Karabakh’s Armenians start to leave en masse

| September 25, 2023

Ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh have begun a mass exodus by car after Azerbaijan defeated the breakaway region’s fighters in a conflict dating from the Soviet era.

The Armenian government said late on Sunday that a total of 1,050 people had so far crossed into the country from Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan populated mainly by ethnic Armenians.

Residents with access to a car and fuel had started to drive towards the border with Armenia, according to a Reuters reporter in the Karabakh capital, known as Stepanakert by Armenia and Khankendi by Azerbaijan.

The region’s 120,000 Armenians fear persecution and ethnic cleansing if they live as part of Azerbaijan.

Space for 40,000 people from Karabakh had been prepared in Armenia. Azerbaijan, which is mainly Muslim, has said the Armenians, who are Christian, can leave if they want.

The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.

The Armenians are not accepting Azerbaijan’s promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated.

“Ninety-nine point nine per cent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters.

“The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilised world,” Babayan said. “Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins.”

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

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has faced calls to resign for failing to save Karabakh. In an address to the nation, he said some aid had arrived but a mass exodus looked inevitable.

“If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity,” he said, according to an official transcript.

The situation could change the delicate balance of power in the South Caucasus region, a patchwork of ethnicities crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the United States, Turkey and Iran vie for influence.

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

Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 wounded in the Azerbaijani military operation.

The Armenian authorities in the region said late on Saturday that about 150 tonnes of humanitarian cargo from Russia and another 65 tonnes of flour shipped by the International Committee of the Red Cross had arrived in the region.