Aliyev was emphatic in an Aug. 2 interview with Euronews: “People who live in Karabakh … they live in Azerbaijan. They should choose whether to live as citizens as [an] ethnic minority … or to leave. So this is their choice.”
In an apparent effort to enforce sovereignty, Azerbaijan has been blockading the road from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, known as the “Lachin Corridor” since June 15. Without this route, the Armenian population has lost access to food, fuel, medicine and other essential supplies. The Azerbaijanis say they are ready to ship food from Azerbaijan, but Armenians fear it might be a trap — a first step toward integration by force — and they have blocked the Azerbaijani entry routes with concrete barriers.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the president of “Artsakh,” as Armenians call this region, appealed for international support against what he called a “genocidal policy” in a statement this week: “The blockade of the Lachin Corridor is not an isolated incident. It should be regarded as part of a planned, large-scale and coordinated policy by Azerbaijan aimed at the destruction of the people of Artsakh as a whole.” He requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.
State Department officials have been working with European partners and Russia to try to reopen the Lachin Corridor and end the humanitarian crisis. The plight of residents there has raised growing international concern for the welfare of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 residents. Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, issued a report this week alleging that “there is a reasonable basis to believe that a genocide is being committed.”
U.S. officials believe that Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh are managing to survive only because of backyard gardens and other home-produced food. They fear that within two months, as winter approaches, the population could face starvation. Armenians dread a repetition of the Ottoman genocide of 1915, an ever-present historical memory for Armenians around the world.
The blockade of fuel supplies is already having a crippling effect inside Nagorno-Karabakh. According to an Armenian official, “even ambulance vehicles are not able to operate within Nagorno-Karabakh because there is simply no fuel.”
The humanitarian crisis surrounding the Lachin Corridor is the latest chapter of a decades-old struggle over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Armenia won control in 1994, but skirmishes continued for the next 25 years. Azerbaijan regained power in a 2020 war that left Armenia dazed and defeated. Russia brokered the deal that ended that war and has a nominal peacekeeping force in Nagorno-Karabakh. But Moscow’s ability to maintain peace and stability has been severely weakened by the Ukraine conflict.
The Armenian government in Yerevan, headed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, has said it is ready for a broad peace agreement with Baku. The two sides have held repeated negotiating sessions, including three in the United States organized by the Biden administration. But this diplomatic process has been ruptured by the Lachin crisis.
An Armenian diplomat told me this week in an email message that her government continues to seek normalization with Baku. But she said Yerevan wants “international guarantees” that a peace deal will be “fully implemented,” and “guarantees of rights and security of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
The Lachin crisis is a distillation of what has been the core issue from the beginning. Nagorno-Karabakh had long been recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan; but the Armenian majority there wants some form of political self-determination, rather than dictation from a hostile government in Baku. There’s abundant food waiting at various border crossings. But Azerbaijan needs to build some trust by ending the Lachin barricade that started this crisis.
When I visited Stepanakert, the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh capital, in April 2016, I saw a monument to the spirit of resistance there that Baku evidently wants to break. On the road to the airport stood an immense stone statue of an old man and woman, seemingly buried in the hillside. The name of the monument was “We Are Our Mountains.”
The message to the world was simple, as I wrote at the time: We aren’t moving. That’s still true. Nagorno-Karabakh may be part of Azerbaijan legally, but it’s going to be populated by ethnic Armenians who need protection of their human rights. It’s time for all parties to accept both sides of that equation.