The flow of refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh slowed to a trickle on Saturday as Armenia said almost the entire population of the separatist region had already fled after Azerbaijan took control of the enclave.
An AFP journalist at the Kornidzor crossing into Armenia saw only a few ambulances arrive, while border guards said they were waiting for the last buses. In the nearest town, Goris, hundreds of exhausted refugees waited among their luggage in the central square for the government to offer them shelter.
Azerbaijan’s lightning military takeover of the ethnic Armenian enclave last week led to a sudden exodus that rewrote the disputed region’s centuries-old ethnic makeup. Armenia said on Saturday that 100,437 people out of an estimated population of 120,000 had fled since the breakaway region saw its decades-long struggle against Azerbaijani rule end in sudden defeat.
Yerevan said 14 bedridden patients died during or shortly after being evacuated from the area via the area’s only mountain road. Artak Beglaryan, a former separatist official, said “the last groups” of Nagorno-Karabakh residents were heading to Armenia on Saturday. “There are at most a few hundred people left, most of which are staff, emergency services workers, volunteers and some people with special needs,” he wrote on social media.
Armenia – a country of 2.8 million people – is facing a challenge to accommodate the sudden influx of refugees and authorities say 35,000 people are now in temporary housing.
Yerevan accused Azerbaijan of waging a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh of its Armenian population. But Baku denied the accusation and publicly called on the area’s Armenian residents to stay and “reintegrate” into Azerbaijan. The United Nations said it will send a mission to Nagorno-Karabakh this weekend to assess humanitarian needs, the first time the international body has had access to the region in about three decades.
With tensions high between neighboring Caucasus countries, Azerbaijan said one of its soldiers was killed on the border by an Armenian sniper. Armenia quickly denied the accusation. Firefights along the border between the two Caucasian enemies are common. So far, the sides have prevented the recent conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh from turning into a broader confrontation.
Azerbaijan’s 24-hour offensive to capture the enclave appears to have decisively ended the bloody struggle for the region’s status that has continued since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The separatists agreed on Thursday to dissolve the government and formally become part of Azerbaijan by the end of the year. The decision marked the end of one of the world’s longest “frozen conflicts,” a conflict that Azerbaijan managed to win while Russia, Armenia’s longtime ally, bogged down in its war against Ukraine.
In the Armenian capital Yerevan, about 3,000 opponents of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan resumed protests against the government. Pashinyan’s critics, who paused demonstrations to focus on helping refugees, accuse him of abandoning the separatist region despite Azerbaijan’s aggression. “We lost Karabakh, now we don’t want to lose Armenia,” 38-year-old linguist Maria Asatryan told AFP. “The longer Pashinyan remains in power, the worse the situation will be. People must come together and tell Pashinyan to resign.”
Pashinyan has tried to shift the blame to Russia. Moscow has sent peacekeeping troops to the region with the aim of controlling the ceasefire that ended the 2020 war, in which Baku regained part of the land it lost to separatists in the 1990s.
Pashinyan called Yerevan’s current alliances “ineffective.” A few days ago, Armenian and US forces conducted joint military exercises, while the head of the government urged Parliament to ratify a document that would make Armenia a member of the International Criminal Court during its session next week. The ICC has issued an international arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said it would consider Armenia’s entry into the ICC an “extremely hostile” step.
Source: DN
