Speaking at the end of a two-day visit to Armenia, Power said Washington also continues to champion the Karabakh Armenians’ right to safely return to their homeland recaptured by Azerbaijan in September 2023. Their repatriation requires “a change in circumstances on the ground right now,” she cautioned without elaborating.
More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining population, fled to Armenia in the space of a week following an Azerbaijani military offensive condemned by the U.S. and the European Union.
Power witnessed the flow of refugees and spoke to some of them when she visited an Armenian border area adjacent to the Lachin corridor in September 2023. She announced at the time $11.5 million in U.S. humanitarian assistance to displaced Karabakh Armenians.
Power again met with refugees during her latest trip to Armenia that involved talks with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, other government officials as well as business leaders and civic activists. She praised Armenian government efforts to help the Karabakh Armenians.
At news conference in Yerevan, the U.S. official declined to say whether she believes that Azerbaijan carried out ethnic cleansing in Karabakh. She said the U.S. State Departments “investigates” the events of September 2023 and will come up with a “legal determination of what happened” in due course.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien was also noncommittal about the matter when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last month.
“We’ve commissioned an independent review by an outside group, a group that advocates for human rights globally, and we’re still waiting for that group to come back with its conclusions,” said O’Brien said. He did not name that group.
