been achieved in the latest round of fighting, with self-rule now clearly off the table. The next stage would likely be the forced exodus of Armenians from the region. This is also known as “ethnic cleansing,” a phrase that has resurfaced in reference to the Karabakh conflict.

On September 22nd, de Waal tweeted that, watching the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, he was experiencing “a disturbing déjà vu of the beginning of the Bosnia war.” Perhaps more accurately, the events are reminiscent of the 1991-94 Karabakh war, whose atrocities were overshadowed by atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia. “And of course today we are seeing pictures of convoys on mountain roads, people having grabbed their possessions and abandoned their homes,” de Waal told me on the phone. “I am having flashbacks to the early nineteen-nineties.” At first, Armenian and Karabakh authorities talked of evacuating only the people whose homes had been destroyed in the fighting. But Armenian N.G.O.s put out the call for people experienced in building refugee camps at a large scale. The population of Nagorno-Karabakh is believed to be around a hundred and twenty thousand people, though, according to de Waal, some eighty thousand to a hundred thousand people were in the region when it was attacked. About half of them are now believed to have left their homeland.

On September 27th, Azerbaijan arrested Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born entrepreneur and philanthropist who had made billions in Russia before moving to Nagorno-Karabakh to lead its government in 2022. (Vardanyan resigned his position in February, in an effort to facilitate negotiations with the Azerbaijani side.) Vardanyan, who had stayed in the region during the shelling, was apparently also trying to leave when he was detained. On September 28th, the government of the self-proclaimed republic announced its intention to disband by the end of the year.

The Nagorno-Karabakh independence project has ended. But, Grigoryan told me, the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict is not over. “Azerbaijan has the military capability to take over southern Armenia, possibly on the pretext of needing a corridor to Nakhchivan.” Russia may have an interest in maintaining a military presence in the region, and further conflict could serve as the pretext. For now, the Russian media machine is working to destabilize the political situation in Armenia. Russia’s chief propagandists, at least two of whom happen to be ethnic Armenians, have blamed the defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh on Pashinyan. They have unleashed diatribes against him, employing obscene language. Under a special legal arrangement between the two countries, Russian television is widely broadcast in Armenia. “I have understood that Armenia should not insert itself in the games big countries play,” Martirosyan, the publisher, said. “Because the big ones will have a spat and kill a small country. Or at least hurt it very badly.” ♦

Over 84,700 people cross into Armenia from Karabakh, RIA reports Reuters

Alex Nanijanian
Reuters
Sept 29 2023
Reuters

Sept 29 (Reuters) – More than 84,700 people have crossed into Armenia from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region, the RIA news agency cited Armenia’s government as saying on Friday.

The exodus of ethnic Armenians from Karabakh began after the fall of the region’s separatist government last week.

Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Christian Schmollinger

Three in four residents of Nagorno-Karabakh have fled to Armenia

Bedik Zaminian
The National, UAE
Sept 29 2023

Gillian Duncan

More than 70 per cent of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population has now fled to Armenia, part of a continuing stream after the swift fall of the separatist enclave.

More than 88,000 people have crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh and the total could reach 120,000, according to UN refugee agency officials on Friday.

On Thursday it was announced that the separatist government will cease to exist on January 1, after a decree signed by President Samvel Shakhramanyan, who declared the dissolution of all state institutions by the new year – an apparent 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 and urged the population not to leave.

READ MORE
Former Nagorno-Karabakh leader arrested as half of population flee to Armenia

But many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear in what they say is a new wave of ethnic cleansing.

They accuse European countries, Russia and the United States – and the government of Armenia itself – of failing to protect ethnic Armenians during months when the territory was blockaded by Azerbaijan’s military and in the lightning blitz earlier this month 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 their 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 lecturer 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.”

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 people of Armenian origin, 4 per cent of the population.

Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which about 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches.

The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during the First World War.

In Bourj Hammoud, the main Armenian district in the capital Beirut, memories are still raw, with anti-Turkey graffiti common on the walls. 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 recognised that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.

Although its population has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris have communities and cultural ties to the territory as well, particularly the city of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azeri poetry.

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 war in 2020. Now, after this month’s defeat, separatist authorities surrendered their weapons and are holding talks with Azerbaijan on reintegration of the territory into Azerbaijan.

In December, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade of the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, alleging that the Armenian government was using the road for mineral extraction and illicit weapons shipments to the region’s separatist forces.

Armenia claimed that the closure denied basic food and fuel supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan rejected the accusation, saying that the region could receive supplies through the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam – a solution long resisted by Nagorno-Karabakh authorities, who called it a strategy for Baku to gain control of the region.

Meanwhile, 170 people are known to have died after a fuel reservoir exploded at a petrol station where people trying to leave were queuing for fuel that, due to the blockade, had been in short supply.

“To date, a total of 170 remains … have been found in the same area and handed over to the forensic medical examination bureau,” the separatist authorities said on social media on Friday.

Authorities had earlier said the blast claimed the lives of 68 people and injured another 200. They said on Monday that remains would be transferred to Armenia for identification.

The fireball erupted as refugees were stocking up on fuel for the long drive along the lone mountain road leading to Armenia.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/2023/09/29/more-than-70-per-cent-of-nagorno-karabakhs-population-has-fled-to-armenia/

What the Dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh Means for the South Caucasus

Garo Vardanian
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Sept 29 2023
Any broader peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan would signal the start of a new era in the South Caucasus. Russia’s influence would decline, and Turkey’s—grow.
Kirill
Krivosheev

There is little doubt among Armenians that Azerbaijan’s September military operation in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh led directly to ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Karabakh Armenians have already fled, and the exodus shows no signs of slowing.

Nevertheless, Baku has seemed in no hurry since its 24-hour military assault delivered the long-standing goal of a clear pathway to taking full control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Karabakh Armenians who remain have received some humanitarian aid from Azerbaijan, and their leaders—who announced the dissolution of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh republic after thirty years of existence—are negotiating with representatives of Baku. All three major participants in this process—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia—would prefer to see some Karabakh Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The flight of Karabakh Armenians began when Azerbaijan opened the Lachin Corridor (the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia) following the capitulation of local defense forces. The rate at which refugees are flooding into Armenia suggests that there could soon be no Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. But if some do stay, this will be politically significant. And it could create the conditions for a partial return of Karabakh Armenians once it becomes clear what sort of government Baku will impose.

The Azerbaijani military has been surprisingly restrained as refugees stream down the Lachin Corridor. It looks like Baku wants to avoid being accused of ethnic cleansing, so it avoids subjecting departees to interrogations or serious checks. Just a few weeks ago, it would have been impossible to imagine such a hands-off approach: in its ten-month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan arrested a sixty-eight-year old man accused of crimes during the First Karabakh War who was attempting to travel to Armenia for medical treatment.

Even so, Azerbaijan has detained a couple of men attempting to flee Nagorno-Karabakh, including former Armenian field commander and local politician Vitaly Balasanyan and Russian-Armenian billionaire Ruben Vardanyan, a former state minister of Nagorno-Karabakh who called on Karabakh Armenians to fight to the last bullet. These detentions hint at Azerbaijan’s unofficial rule: only Nagorno-Karabakh’s political elite need fear prosecution.

Predictions of a partisan war led by Karabakh Armenians unwilling to give up their weapons have been proved false. The process of disarming local defense forces with the assistance of Russian peacekeepers has, to the surprise of many, taken place without any major incidents.

There have also been no attempts to use force to keep the Karabakh Armenians in place. However, it’s not in anyone’s interest to see the region totally devoid of people. Armenia will struggle to house 100,000 refugees, and, if many end up in Yerevan, they could join anti-government protests and exacerbate Armenia’s domestic political crisis.

Azerbaijan appears preoccupied with not being seen as a monster. And Russia needs Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh to justify the presence of its peacekeepers: handing out humanitarian aid, organizing evacuations, and generally looking useful. If there is nothing for them to do, Russia’s peacekeeping mission could come to an end earlier than planned.

Finally, if there are no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh, there is no point to negotiations between Baku and the Karabakh Armenians. These negotiations are ongoing, and have yielded some modest results.

In the meantime, it’s possible Aliyev could allow some sort of international monitoring mission into Nagorno-Karabakh to show himself in a positive light. While Yerevan has been hoping for Western sanctions against Baku, these look unlikely to materialize.    

However painful, Armenia’s defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh has not prompted it to drop out of discussions about a broader peace treaty with Baku. On the contrary, this process has been given fresh impetus. The secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Armen Grigoryan, met with Hikmat Hajiyev, an adviser to the Azerbaijani president, on September 26 in Brussels. Apart from the obvious humanitarian issues, they discussed a planned October 5 meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the Spanish city of Granada.  

If a peace agreement were signed, it would signal the start of a new era in the South Caucasus. Russia’s influence would be on the decline, and Turkey’s would grow.

The text of a peace agreement was more or less ready even before Azerbaijan’s recent capture of Nagorno-Karabakh. If Baku feels the process is dragging on unnecessarily, it could raise the stakes by not only demanding a land corridor through Armenia to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, an Azerbaijani exclave bordering Turkey, but by laying claim to internationally recognized Armenian territory. Aliyev hinted at the latter in a recent meeting with Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, when he mused about Armenia’s post-Soviet borders in a similar way to which Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks about Ukraine.

If it were implemented, a corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan could provide a welcome toehold for Moscow in the region. The agreement that ended the 2020 Second Karabakh War envisaged Russian security forces policing the corridor, protecting Azerbaijani traffic and securing its entry and exit points.

As soon as Armenia and Azerbaijan sign a peace agreement, Turkey is likely to open its border with Armenia (which has been closed since 1993). Once this happens, economic factors will begin to come into play. Considering Erdogan’s talent for manipulating his partners, an open border could be a powerful tool of influence for Ankara.

Nevertheless, any document proclaimed as a “peace agreement” between Armenia and Azerbaijan will likely be little more than a framework. There will be a general recognition of each other’s territorial integrity and a commitment to refrain from infringing on it. This should be enough to protect Armenia from losing its southern region of Syunik to Azerbaijan.

But, as ever, many other issues should also be addressed. The international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which passes over remote mountains, needs to be permanently fixed, and there should be discussions about transport links. And that’s before you get to the issue of whether displaced Karabakh Armenians will be allowed to enter Azerbaijan. The devil will be in the details. 

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.


Moscow, Baku to decide future of Russian peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh

Ara Felekian
France 24 2023
Sept 29 2023

The Kremlin said Monday that the future of its peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh would be determined by Russia and Azerbaijan, which last week took control of the territory from Armenian separatists. 

“Since the mission is now on Azerbaijani territory, this will be a subject of our discussion with the Azerbaijani side,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Russia deployed nearly 2,000 forces to the mountainous region in 2020 as part of a ceasefire deal it brokered between Azerbaijan and Armenia that ended six weeks of brutal fighting for control of the territory.

Peskov’s statement came a day after Moscow said Armenians fleeing after Azerbaijani forces retook control of Nagorno-Karabakh had nothing to fear.

“It’s difficult to say who is to blame (for the exodus), there is no direct reason for such actions,” Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

“People are nevertheless expressing a desire to leave… those who made such a decision should be provided with normal living conditions,” he  added.  

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has warned of “ethnic cleansing” in the region and called for the international community to act.  

Pashinyan had criticised the Russian peacekeeping force for failing to intervene when Azerbaijan launched its lightning offensive to regain control of the region. 

Russia denied the accusations.

The exodus of ethnic Armenians from the enclave marks a fundamental shift in ethnic control of lands disputed by mostly Christian Armenians and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijanis for the past century.

The UN refugee agency on Friday said more than 88,000 people have crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh and the total could reach 120,000, a figure matching estimates of the entire population of the breakaway region.

Kavita Belani, UNHCR representative in Armenia, told a UN press briefing by video link that huge crowds of tired and frightened people were gathering at registration centres.

“This is a situation where they’ve lived under nine months of blockade,” she said. “And when they come in, they’re full of anxiety, they’re scared, they’re frightened and they want answers.”

“We are ready to cope with up to 120,000 people. It’s very hard to predict how many will come at this juncture,” she added in response to a question about refugee numbers. Initial planning figures were for between 70-90,000 refugees but that needs updating, she added.

Nearly a third of the refugees are children, another UN official told the briefing.

“The major concern for us is that many of them have been separated from their family,” said Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF regional director.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies representative Hicham Diab said there was a massive need for mental health support for refugees.

“The situation often involves families arriving with children so weak that they have fainted in their parents’ arms,” he said.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20230929-moscow-baku-to-decide-future-of-russian-peacekeeping-mission-in-nagorno-karabakh

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