“We are nobody,” said Artak Beglaryan, the former ombudsman of Karabakh and now one of its few public advocates. Like nearly every other Armenian resident of Karabakh, he escaped to neighboring Armenia when Azerbaijani troops took control in September. “It is a ghost country,” said Beglaryan of the rugged, verdant region where he was born.
A cry for the refugees of emptied Nagorno-Karabakh: ‘We are nobody’
The Washington Post
Armenia “struggles to cope with [the] exodus” of 100,000 ethnic brethren who have become refugees, according to a report last week by the International Crisis Group. The Armenian government provides meager stipends, but those may end soon. There’s little international discussion of a “right of return” for Karabakh people who have been displaced by war and want to move back, reclaim belongings or just visit family gravesites.
Ethnic Armenians wait to be evacuated from Stepanakert in the Nagorno-Karabakh region on Sept. 26. (Siranush Sargsyan/AFP/Getty Images)
The plight of the Karabakh residents who fled their ancestral homes has been largely overlooked in a world preoccupied by wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But Karabakh offers a stark picture of what Armenians say is ethnic cleansing of a region legally controlled by Azerbaijan but until last year was populated almost entirely by ethnic Armenians. Now, according to Beglaryan, only 21 Armenian residents remain in a region that once had a population of about 120,000 before Azerbaijan launched its successful war for control in 2020. A State Department official told me the figure is about 30 families all told — a minuscule remnant either way.
Armenian history is a narrative of such tragedies, captured in the phrase “Nation into Dust,” which is the title of a poem by Vahan Tekeyan, a revered Armenian poet. He lived in exile during the Armenian genocide of 1915, which historians believe killed more than 1 million Armenians. Members of my own family perished during that slaughter.
This recurring cycle of exile and death is partly a matter of geography. Armenia was the first nation to embrace Christianity, in 301 AD. But over the centuries, tensions grew with Muslim neighbors — which finally erupted catastrophically in the 1915 genocide. Russia was historically a protector of Armenia, but the Soviet Union’s designation of Karabakh was a classic Soviet maneuver of divide and rule — legally part of the Azerbaijani republic but ethnically Armenian.
Karabakh’s ambiguous status exploded in the post-Soviet era. Armenia seized control after 1991, and then lost it in the 2020 war. Russia negotiated a peace agreement to end the 2020 conflict, but Moscow became increasingly preoccupied by Ukraine and didn’t resist Azerbaijan’s move to seize control last fall. Karabakh residents fled to Armenia, but the government there has had difficulty absorbing them.
“Armenia is having problems integrating over 100,000 refugees who fled Nagorno Karabakh,” noted the International Crisis Group report. “Yerevan has tried to be generous, but it lacks funds and a long-term plan, leaving the displaced people exposed and facing an uncertain future.”
Beglaryan met me in Washington, where he was seeking support from the U.S. government. But the Biden administration, like its predecessors, has been caught between sympathy for the Armenian cause and its ties to Turkey, a NATO ally, and to Azerbaijan, a useful partner against Iran. A senior State Department official told me Friday that U.S. diplomats have raised the “right of return” issue with Azerbaijan’s representatives. But State’s focus has been a broader a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Azerbaijani officials say claims of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh are “unfounded.” They argue that Azerbaijanis were driven from Karabakh during the decades of Armenian control and that they have a right to go home, too, in what President Ilham Aliyev has called the “Great Return program.”
Peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan continue. The leaders of the two countries met during the Munich Conference last month, and their foreign ministers held another round in Berlin on Feb. 28. Azerbaijan joined Armenia in a joint statement in December that said the two countries want to normalize relations and “share the view that there is a historical chance to achieve a long-awaited peace.”
But for now, the former Karabakh residents are homeless and stranded — and a few are imprisoned in Baku. Beglaryan and his successor as ombudsman, Gegham Stepanyan, told me they had worked closely with Ruben Vardanyan, who until the Azerbaijani takeover served as state minster for Artsakh, as Armenians refer to Karabakh. Vardanyan is the most prominent of what the State Department officials told me are “dozens” of Karabakh prisoners in Baku.
As Armenians fled Karabakh last year, they left behind an estimated 400 churches and other religious sites, according to a Reuters report. The Museum of the Bible in Washington affirms on its website: “Today, Karabakh still holds a treasury of churches, monasteries, khachkars (cross-stones), and sacred sites, many of them inscribed in Armenian with the names, stories, and prayers of people from ages past.”
“I’m heartbroken and outraged for the thousands of Armenians who were isolated, starved, and then forced to flee their homes under assault from the Azerbaijani government. It’s imperative that we provide support to these refugees during this difficult time, and that we find a path to lasting peace between these two nations,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) told me. He’s been a leader of congressional efforts to aid the Karabakh Armenians.
History is a story of bloody conflicts that forced people from their lands and made them refugees. We might think that we live in more modern times, where the devastation of war is checked by international law and the oversight of the United Nations. But to the growing list of places where those rules don’t seem to apply, you can add the emptied territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
