More than 100,000 refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh have already arrived in Armenia, the Armenian Prime Minister’s spokesman said.
According to official data, around 120,000 Armenians lived in that enclave before the separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh announced its dissolution and the unrecognized republic would cease to exist on January 1, 2024.
“There are at most a few hundred officials, volunteers, civil protection officers and people with special needs left, who are also preparing to leave,” former Karabakh ombudsman Artak Beglarian said in a post online social X (formerly Twitter).
The United Nations announced this weekend the deployment of a mission team to Nagorno-Karabakh to assess humanitarian needs, despite the fact that the organization has not had access to the region for 30 years.
The separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh announced on Thursday that it will dissolve and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist on January 1, 2024.
The announcement was made after Azerbaijan carried out a military offensive to regain full control of the separatist region and demanded that Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh lay down their arms and the separatist government be dismantled.
Earlier this month, the European Council had warned of the “rapid deterioration” of the humanitarian situation in the region, after calling on Azerbaijan and Armenia to protect their populations and reduce tensions.
The two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus faced off in two wars in the early 1990s and in 2020 for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, a mountainous region whose population is mainly Armenian and which separated from Azerbaijan for more than three decades. .
At the end of the short war in which Azerbaijan retook areas of this breakaway territory in the fall of 2020, Baku and Yerevan entered into a Russian-promoted ceasefire.
Tensions increased this year when Baku announced on April 23 that it had installed a first road checkpoint at the entrance to the Latchin corridor, the only axis connecting Armenia to the separatist enclave, which was already under an embargo that caused shortages. essential goods and electricity cuts.
Source: DN
