The United States urged continued humanitarian access to Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday as officials announced additional humanitarian assistance to address health care and other emergency needs.

The White House statement came as the death toll from an explosion and fire at a fuel depot in the breakaway enclave rose to 68, with a further 105 people missing and nearly 300 injured.

“We are saddened by the news that at least 68 people have been killed and hundreds injured in an explosion at a fuel depot in Nagorno-Karabakh and express deep sympathy to the residents of Nagorno-Karabakh and to all of those suffering,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said.

“We urge continued humanitarian access to Nagorno-Karabakh for all those in need.”

By Michael Rubin

More than 100,000 Armenian Christians are fleeing their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, desperate to escape the arrival of the Azerbaijani army. Publicly, Azerbaijani diplomats promise they will treat the Armenian community no differently than they treat Azerbaijanis, hardly a promise that wins confidence given how repressive the Aliyev dictatorship has become in Azerbaijan. Freedom House ranks Azerbaijan alongside China and the military junta in Burma, and below Russia, Iran, Cuba, and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in its freedom rankings. Privately, Azerbaijani officials bargain for favors from the State Department in order to allow refugees to flow unmolested. This is equivalent to 1930s Germany seeking favors to allow small numbers of Jews to leave. Then, there has been Azerbaijani Telegram channels that range the gambit from mocking Armenians to glorifying the desecration of Armenians bodies to offering to buy women and children as slaves in postings reminiscent of the Yezidi genocide. World leaders may say “Never Again” but it is clear, then, that they have a collective case of Alzheimer’s disease.

Those who carry water for the Azerbaijani regime may justify any action with the argument that the international community recognizes Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. The American positions dating to Secretary of State James Baker were more nuanced and conditional, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken has forgotten, waived, or ignored those conditions, first and foremost a negotiated agreement with Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents. It will be curious to see if my friends at the Hudson Institute like Michael Doran and Luke Coffey, for example, apply the same principles of “freedom-be-damned; listen to the United Nations!” to side with Palestinian rejectionists over Israel when adjudicating disputes over Jerusalem or the West Bank, or for that matter China’s equally ahistorical claims over Taiwan.

What really makes this moment as spectacular as it is tragic is that, Azerbaijan’s claims aside, Azerbaijan has never controlled Nagorno-Karabakh. Prior to rising to the Soviet premiership, Joseph Stalin had gerrymandered borders to rip Nagorno-Karabakh away from Armenia, but it remained an autonomous “oblast” within Azerbaijan, with its own parliament and administration. As the Soviet Union crumbled, the region was the first (even before Ukraine) to use the hitherto theoretical freedoms under the Soviet constitution to demand self-determination. This ultimately culminated to a referendum in which 99 percent of residents sought independence. A series of Azerbaijani pogroms and attempts to drive out Armenians or starve communities into submission failed, and the region governed itself since 1991.

Before Stalin, Turks—both from the Ottoman Empire and the newfound Azerbaijan Republic tried to wrest control of Nagorno-Karabakh from the Republic of Armenia. Indeed, the September 2020 Azerbaijan-Turkey surprise attack on Nagorno-Karabakh coincided with the centenary of that invasion. The 1920 invasion was unsuccessful, though, as neither side was able to consolidate full control over the region prior to the Soviet Union overrunning the Caucasus in their entirety.

Of course, before 1918, there was no Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh at the time fell under titular Russian and, before 1828, Persian control although in practice, it was autonomous at these times as well.

Make no mistake: Today, tens of thousands of Armenians flee an ancestral homeland in which they have lived for thousands of years. Their flight before Azerbaijani forces resembles the 2014 Yezidi flight from Sinjar under the Islamic State’s assault or the Kurds fleeing Saddam’s advancing armies in 1991.

The difference is in 1991 and 2014, the United States sided with freedom. In 2023, we betrayed it.

https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/why-are-armenians-fleeing-nagorno-karabakh/

Armenian soccer player Henrikh Mkhitaryan has called on international leaders to “stand up against ethnic cleansing” in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a landlocked region in the Caucasus Mountains that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is home to around 120,000 ethnic Armenians, who make up the majority of the population and reject Azerbaijani rule.

The region has its own de facto government that is backed by Armenia, but is not officially recognized by Armenia or any other country.

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Inter Milan midfielder said his “heart breaks” as he is getting more information about “the stories of trauma, loss, and severe violations of human rights of thousands of Armenian families who are being forcibly displaced from Nagorno Karabakh and flee for Armenia in a mass exodus.”

Just over 47,000 people arrived in Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh as of 12.15 p.m. local time (4.15aET) Wednesday, the Armenian prime minister’s spokesperson said.

The vast majority of those arriving continue to be women, children and the elderly, a spokesperson for the Armenian Red Cross told CNN Wednesday.

The latest figures mean that more than one-third of the region’s roughly ethnic Armenians have left Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been under blockade since December 2022, when Azerbaijan-backed activists established a military checkpoint on the Lachin corridor – the only road connecting the landlocked enclave to Armenia.

The blockade prevented the import of food, fuel and medicine to Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting fears that residents were being left to starve. A former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor said in August there is “reasonable basis to believe that genocide is being committed against Armenians” in the region.

The closure of the Lachin corridor has also prevented international organizations and foreign media from accessing Nagorno-Karabakh. The road was only opened last weekend to allow residents to flee.

Mkhitaryan, the former Manchester United and Arsenal player, wrote: “We often look back to those dark pages of indiscriminate killings, ethnic cleansing and concentration camps with remorse, and regret that no one did enough to stop it.”

The 34-year-old also called for the “deployment of international monitoring missions” and the “immediate mobilization of emergency humanitarian aid” through the Lachin corridor.

In 2019, while playing for Arsenal, Mkhitaryan missed the Europa League final in Baku, Azerbaijan, due to fears over his safety

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a century-long conflict stemming from the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.

Azerbaijan’s brief but bloody offensive last week killed more than 200 people and injured many more, before ethnic Armenian Karabakh officials in the enclave agreed to a Russia-brokered ceasefire in which they agreed to dissolve their armed forces.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said Baku had restored its sovereignty over the enclave “with an iron fist.”

The Karabakh presidency told Reuters that the majority of Karabakh Armenians did not want to live in Azerbaijan and that they would leave for Armenia.

Azerbaijan has said it will guarantee the rights of those living in the region, but Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and international experts have repeatedly warned of risks of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the enclave.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/27/sport/henrikh-mkhitaryan-armenia-nagorno-karabakh-spt-intl/index.html

ecent footage and photographs from funerals in Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, have emerged. Parents weep beside small, excavated holes where their children were laid to rest. Kids sit and cry beside their parents’ graves. Hundreds of grieving Armenians gather at the cemetery in the city of Stepanakert, their voices echoing their despair and grief after the massacre of their relatives on Sept. 19.

Armenians living on their ancestral lands were met with Azeri aggression a few days ago, amid the absence of bread, electricity, and medicine, due to the monthslong blockade by the petroleum-fueled regime.

This tragedy could have been prevented, yet world leaders looked away, pretending the Azeri oppression that led to it didn’t exist. The signs of ethnic cleansing were evident all along; no one today can claim they didn’t see it coming. History will harshly judge those who could have acted but chose not to do anything to help.

In the United States, representatives and senators, along with celebrities like Kim Kardashian, and Cher, implored President Joe Biden to act. Last month, a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) spoke out, asserting that there was “reasonable basis to believe” the Azeri regime’s repression of ethnic Armenians met the U.N.’s criteria for genocide.

For 10 long months, Azerbaijan has isolated 120,000 Armenians from the rest of the world, leaving them without essential resources, like food and medicine. The media’s silence on these atrocities shook my faith as a journalist, and raised questions about our profession’s purpose—if not to objectively report and help halt crimes against humanity, what then?

The European Union (EU) was another disappointment. In the summer of 2022, the EU struck gas deals with the Azeri regime. Is that why the EU has been quiet about the ethnic cleansing? Turkey likewise has demonstrated its support for Azerbaijan time after time.

The silence of world leaders, the media, and other influential actors paved the way for Azerbaijan’s showering of bombs upon Artsakh, some were even aimed at civilians for an “anti-terrorist operation.” No one cared about the Armenians of Artsakh before bombs started falling from the sky.

The death toll remains uncertain, but an estimated 200 lives have been lost, according to sources on the ground. More than 200 were injured in a recent fuel depot blast in Nagorno-Karabakh.

My social media feed is flooded with grieving Armenians. Armenian activists in the diaspora who tried relentlessly to sound the alarm but weren’t heard are now living their worst nightmares. Armenians on the Azeri-Armenian border, who are hosting refugees, openly weep as they embrace their compatriots, including the elderly, those with health impairments, and families with children who fled their homeland.

When I call fellow journalists and human rights activists in Artsakh and Armenia, they are equally despondent. They send more photos now of Armenians fleeing and crossing the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, faces etched with fear and uncertainty.

Other images, depicting Armenians fleeing the Ottoman genocide of Christians in 1915, are juxtaposed with those of Armenians fleeing today. The resemblance is chilling and heart-wrenching. Today, as in 1915, the world is failing them once again.

The least President Biden and other world leaders could do is take swift action to prevent further violence and provide essential aid to refugees in dire need. This might spare the history books from recording yet another painful chapter of betrayal.

Nuri Kino is an independent investigative multi-award-winning reporter and minority rights expert.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

https://www.newsweek.com/another-modern-betrayalhistory-will-judge-those-who-ignored-armenians-opinion-1829723

AZERBAIJAN IS A dictatorship built around a family dynasty. The current president of 20 years standing, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of his predecessor, Heydar Aliyev. The vice-president of the country is Mehriban Aliyeva, wife of Ilham.

By contrast, Armenia has developed an imperfect democracy with intense political competition. The current premier, Nikol Pashinyan came to power in 2018 on a wave of popular protests. His popular democratic credentials mean he is viewed with suspicion by many post-Soviet autocrats, not least in the Kremlin.

For many years Armenians and Azerbaijanis have found themselves at war over the destiny of Nagorno-Karabakh – a mountainous territory approximately the size of Co Tipperary and home to 120,000 Christian Armenians.

Yesterday, Azerbaijan launched an all-out assault to bring an end to a separate Armenian-populated Karabakh and impose a final military solution.

A ceasefire was announced this morning ahead of talks planned for tomorrow – but Armenia says at least 32 people have been killed and more than 200 wounded since the shelling by Azerbaijan began. 

Stalin’s fatal decision

How did we get to this point?

Even though the vast majority of people (94%) in Nagorno-Karabakh were Armenian when the USSR was established, in 1923 the then Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin, reversed an earlier leadership decision and placed the region within Soviet Azerbaijan. Long after the dictator’s death, Stalin’s handiwork wreaked havoc, as his cartography cost the lives of thousands.

During the communist era, the Kremlin refused to entertain periodic representations from Karabakh Armenians who complained of discrimination and lack of autonomy.

The Soviet empire kept a lid on the conflict, but Gorbachev’s reforms led to increased calls from Karabakh Armenians to unite with their ethnic kin, efforts that were brutally suppressed by the Azerbaijani leadership.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence from the Soviet Union and then promptly fought each other over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

As the USSR imploded, fifteen new republics quickly gained international recognition. Azerbaijan – Nagorno-Karabakh included – was one of them.

The war ended in 1994 with a decisive victory for Armenia, which expelled hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis from neighbouring areas to create a buffer zone to insulate Karabakh Armenians from attack.

Embittered and vengeful, Azerbaijan nursed its grievances for a generation. The conflict appeared frozen to many observers but it merely simmered.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan spent billions of euro building up huge military resources and preparing for war.

2020 war

In September 2020, as the rest of the world managed the COVID-19 pandemic, Azerbaijan finally ignited large scale military operations.

Armenia’s Soviet-era arms and strategy proved no match for the rapid, flexible, high-tech war that Azerbaijan waged with Turkish support.

We will never know for sure how many died during that 44-day war but estimates run as high as 10,000 people with multiples of that number displaced.

So great is the enmity between the two nations that fleeing Armenians dug up the remains of their relatives, for fear their graves would be desecrated, and brought them to be reburied elsewhere.

Azerbaijani forces quickly gained the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and a complete rout seemed inevitable.

However, as they edged closer to the Armenian stronghold of Stepanakert, a city of some 50,000 people, Russia finally intervened and brokered a hastily agreed ceasefire.

Without committing – let alone losing – any of its own troops during the war, Russia came away with a settlement that greatly enhanced its military presence in the Caucasus. Its role as a regional hegemon had been affirmed.

But what had emerged was a ceasefire, not a peace settlement. Azerbaijan and Turkey resented Russia’s role. Rather than promising an end to the conflict and a new beginning it seemed merely to be a pause.

The 2020 war was hugely popular in Azerbaijan but it had ended inconclusively.

Why now?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tilted the balance further in Azerbaijan’s favour. Not only is the Kremlin preoccupied with its calamitous war, but the EU – eager to replace Russian energy with alternative suppliers – has increasingly warmed to the Azerbaijani regime.

For the last nine months the people of Karabakh have been blockaded as Azerbaijan prevented the free movement of people to Armenia, contrary to the agreement struck in 2020.

The international community stood by as reports filtered out of Armenians suffering from all sorts of deprivations. The lack of an effective response – not least from Russian troops in the region – no doubt convinced Ilham Aliyev that the rewards that would come from renewed war outweighed any risks.

And so, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale attack against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The term used to justify the invasion – “anti-terrorist measures” – has all the deceitfulness of Putin’s “special military operation”. The phrase is meant to de-emphasise the enormity of what is been done and to conceal the real objectives.

Armenian leaders in Karabakh have said these attacks were aimed at wiping out the local population. The word “genocide” resonates strongly amongst Armenians given the mass killings and ethnic cleansing that took place in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

They are under no illusion that Azerbaijan wants the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh but not the Armenians who live there.

Videos have been circulating of Armenians fleeing the area in the last few hours. 

The Russian and Turkish response

Wary of being dragged into an unwinnable war, and conscious of the domestic and foreign adversaries who want him replaced, Prime Minister Pashinyan did not try to militarily reverse the Azerbaijani attack. The Armenians have dedicated foes and relatively indifferent allies.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan yesterday offered Azerbaijan his full support, saying “we act under the motto ‘one nation, two states’”.

Frustrated with Russia’s failure to secure the safety of Karabakh Armenians, Pashanyan recently spurned military drills with the Kremlin-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) alliance in favour of joint military drills with NATO.

Earlier this month Pashinyan’s wife, Anna Hakobyan, met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife in Kyiv. Consequently, many in Russia’s political elite now relish Pashinyan’s predicament.

The former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who currently sits on Russia’s Security Council, wrote that Pashinyan had “decided to flirt with NATO, and his wife demonstratively went to our enemies with cookies. Guess what fate awaits him…”.

The Editor-in-chief of Russia Today facetiously asked Pashinyan where his help from NATO was now? She added:

“An Armenian who comes to power with anti-Russian slogans is a traitor by definition. A traitor to Armenian interests, not Russian ones. Russia will manage without Armenia. Armenia without Russia – no.”

What now?

It was announced this morning that ethnic-Armenian forces in Karabakh had agreed to terms for a ceasefire – committing to “full dismantlement” of their forces. 

In short it is a complete and unconditional surrender. It signals after three decades in existance the end of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).

The two sides said talks would be held tomorrow in the Azerbaijani city of Yevlakh. 

However, many Armenians would rather die than live under Azerbaijani rule and many survivors are likely to flee Karabakh for nearby Armenia.

This isn’t simply a matter of leaving a house. Rather, it involves abandoning a homeland where Armenians have predominated for centuries and is considered an integral part of their national culture and identity.

Most people focus on the geopolitics of the region, not least when large-scale conflict erupts.

But while we talk of the role of Russia, Turkey, the EU, and other powers, we should not forget that right now there are 120,000 souls in Karabakh who are living in a state of uncertainty – many in paralysing fear of what will become of them.

Donnacha Ó Beacháin is Professor of Politics at Dublin City University. For more than two decades he has worked and researched in the post-Soviet region and has been published widely on the subject. 

By RAYMOND IBRAHIM Published on 

TEHRAN- Under the current volatile situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Monday emphasized the importance of “active communication” between Yerevan and Tehran.

Pashinyan made the statement during a meeting with Iran’s new ambassador to Yerevan, Mehdi Sobhani.

According to a news statement from his office, Pashinyan noted that his “reliable dialogue” with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi lays the ground for the steady improvement of bilateral cooperation.

He also congratulated Sobhani on his new position, expressing optimism that bilateral ties will continue to flourish throughout his diplomatic tenure in Armenia.

Sobhani, for his part, reiterated Iran’s unambiguous support for Armenia’s territorial integrity.

He voiced worry over the humanitarian situation in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory, stating that the safety and rights of Armenians residing there must be ensured.

The Iranian envoy went on to say that the Islamic Republic is eager to expand relations with Armenia in all areas.

In the Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan, the majority of the population is of ethnic Armenian descent.

Following the most recent armed clashes with Azeri forces, Armenian authorities, who have been in charge of the region’s affairs without receiving international recognition since the early 1990s, declared on Wednesday that local “self-defense forces” had disbanded and laid down their weapons as part of a ceasefire mediated by Russia. 

The ceasefire put an end to Azerbaijan’s 24-hour war in the enclave.

On Thursday, representatives from Azerbaijan and Karabakh separatists began their first direct peace negotiations in the city of Yevlakh as Baku claimed complete authority over the region.

Iran has repeatedly urged Armenia and Azerbaijan to reach a peaceful resolution to their conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

On Friday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi underlined the need for the Republic of Azerbaijan to ensure the rights of ethnic Armenians in the Karabakh region. 

Speaking at a military parade in Tehran, President Raisi reiterated Iran’s position on the situation in the South Caucasus region. 

“The powerful Iranian armed forces are present in the region to prevent any change in the geopolitics of the region and changes in the borders, and they have been successful in this,” he asserted. 

Raisi added, “Regarding the developments in the [South Caucasus] region, we emphasize that preserving the rights of Armenians and observing the situation of Armenians is a necessity, in such a way that the security and rights of Armenians must be protected in the region and the state of the borders must be completely preserved.”

According to CNBC, thousands of ethnic Armenians on Tuesday fled their homes in the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The mass exodus comes after the lightning military operation by Azerbaijan  that saw it take full control of the region that has endured more than three decades of conflict.

The 24-hour offensive ratcheted up fears of major unrest throughout the Caucasus — the border region between southeast Europe and west Asia.

The landlocked territory of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1991 and, with the support of Armenia, has fought two wars with Azerbaijan in the space of 30 years. The territory is currently home to an estimated 120,000 ethnic Armenians.

Hundreds of cars, buses and open-top trucks were seen Tuesday snaking their way through the last Azerbaijani checkpoint to enter Armenia via the so-called Lachin Corridor, a mountain road that connects Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

The first convoys of civilians leaving the region began on Sunday. As of Tuesday morning, at least 13,350 people were estimated to have entered Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, according to the Armenian government.

Armenia said Azerbaijan’s military operation last week was an attempt to ethnically cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh, a charge it denies.

Speaking on Sunday in an address to the nation, Armenia’s prime minister said the likelihood was rising that people would seek to flee the Nagorno-Karabakh region “as the only way to save their lives and identity,” Reuters reported.

“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,” Pashinyan said. He added that the government’s strategic partnership with Moscow was not enough to protect the country’s external security.

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/489441/Armenian-PM-backs-dialogue-with-Iran-amid-conflict-in-Karabagh