A few minutes ago the lights were turned on in Stepanakert. Former Artsakh State Minister Artak Beglaryan wrote about this on social networks.
“This is an important step to alleviate human suffering. The city has been without electricity since September 19,” he wrote.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to discuss the proposed meeting between the leaders of the Russian Federation, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev during their negotiations on Monday in Nakhichevan, according to a source in the administration of the Turkish leader, as reported by RIA Novosti.
Erdogan had previously stated that he made a proposal to hold a quadrilateral meeting of the leaders of the Russian Federation, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. However, Ankara has not yet received a response to this proposal. The Turkish President has expressed his intention to discuss the matter with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Aliyev.
KORNIDZOR, Armenia — Many of the men waiting at the Armenian border have been there for days.
When news broke on Tuesday that Azerbaijan had launched a major attack into the ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, dozens of them pulled on warm jackets and wooly hats and drove towards the checkpoint. Now they can only watch the road, once the sole highway cutting through the mountains to the breakaway region where their families live, hoping their relatives are able to get out.
Sleeping in their cars, peering through binoculars, or standing around smoking in small circles on the dusty asphalt, the group of about 40 Karabakh Armenians is only growing, with a sense of angry desperation permeating the air.
“Nobody is helping us. Not Armenia, not Russia, not the world,” said one man, spitting out his words with fury. “Look at my hands” — he held out a palm blackened with dirt — “I’m an honest guy, I’ve worked with these my whole life. Now they’re all I have to protect my family.”
A day earlier, he said, a fellow Karabakh Armenian had flown in from Russia and joined the group at the checkpoint on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. Hours later he found out his two brothers had died in the fighting as the Azerbaijani army poured in. “He went crazy, he couldn’t sleep, he had to leave.”
Just 10 kilometers from where the men have gathered, inside Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave Armenians see as an ancestral homeland within Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory, desperate calls for help are growing, with many Armenians issuing dire warnings of potential genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The sense of abandonment is palpable. While Azerbaijan is firmly supported by Israel and regional powerhouse Turkey, Western leaders, particularly in Europe, are reticent to directly confront Azerbaijan over its offensive, not least because they have courted Baku for years in pursuit of natural gas deals — a quest that has only become more critical since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a sign of those ties, just as Azerbaijan was driving home its victory, U.K. energy giant BP sent a senior delegation — including chair of the board Helge Lund and former CEO Lord Browne — to Baku to celebrate the centenary of the birth of former President Heydar Aliyev, father of current Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and to cement a “long-term partnership” with Baku.
Even more worryingly for the Karabakh Armenians, their traditional protectors in Armenia and Russia now also look unlikely to rush to the rescue. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said he “assumes” it is the responsibility of Russian peacekeepers to ensure the security of people in Nagorno-Karabakh, and has accused Karabakh Armenians of seeking to foment unrest against him in the wake of the lightning military offensive from Azerbaijan on Tuesday. Russia — overstretched in Ukraine — cannot do much either. Russian peacekeepers appear overwhelmed, telling thousands of panicking people heading to their base at a disused airfield in Nagorno-Karabakh, that there’s nothing they can do.
That leaves the 100,000 or so Karabakh Armenians inside the territory as hostages in a conflict where geopolitical heavyweights such as Turkey, Russia and Iran all have strategic interests.
For now, the pressure continues, with the Azerbaijanis pressing the Karabakh Armenians, who surrendered within a day, to fully integrate into the Azerbaijani state and the Armenian authorities hoping that the worst does not happen. At the city administration building in Goris, the closest city to the border and the first stop for any fleeing refugees, an elderly man in a flat cap points the way up the stairs to the deputy mayor’s office. Surrounded by potted plants and with Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh flags on her desk, Irina Yolyan said preparations for a mass evacuation were not being considered.
“We’re not talking about this at the moment — we are hoping a humanitarian disaster can be prevented,” she explained. “Of course if we could save people and take them in, we would do what we can,” she added.
But in a region that has been marked by war and civilian massacre, nobody can afford to take anything for granted. Forced to reject criticism that Armenia is doing nothing to prepare for large numbers of refugees, Pashinyan said on Thursday that the country was preparing to house as many as 40,000 people.
Armenians’ sense of helplessness has only been compounded by the speed of Azerbaijan’s tactical victory.
The three-decades-long “frozen” conflict turned hot again on Tuesday, when Azerbaijan began an “anti-terror activity,” with soldiers and tanks streaming across the contact line, capturing villages under the cover of artillery fire and missile strikes. The government in Baku insists the move came in response to “provocations” including landmine attacks that reportedly claimed the lives of four soldiers and two civilians. How the mines were laid on roads controlled by Azerbaijan’s far superior forces has not been revealed.
According to Karabakh Armenian officials, as of Wednesday evening, at least 200 people have died and 400 have been injured — including 40 civilians wounded and 10 killed. But getting information out of the region — or even inside the region — is complicated by power and communications outages that have left many villages without a line to the outside world.
Speaking to POLITICO in a series of frantic voice messages, one Karabakh Armenian in the de facto capital, Stepanakert, painted scenes of total chaos as people were called up to defend their homes. “When we heard the explosions, I ran to my daughter’s school — but there were young children whose parents hadn’t arrived yet. She felt responsible for them, and we waited for their parents to come before we left.”
“Like everyone else, we went to the underground shelters. Then, because I’m a man, they gave me a weapon and I went to the front lines.” He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that Azerbaijan could prosecute those who took up arms. “It’s been a year since we had reliable supplies of gas and food, but we tried to hold our positions until the civilians got out.”
A sign pointing the way to the unrecognized state of Artsakh | Gabriel Gavin/POLITICO
Low on provisions due to an effective blockade imposed by Azerbaijan, the Karabakh Armenian forces were forced to accept a Russian-mediated surrender. Marut Vanyan, a blogger from Stepanakert, said residents had become spectators to the disintegration of their unrecognized state.
“Only the hospital has electricity, so I had to go there to charge my phone. The nurses say wounded soldiers are simply dying — others are emotionally shaken,” he said in a telephone interview. “On Republic Square, in the center of the city, refugees from the villages are gathering. Nobody knows what to do with them. The mayors’ office have put them in schools. Government officials are confused, and they don’t know what is going on.”
“Because of no electricity, people are cooking outside. The whole city smells of smoke.”
Many now fear that, as happened to Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh and its environs in the 1990s, they will be forced to leave their homes for good. Few trust Azerbaijan’s offer to open a “humanitarian corridor” to Armenia, and the checkpoint at Kornidzor is silent. For now at least, they’re trapped in limbo.
It’s a worry looming large for another Karabakh Armenian, Gayane Sargisyan, 29, who has lost people close to her in the fighting. “My mother’s brother is dead,” she said. “Well, he’s not really her brother — more like her cousin. That isn’t a rumor or guesswork, his name was on a list from the government. Together, we had to go down to the morgue to identify his body and make sure it was him. My best friend’s brother is dead — she found out this morning.”
Amid the chaos, Sargisyan received some good news. After a flurry of calls and desperate WhatsApp messages, she was able to find her grandfather, from a village near the contact line, alive and well.
But, she said, “for everyone who lost someone, the worst thing is working out where to bury them. Should we bury them here, then leave? Can you bury their body and then walk away?” Following the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, there were reports that those leaving territory they had lost to Azerbaijani forces had exhumed the bodies of their loved ones and brought them with them, fearing separation or desecration.
According to Laurence Broers, an expert on the region at Chatham House, with no international observers on the ground, some of the Karabakh Armenians’ fears have a precedent. While Baku, he says, will want to avoid allegations of atrocities in its newly conquered territory, “we have this history that when soldiers have come across some Armenian civilians who have stayed in place and not fled, they have been murdered. We saw this in 2016, we saw this in 2020. There’s a climate of impunity.”
In a message posted online on Friday, Azerbaijan’s foreign policy chief Hikmet Hajiyev said Azerbaijan had observed “strict observance of international humanitarian law” and stressed that civilians would be allowed out. “Military personnel who voluntarily lay down their weapons are free.”
As a result, statements from the EU and European nations like France and Germany raising fears of a humanitarian crisis are “incomprehensible,” he went on.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev says his government is determined to offer rights and security to the Karabakh Armenians, turning the region into a “paradise.”
On Thursday, representatives of both sides met for talks on what comes next. Azerbaijan says the “constructive” negotiations are the start of a process of “reintegration” that will require the Karabakh Armenians to make good on a long-standing demand they lay down their weapons and accept being governed from Baku for good.
“If we want to see a future where people coexist and stand together, we have to support the peace process,” said Elin Suleymanov, the Azerbaijani ambassador to the United Kingdom. “On the Armenian side, they have to fulfill their part of the agreement in disarming the militias and disbanding their so-called government. On our side, it’s to provide for security and [humanitarian] supplies and act on a roadmap for integration.”
He denied that triumphant Azerbaijani soldiers would take out their three decades of anger and ethnic resentment on the civilian population. “We are not them, we will not do what they’ve done,” he said, referring to the killings and mass displacements that followed when Armenians took ethnic Azerbaijani towns and cities during the war of the 1990s.
On the other side, the region’s former de facto prime minister, Armenian-Russian oligarch Ruben Vardanyan, said Stepanakert is entering negotiations requesting the bare minimum. “The situation is dire: a huge number of casualties — dead, wounded or missing,” he wrote in a message passed out through an aide. “The main thing is to ensure that the civilian population is safe and have food and there is medicine for the wounded. It is also necessary to organize a search for the missing.”
Pashinyan’s government has faced fierce criticism from the opposition for its role in the crisis — first for officially recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory, and now for purportedly failing to prepare for a mass exodus, though the prime minister says space is being made ready for any potential refugees.
“The situation remains extremely tense,” he said in a statement on Friday, but “there is no direct threat to the civilian population.”
Meanwhile, with anger growing among the public, he claimed groups linked to “high-level circles in Nagorno-Karabakh” were working to stage “mass riots” inside Armenia designed to overthrow the government.
Russia has openly blamed the situation on Pashinyan’s shift to the West, in which his government provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine and invited U.S. soldiers for drills. In an interview with POLITICO last week, Pashinyan said the Russian peacekeepers had “failed” in their mission. A document obtained by independent Russian news outlet Meduza this week reveals officials told Moscow’s state media to pin the blame on Armenia and its “Western partners.”
On the ground, Karabakh Armenians say the reality is different and they’ve been abandoned by everyone they once relied on.
Tens of thousands of people leaving villages and districts around Stepanakert converged on the Russian peacekeeper base at a disused airport outside the city this week, desperately seeking supplies and safety. “My family village in Martakert region came under Azerbaijani control. All my relatives went to the airport,” says Vanyan, the blogger from Stepanakert. “But they say the Russians there told them: Why are you here? There’s nothing we can do for you.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/nagorno-karabakh-armenia-azerbaijan-war-inside/
A fresh disaster may be looming in Nagorny Karabakh, the majority-Armenian highland enclave within the borders of Azerbaijan.
On September 19, a lightning Azerbaijani offensive overwhelmed inferior Armenian forces, and Azerbaijan took possession of the province it had not controlled in thirty-five years. Locals reported at least 200 casualties, and there were credible reports of civilian deaths.
A day later, the Karabakh Armenians signed a ceasefire agreement under duress, by which they agreed to dismantle their local self-defense force. Talks took place between local Karabakhi Armenians and emissaries from Baku, but the Azerbaijani side is offering neither autonomy nor an elected local government. In a speech, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev said that the Armenians could enjoy educational, cultural, and religious rights—a meager offer from the leader of an authoritarian one-party state to people who largely do not speak the same language. In essence, Karabakhis are now negotiating the terms of their own surrender, and for many, that will mean exodus from their homeland.
Force, not diplomacy, has decided the course of this conflict since it first flared up during the era of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. (Some would say it originated well before, in the early twentieth century.) In 1988, the Karabakhi Armenians tried to break away from Soviet Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia in a dispute that developed into armed conflict. In the 1990s, the Armenians prevailed on the battlefield, occupying large parts of Azerbaijani territory and driving hundreds of thousands of inhabitants from their homes. In 2020, the Azerbaijanis reversed the situation, recapturing their lost territories and taking parts of Karabakh, too.
To the frustration of Baku, the Karabakhis did not act like a defeated party in 2020. They invited sympathetic foreigners—including a French presidential candidate—to visit the region they still referred to by a medieval Armenian name, Artsakh. Azerbaijan alleged that weapons and land mines were being transported along the so-called Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia.
Diplomacy resumed, with the European Union, the United States, and Russia all negotiating between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The competing mediators made progress on bilateral issues, but the Karabakh issue remained unresolved. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed, along with the rest of the world, to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity (including Nagorny Karabakh), but the vital question of the inhabitants’ rights and security remained unresolved.
The Karabakhis’ fate was probably sealed in April, when Azerbaijan established a checkpoint on the Lachin Corridor. This de facto blockade deepened in the summer, and the situation became desperate for tens of thousands of people remaining in Karabakh (estimates range from 50,000 to 120,000) who began to run out of food and medicine.
There is a geopolitical game here. A small Russian peacekeeping force was established in Karabakh in 2020. Moscow, which has always wavered between and manipulated both sides, had presented itself as the protector of the Karabakhis. President Vladimir Putin publicly told them his peacekeepers would guarantee their safe return from Armenia and continued residence in their homeland. But the Russian soldiers stood by as the checkpoint was set up on the Lachin road earlier this year, fracturing trust held in the peacekeeping force.
The context is that after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Armenian government began to pivot toward the West, and Azerbaijan—with which Russia shares a land border and an authoritarian model of government—looked like a more valuable partner.
Over the summer, the EU and United States were hopeful that a deal had been reached to reopen the Lachin road, as well as a road via the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam, to resupply Karabakh. Senior figures, notably U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Council President Charles Michel, sent messages to Aliyev that the use of force was unacceptable. On September 18, in a hopeful sign, two small humanitarian convoys reached Karabakh down the two roads, after a long pause.
The military offensive on September 19 caught Western officials by surprise, which became more understandable when news broke that Russian peacekeepers simply stood down and let the assault happen. The impression that there had been a side deal between Moscow and Baku deepened when Russian officials blamed Pashinyan and his pro-Western tendencies, not Azerbaijan, for the fighting.
At the United Nations, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called out Azerbaijan, saying, “Baku again assured that it would refrain from using force, but this promise was broken, and it caused enormous suffering to the population in dire straits.” By contrast, the Russian representative to the UN only noted that “the armed confrontation in Nagorno-Karabakh escalated dramatically.”
In the darker European order of the past decade, where normative values and a multilateral framework have been devalued, Azerbaijan cares less about statements of condemnation from Western governments. The key thing is almost certainly the support of two regional powers and neighbors: the full backing of Türkiye and deliberate equivocation from Russia, which looks more concerned about keeping its military base on the ground in Azerbaijan and humiliating the government in Yerevan than in ensuring the rights of local Karabakh Armenians.
The only international organization on the ground in Karabakh is the International Committee of the Red Cross. Western officials have called for an international humanitarian and monitoring presence on the ground analogous to the missions deployed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but Azerbaijan and Russia—which seeks to justify its peacekeeping force—will try to block this.
Barring an unexpected international initiative, the main question may now be whether a mass exodus of Karabakhis to Armenia will happen in an orderly fashion or with bloodshed and detentions of male residents. There are modest signs that the Azerbaijanis will allow the former, but the situation on the ground is messy and volatile—as could only be expected when combatants in a three-decade-long conflict confront one another again, face to face. The repercussions of the third Karabakh war will be long and hard.
https://carnegieeurope.eu/2023/09/22/tragic-endgame-in-karabakh-pub-90620
The armed forces of Nagorno-Karabakh have begun to hand over weapons, ammunition and armored vehicles, Russian state-controlled media reported on Sept. 22, citing the Russian Ministry of Defense.
“In pursuance of the agreements reached, the armed formations of Karabakh have begun the surrender of weapons under the control of Russian peacekeepers,” the Defense Ministry said.
The Ministry claims that more than 800 units of small arms and anti-tank weapons, six units of armored vehicles, and about 5,000 rounds of ammunition were retrieved. Additionally, Russian peacekeepers were reported to have delivered 50 tons of humanitarian supplies for the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, including through the Lachin corridor.
Earlier today, Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign policy advisor to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, suggested in an interview with Reuters that ethnic Armenian fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh would receive amnesty in exchange for laying down their arms.
Hajiyev also stated that some individual groups and units of the Armenian defense forces have pledged to continue fighting, although he did not consider them to be a “big security challenge.”
Following the 24-hour offensive launched by the Azerbaijani military on Sept. 19 in Nagorno-Karabakh, a ceasefire was brokered with the condition that the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Forces be disbanded and disarmed.
Azerbaijan forces tightened their grip on the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh on Saturday as international concern mounted over the plight of ethnic Armenian civilians trapped there.
As the first Red Cross aid convoy crossed into the disputed enclave since Azerbaijan launched this week’s lightning offensive, government forces said rebel “demilitarisation” had begun.
Moscow announced on Friday that ethnic Armenian separatist fighters had begun to surrender weapons under a Russian-mediated agreement, and on Saturday the Azerbaijan forces were keen to show off a captured rebel arsenal.
“We are in close cooperation with the Russian peacekeepers who are conducting the demilitarisation” and giving “support to civilians”, Azerbaijani military spokesman Colonel Anar Eyvazov said in the Shusha district, outside the regional capital Stepanakert.
Azerbaijani forces now control the area and the town of Shusha appears deserted. Troops have mortar positions on high ground overlooking the approach to Stepanakert, AFP reporters saw.
Government forces displayed an arsenal of infantry weapons, including sniper rifles, hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and four tanks painted with cross insignia, that they said they had seized from the separatists.
“We have more like that in the forest, but we can’t bring them all here,” said Lieutenant General Mais Barkhudarov, commander of Azerbaijan’s 2nd Army Corps.
To the southwest, the so-called Lachin Corridor that once connected the breakaway region to Armenia is also controlled by government forces, which have mounted a de facto blockade for the past nine months.
A humanitarian convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross was nevertheless able to cross into the area on Saturday — the first since fighting erupted earlier this week.
On the Armenian side of the border, at the Kornidzor checkpoint, local ICRC spokesman Zara Amatuni told AFP that 70 metric tonnes of food and humanitarian aid “have passed through the Lachin Corridor”.
If the ceasefire holds, it could mark the end of a conflict between the Christian and Muslim Caucasus rivals that has raged, off and on, through the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In a hint of the bad blood between the sides, Azerbaijan’s defence ministry on Saturday accused Karabakh Armenians of setting fire to their homes in one village to keep them from falling in the hands of Baku’s advancing troops.
Some villagers also set fire to their homes before fleeing after Azerbaijan first began to re-establish control over parts of Nagorno-Karabakh in a six-week war in 2020.
Russia also said an Azerbaijani soldier was “wounded during an exchange of fire”, adding that it was conducting an investigation into the incident with Baku and separatist officials.
A US congressional delegation travelled to Armenia to show support for embattled Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and to inspect the region’s blockade.
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan used binoculars to look across the border towards Russian peacekeeper positions, as Azerbaijani trucks could be seen transporting material for a new highway being built as the government secures the region.
“Certainly people are very fearful of what could be occurring in there, and I think the world needs to know exactly what’s happening,” Peters told reporters at the border.
At the United Nations General Assembly, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov insisted “that Azerbaijan is determined to reintegrate ethnic Armenian residents of the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan as equal citizens.”
The years of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh have been marked by abuses on both sides and there are fears of a new refugee crisis. This week’s Azerbaijani offensive left tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians cut off from electricity in the disputed enclave.
In the Armenian border town of Kornidzor, civilians have been gathering, some of them waiting for days, at the last checkpoint before Azerbaijani territory hoping for news of relatives.
“I’ve been here for three days and nights, sleeping in my car,” said 28-year-old Garik Zakaryan, as displaced Armenians borrowed a soldier’s telescope to scan a village across the valley.
It was shelled by Azerbaijani forces on Tuesday. No-one was killed, but witnesses who managed to escape reported that 150 inhabitants were forced to take refuge close to a Russian peacekeeper base a kilometre from the last Armenian positions.
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Zakaryan got his family out in December, three days before Azerbaijan blockaded the area, but he is worried for friends and family still across the border.
“I don’t have much hope of seeing them soon, but I couldn’t just do nothing. Just being here, being able to see the Russian base, I feel better,” he said.
Separatist leaders have said they are in Russian-mediated talks with Baku to organise the withdrawal process and the return of civilians displaced by the fighting.
They say they are discussing how citizens access to and from Nagorno-Karabakh, where up to 120,000 ethnic Armenians live, will work.
(AFP)
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230923-karabakh-rebels-negotiate-withdrawing-their-forces
Humanitarian Crisis Needs Urgent Response
(Berlin, ) – Thousands of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh have dire humanitarian needs following Azerbaijan’s military operation to regain control over the region, Human Rights Watch said today. The military intervention followed months of acute shortages of food, medications, hygiene products, and other essential supplies to the region, as Azerbaijan had disrupted vehicular and pedestrian traffic to the region for over 9 months.
Azerbaijani authorities should take immediate steps to ensure the safety and humanitarian needs of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population, allowing humanitarian access without delay. Azerbaijan should allow civilians who wish to evacuate temporarily to Armenia, as well as people in urgent need of medical care who wish to leave, while respecting their right to return. Transportation of food, medicines, and other humanitarian necessities into Nagorno-Karabakh should be permitted from multiple directions, including through Armenia. International monitoring is needed to ensure that Azerbaijan meets its human rights obligations, in particular, toward Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population.
“Civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh are facing a dire humanitarian crisis and grave uncertainty about their future,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Azerbaijani authorities have said that everyone’s rights will be protected, but that is hard to take at face value after the months of severe hardships and decades of conflict.”
Unless Azerbaijani authorities take immediate steps to address humanitarian needs, including goods and services essential to people’s economic and social rights, it would be credible to conclude that it is deliberately trying to make ethnic Armenians’ lives so miserable they will have no choice but to leave, Human Rights Watch said.
Since September 19, 2023, when Azerbaijan started military attacks to regain full control over Nagorno-Karabakh, thousands of civilians have fled their homes. Many fled to Stepanakert/Khankendi. Ethnic Armenian civilians cannot evacuate the region because Azerbaijan has not opened the border, which runs through the Lachin Corridor, the sole road connecting the region to Armenia.
On September 22, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Russian peacekeeping force bases in Nagorno-Karabakh were “hosting 826 civilians,” and that “their accommodation, food supply, and medical care are provided.” Russian peacekeeping forces should ensure the humanitarian needs and protection of civilians who sought refuge on Russian military bases, Human Rights Watch said. On September 22, the Azerbaijani emergencies ministry announced that it had sent 40 tons of humanitarian assistance, including food and hygiene products, to Khankendi/Stepanakert for distribution to civilians.
For civilians who choose to evacuate, Azerbaijan is obligated to allow them to return to their homes under a fundamental precept of international human rights law, Human Rights Watch said.
On September 22, the European Court of Human Rights issued interim measures obligating Azerbaijan to “refrain from taking any measures which might entail breaches of their obligations under the [European Convention on Human Rights], notably regarding the right to life and the prohibition of torture and other degrading treatment or punishment.”
Nagorno-Karabakh is a region of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians who, together with Republic of Armenia forces, fought a war for independence in the early 1990s and remained defacto separate from Azerbaijan until 2020. Azerbaijan initiated hostilities in September 2020 to retake the area. A truce statement ending the 44-day war provided for Russian peacekeeping troops to have a presence in Nagorno-Karabakh and to control the Lachin Corridor until 2025.
Azerbaijan began blocking the Lachin Corridor on December 12, 2022, and in April established a checkpoint. Starting in mid-June, Azerbaijan blocked all humanitarian goods, which Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) had been delivering, claiming unauthorized goods had been smuggled into Nagorno-Karabakh. It also periodically prevented the ICRC from transporting patients out of the enclave, Nagorno-Karabakh representatives told Human Rights Watch in August.
On September 19, Azerbaijani forces carried out military attacks aimed at re-establishing control over areas of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had remained under the control of the de facto local authorities after the 2020 truce. On September 20, a ceasefire was announced, followed the next day by initial talks between Azerbaijani authorities and representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian community.
In August, Human Rights Watch spoke remotely with 16 people who described the nearly complete disruption of movement of people, goods, and services including electricity, gas, and petrol. This disruption resulted in acute shortages of food, medications, hygiene products, and other supplies essential to people’s economic and social rights. People described facing shortages of these essential items with almost no access to dairy products, eggs, or meat, and intermittently bread.
Civilians now face even greater shortages. Under added widespread power cuts, they are desperately trying to locate their loved ones.
Hikmet Hajiyev, an adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Azerbaijani officials had told the ICRC, “all necessary conditions are provided and will be provided for the delivery of medicine, food and other goods by ICRC” via Lachin and another road.
By establishing a border checkpoint at the Lachin road and forcing it closed for months when no other arrangements were in place to ensure residents’ rights to food and health, Azerbaijan effectively has been denying these rights, Human Rights Watch said.
For seven months, Azerbaijan has refused to carry out a binding order by the International Court of Justice to “take all measures […] to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles, and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions.” In December, the European Court of Human Rights issued an earlier set of interim measures, saying Azerbaijan should “take all measures that are within their jurisdiction to ensure safe passage through the ‘Lachin Corridor’ of seriously ill persons in need of medical treatment in Armenia and others who were stranded on the road without shelter or means of subsistence.”
Hajiyev’s post also stated that Nagorno-Karabakh military personnel who voluntarily lay down their weapons are “free,” though there are serious grounds to fear that Azerbaijani authorities may treat all adult males without disabilities as presumptive combatants. On September 19, when hostilities started, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry messaged Nagorno-Karabakh civilians saying that shelter, food and water would be made available to women, children, older people, people with disabilities, and sick people. The statement implied that most adult males would not be treated as civilians, Human Rights Watch said.
“Thousands of ethnic Armenian people are displaced, and many separated from their families, fearing uncertainty and a bleak future,” Williamson said. “Urgent humanitarian access and monitoring are needed to ensure safety for Nagorno-Karabakh’s civilians.”
A Turkish citizen did a DNA test and discovered the truth – “we don’t come from these real Turks with slanted eyes; we come from Christians who were kidnapped and used as slaves by these Ottomans.”
“I did a DNA test, and I am almost entirely from Christian Europeans, from the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and also some Turkish (Anatolian), Caucasian, and Jewish from Iran,” he added.
With the advent of genetic testing, more and more Turkish citizens and diaspora communities are discovering that they are Turkified peoples, mostly pointing towards Greek.
A famous case of a Turkish citizen discovering they are Greek is Yannis Vasilis Yaylalı, born Ibrahim Yaylalı.
Yannis was a former Turkish ultra-nationalist that was proud of his enmity towards Kurds and other indigenous peoples of Asia Minor.
However, he soon discovered he was actually Greek, became Christian and then became an activist for minorities in Turkey despite originally joining the Turkish Army to kill them, as reported by The Armenian Weekly.
Full transcript of the above video:
“If you look at this map, it’s obvious which is the good and bad sides. Right next to Europe, the Ottomans enslaved European Christians for 600 years to their harems and Janissary army. How can nobody be talking about this?
“How can there be no Hollywood movies about this? Wouldn’t Hollywood be dying to make movies about this?
“They would, but Ataturk destroyed all these real Ottomans with these slanted eyes so that history would not exist anymore. That’s why nobody makes movies about it. Nobody talks about it. Us Turks are not considered innocent because we don’t come from these real Turks with slanted eyes.
“We come from Christians who were kidnapped and used as slaves by these Ottomans. By making us all Turks, by calling us all the same, by saying ‘How happy is he who says calls himself Turk’, Ataturk turned to the dark side.
“Instead of telling us that we were turned into Turks, instead of telling us we were kidnapped Christians who were then turned into Muslim Turks, he kept this most important part of our history a secret.
“Instead of telling us we come from Christians, he committed genocide against Christian Armenians and Christian Greeks so he can establish a country without any Christians in them.
“I did a DNA test and I am almost entirely from Christian Europeans, from the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and also some Turkish (Anatolian), Caucasian, and Jewish from Iran. Other Turks’ DNA will also look like this. There’s only going to be a little bit of Turkish DNA.”
20:32,
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 23, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoke by phone on Saturday with United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
PM Pashinyan and Secretary Blinken discussed the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and issues related to the agenda of protecting the rights and security of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a readout. They also discussed the prospects of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and issues of regional security, as well as the Armenia-United States bilateral agenda.
21:44,
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 23, ARMENPRESS. Several Russian media outlets have spread disinformation falsely claiming that demonstrators in Yerevan ‘breached into the Government headquarters’ on September 20 and ‘stumbled upon American paratroopers’ there.
Neither has any protester breached into the government building nor were there any U.S. paratroopers there, the Prime Minister’s Office told ARMENPRESS.
“No demonstrator breached into the Government building that day, and furthermore, there was no American paratrooper there,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. The Russian media report is an absolute disinformation, it added.