On Thursday, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan said he hoped to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan soon.
The development comes two months after Azerbaijan recaptured the Nagorno-Karabakh region in a swift offensive.
“We are currently working on the draft agreement with Azerbaijan on peace and the normalisation of relations, and I hope this process will successfully conclude in the coming months,” Pashinyan added.
On Wednesday, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy condemned Azerbaijan over its actions in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Nagorno-Karabakh been ethnically and religiously Armenian Christian for a long time, and has largely been viewed as an autonomous region governed separately,” Ramaswamy said.
But what is Nagorno-Karabakh? And what do we know about Armenia’s actions in the region?
Let’s take a closer look
What happened in Nagorno-Karabakh?
Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory.
It became a breakaway state under the control of ethnic Armenian forces in 1994 following a six-year conflict.
After a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region in the South Caucasus Mountains – along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had captured earlier.
Then, last month, Azerbaijan launched an offensive that forced separatists to relinquish the rest of the region and brought the entire ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control.
The 24-hour campaign which began on 19 September witnessed Azerbaijani army routing the region’s undermanned and outgunned Armenian forces, forcing them to capitulate.
Though Azerbaijan had vowed to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian community, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians – more than 80 per cent of the region’s residents – have since fled the region and sparked a refugee crisis.
The ethnic Armenians fear reprisals or losing the freedom to practice their religion and customs.
Armenia has now accused Azerbaijan of “ethnic cleansing”.
Ethnic Armenians had faced months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military.
As per the Washington Post, ethnic Armenians witnessed the shelves of their grocery stores grow bare and hospitals go without medical supplies during the blockade.
French-Armenian journalist Astrig Agopian told NBC News, “Many of them are from villages which were taken by the Azerbaijani army, so they really lost their homes already.”
“There is really this feeling that this time is different. It’s another war, but it’s a war that is definitely lost this time,” Agopian reporting from the Armenian border added.
Narine Shakaryan, a grandmother of four, told Reuters, “My husband died in the first war. He was 30, I was 26. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. It is the fourth war that I went through.”
“My husband died back then, he was 30 in 1994. That’s the cursed life that we live.”
“I gave my whole life to my homeland,” one man told BBC. “It would be better if they killed me than this.”
A woman, Veronica, added this was the second time she had become a refugee – after the 2020 conflict.
“Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the 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 civilized world.”
“Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins.”
Pashinyan on Sunday said, “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.”
But Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev’s office has claimed that the country has presented a plan for the “reintegration” of ethnic Armenians in the region, noting that “the equality of rights and freedoms, including security, is guaranteed to everyone regardless of their ethnic, religious or linguistic affiliation.”
Aliyev blamed the Armenians’ exodus from the region on separatist authorities that encouraged them to leave.
The Azerbaijani leader said that Azerbaijani authorities had provided humanitarian assistance to the Armenian residents of Karabakh and “the process of their registration had started.”
What do experts say?
A piece in CFR stated that it has been reported that more than 400 ethnic Armenians including civilians were killed in clashes with the Azerbaijan army.
The piece noted that the Untied Nations terms ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
Luis Moreno Ocampo, an ex-prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, has accused Azerbaijan of imposing “genocide” conditions on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Ocampo in a Washington Post op-ed wrote that Azerbaijan’s ambitions “extend beyond” the region.
“Azerbaijan is an ally with the West against Iran; it provides energy to Europe and it spends millions on sophisticated Israeli weapons,” he wrote. “But such exigencies must not get in the way of the world’s responsibility to stop what is happening before its very eyes: the Armenian genocide of 2023.”
A piece in The Conversation noted, “It was always highly unlikely that any Armenians would “choose” to stay under Azeri control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The regime of President Ilham Aliyev does not tolerate criticism or plurality of voice among its own citizens.”
The article, noting how the think-tank Freedom House designated Azerbaijan a “consolidated authoritarian regime”, stated that Baku’s vow ‘to protect the rights and safety of ethnic Armenians’ rings hollow.
“For decades, the Aliyev regime has promoted ethnic hatred of Armenians. Azerbaijan has actively worked for the eradication and appropriation of its Armenian religious and cultural heritage. This was referred to in a recent report as “the worst cultural genocide of the 21st Century”.
The piece also noted that the crimes committed by Azerbaijan’s troops during the 2020 conflict were extremely well documented.
“The so-called “Military Trophies Park” in the Azeri capital of Baku, built as a memorial of the war, is filled with grotesque mannequins representing Armenians.”
Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with the London-based Carnegie Europe think-tank told NBC News, “Azerbaijan has won a comprehensive military victory and what we’re looking at now is the prospect of Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians or with very few Armenians remaining.”
“So in that sense, Azerbaijan has won.”
Skepticism over Western intervention
Pashinyan said Armenia was ready “to open, reopen, rebuild, build all regional communications” if its sovereignty over the area is not questioned.
Baku has vowed to ensure the rights of Karabakh’s Armenians are protected.
It has denied having any territorial claims to Armenia, saying it could set up a land link with Nakhichevan via Iran instead of Armenia.
Pashinyan also said Thursday that he hoped the border between Armenia and Turkey could be opened for citizens of third countries and diplomats “in the near future”.
Ankara closed its border with Armenia in the 1990s in solidarity with ally Azerbaijan.
With the traditional regional power broker Russia bogged down in its Ukraine war, the European Union and United States have taken a lead role in brokering an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
Aliyev has recently expressed scepticism about Western mediation efforts.
Citing France’s “biased position,” he refused to attend another round of peace talks with Pashinyan in Spain earlier in October.
They had been due to take place under the mediation of the EU chief Charles Michel, French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Aliyev said peace talks with Yerevan could be held in Georgia “if Yerevan agrees”, but Pashinyan – who is keen on Western mediation – rejected the idea.
On Monday, Iran and Russia denounced Western “interference” in tensions between Yerevan and Baku at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Tehran that also included top diplomats from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.
Armenians stunned, say ‘historic blow’
While the separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh then announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year’s end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de-facto independence – but Azerbaijani authorities are already in charge of the region.
The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world.
Traumatized by genocide a century ago, they now fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.
Many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear in what they call a new wave of ethnic cleansing.
They accuse European countries, Russia and the United States – and the government of Armenia itself – of failing to protect ethnic Armenians during months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military.
Outside the modern country of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of the only surviving parts of a heartland that centuries ago stretched across what is now eastern Turkey, into the Caucasus region and western Iran.
Many in the diaspora had pinned dreams on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.
Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history,” Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian university instructor in Beirut, said Thursday.
“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours … For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”
Ethnic Armenians have communities around Europe and West Asia and in the United States.
Lebanon is home to one of the largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, four per cent of the population.
Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches.
The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide.
Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.
In Bourj Hammoud, the main Armenian district in the capital Beirut, memories are still raw, with anti-Turkey graffiti common on the walls. The red-blue-and-orange Armenian flag flies from many buildings.
“This is the last migration for Armenians,” said Harout Bshidikian, 55, sitting in front of an Armenian flag in a Bourj Hamoud cafe. “There is no other place left for us to migrate from.”
Azerbaijan says it is reuniting its territory, pointing out that even Armenia’s prime minister recognized that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.
Though its population has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris also have communities and cultural ties to the territory as well, particularly the city of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azeri poetry.
Wall said Nagorno-Karabakh had become “a kind of new cause” for an Armenian diaspora whose forebearers had suffered the genocide.
“It was a kind of new Armenian state, new Armenian land being born, which they projected lots of hopes on. Very unrealistic hopes, I would say,” he said, adding that it encouraged Karabakh Armenians to hold out against Azerbaijan despite the lack of international recognition for their separatist government.
Armenians see the territory as a cradle of their culture, with monasteries dating back more than a millennium.
“Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years,” said Lebanese legislator Hagop Pakradounian, head of Lebanon’s largest Armenian group, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. “The people of Artsakh are being subjected to a new genocide, the first genocide in the 21st Century.”
The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is not just a reminder of the genocide, “it’s reliving it,” said Diran Guiliguian, an Armenian activist who is based in Madrid but holds Armenian, Lebanese and French citizenship.
He said his grandmother used to tell him stories of how she fled in 1915. The genocide “is actually not a thing of the past. It’s not a thing that is a century old. It’s actually still the case,” he said.
Seroujian, the instructor in Beirut, said her great-grandparents were genocide survivors, and that stories of the atrocities and dispersal were talked about at home, school and in the community as she grew up, as was the cause of Nagorno-Karabakh.
She visited the territory several times, most recently in 2017. “We’ve grown with these ideas, whether they were romantic or not, of the country. We’ve grown to love it even when we didn’t see it,” she said. “I never thought about it as something separate” from Armenia the country.
In the United States, the Armenian community in the Los Angeles area – one of the world’s largest – has staged several protests trying to draw attention to the situation. On Sept. 19, they used a trailer truck to block a major freeway for several hours, causing major traffic jams.
Kim Kardashian, perhaps the most well-known Armenian-American today, went on social media to urge President Joe Biden “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide.”
Several groups in the diaspora are collecting money for Karabakh Armenians fleeing their home. But Seroujian said many feel helpless.
“There are moments where personally, the family, or among friends we just feel hopeless,” she said. “And when we talk to each other we sort of lose our minds.
With inputs from agencies
