Azerbaijan says UN mission to visit Nagorno-Karabakh

| September 30, 2023

Azerbaijan has invited a United Nations mission to visit Nagorno-Karabakh, the foreign ministry says, amid a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from the region following a lightning Azerbaijani military offensive.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric confirmed that a UN mission, led by a senior UN aid official, would travel to Nagorno-Karabakh this weekend – the world body’s first access to the region in about 30 years.

“While there, the team will seek to assess the situation on the ground and identify the humanitarian needs for both people remaining and the people that are on the move,” Dujarric told reporters on Friday, urging all to respect international law.

“The focus will be on humanitarian and also, as part of that, on issues of protection,” he said.

Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh, something Azerbaijan strongly denies.

“The visit will allow (the mission) to become acquainted with the current humanitarian activities being carried out by Azerbaijan in the region,” the Azeri foreign ministry said in a statement.

“In addition, the group members will be shown the process of rebuilding certain infrastructure, disarmament and confiscation of ammunition from illegal Armenian armed forces, as well as the dangers posed by mines,” it said.

Earlier, an Azeri government official said media would also be allowed to visit the region, which is internationally viewed as part of Azerbaijan but which had been run by an ethnic Armenian breakaway state since the 1990s.

Armenia’s government estimated that about 97,700 Armenians – or more than 80 per cent of Karabakh’s population – had crossed onto its territory as of Friday afternoon, despite Azeri promises to protect their civil rights if they stayed.

Meanwhile, several legal experts said they believe the mass flight fits the legal definition of a war crime.

The International Criminal Court’s founding documents say that, when referring to forcible transfer or deportation, “the term ‘forcibly’ is not restricted to physical force but may include threat of force or coercion such as that caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power against such person or persons or another person, or by taking advantage of a coercive environment”.

Such a “coercive environment” was created in Nagorno-Karabakh before the offensive by Azerbaijan’s obstruction of essential supplies, said international lawyer Priya Pillai and Melanie O’Brien, visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Big gains in a 44-day war in 2020 had put Azerbaijan in a position to block the flow of food, fuel and medicines from Armenia along the Lachin corridor – for three decades Karabakh’s lifeline through hostile territory.

“So the fear/apprehension of the population – due to the coercive environment created by the months-long blockade and the recent armed attack – would meet the threshold for this crime,” Pillai said, adding that it would be a more severe “crime against humanity” if considered to be part of a widespread attack.

There is, however, no swift path to prosecution because neither state belongs to the ICC, the permanent tribunal for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

O’Brien believes the blockade – which Azerbaijan said was needed to prevent weapons smuggling – was in effect the start of a genocide because it was implemented with the aim of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group”.

The first prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno Ocampo, agreed with O’Brien’s argumentation, noting that a ruling of genocide did not require mass killings.

“For me, it’s obviously a genocide,” he said.

For Azerbaijan, however, retaking control of Nagorno-Karabakh helps to redress the traumas of 1988-94.

About 30,000 people were killed in fighting to establish separate homelands, according to Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, a 2003 book by Thomas de Waal.

At the same time, 500,000 Azeris from Karabakh and the areas around it were expelled from their homes while 350,000 Armenians left Azerbaijan and 186,000 Azeris left Armenia.