Nagorno-Karabakh: Rebel Armenians bow to Azerbaijan, dissolve breakaway government

More than half of the population has fled Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan started a rapid onslaught last week, and ethnic Armenians there announced on Thursday that they were dissolving the breakaway statelet they had fought for three decades. As a formal concession to Azerbaijan, they proclaimed in a statement that their self-styled Republic of Artsakh will “cease to exist” by January 1. The result is a successful restoration of sovereignty for Azerbaijan and its president, Ilham Aliyev, over a region that is internationally regarded as being a part of their territory but whose ethnic Armenian majority earned de facto independence in a war in the 1990s. It is a setback and a tragedy for Armenians as a nation. By Thursday morning, 65,036 people, according to Armenia, had entered its territory, out of an estimated population of 120,000. “Analysis of the situation shows that in the coming days there will be no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told the media. “This is an act of ethnic cleansing.” This claim is refuted by Azerbaijan, which asserts that it is not forcibly displacing anyone and that it plans to pacifically reintegrate the Karabakh region while preserving the civil rights of the ethnic Armenian population. Given the long history of bloodshed between the two sides, which includes two wars since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Karabakh claim that they do not believe that promise. They have been dispersing in large numbers down the winding mountain road between Karabakh and Armenia that snakes through Azerbaijan for days. The humanitarian issue has alarmed the US and other Western nations, who have called for access for foreign observers to watch how Azerbaijan is treating the local population. The head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, stated last week that she has received “very troubling reports of violence against civilians”. Azerbaijan claimed Aliyev had assured her during a meeting on Wednesday that ethnic Armenians’ legal rights would be safeguarded in the same way as those of other minorities. “The Azerbaijani president noted that the civilian population had not been harmed during the anti-terrorist measures, and only illegal Armenian armed formations and military facilities had been targeted,” a statement said. According to Aliyev’s office, he was in Jabrayil on Thursday, a city on the southern fringe of Karabakh that Armenian forces destroyed in the 1990s and that Azerbaijan retook in 2020 and is currently rebuilding. Aliyev last week referred to the leaders of the Karabakh Armenians as a “criminal junta” that would be brought to court while maintaining that he had no beef with regular Karabakh Armenians. Ruben Vardanyan, a former leader of Karabakh’s government, was detained on Wednesday as he attempted to enter Armenia. According to the official security office of Azerbaijan, he was accused of funding terrorism and unlawfully crossing the country’s border the previous year. An advisor to the leadership of Karabakh, David Babayan, declared in a statement that he was voluntarily handing himself over to the Azerbaijani authorities. Since the Karabakh conflict first started in the late 1980s while the Soviet Union was on the verge of disintegrating, mass displacements have been a recurring theme. A former head of Karabakh’s government, Ruben Vardanyan, was arrested on Wednesday as he tried to cross into Armenia. Azerbaijan’s state security service said on Thursday he was being charged with financing terrorism and with illegally crossing the Azerbaijani border last year. David Babayan, an adviser to the Karabakh leadership, said in a statement he was voluntarily giving himself up to the Azerbaijani authorities. Mass displacements have been a feature of the Karabakh conflict since it broke out in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union headed towards collapse. “This is one of the darkest pages of Armenian history,” said Father David, a 33-year-old Armenian priest who came to the border to provide spiritual support for those arriving. “The whole of Armenian history is full of hardships.” (With agency inputs)