Nagorno Karabakh -=- ARTSAKH

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I guess he's the trophy for Putin

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ԹՈՒՐՔՆ ԱՐՑԱԽՆ ԱՆՕՐԻՆԱԿԱՆ ԼՈՒԾԱՐԵՑ ԹՈՒՐՔԱՀՊԱՏԱԿ ՀԱՅԵՐԻ ՁԵՌՔՈՎ

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The issue of people forcibly displaced from NK is also included in the list of crimes subject to the Rome Statute. Yeghishe Kirakosyan


The Standing Committee on State-Legal Affairs of the National Assembly is discussing the issue of ratifying the Rome Statute (Rome Statute). As " Armenpress " informs, the project was presented by the representative of International Legal Affairs, Yeghishe Kirakosyan, who reminded that the government approved the project regarding the Rome Statute back on December 29, 2022.

"Approving the project at that time was conditioned by the large-scale aggression carried out by Azerbaijan against the Republic of Armenia in 2022 and a number of gross crimes committed during the aggression. You will remember the heinous shooting of Armenian servicemen and other war crimes that happened in the Black Lake area," said Kirakosyan.

According to him, the International Criminal Court has the jurisdiction to bring responsibility for a number of crimes, in particular, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, military aggression.

"Unfortunately, the necessity of this project is again justified by the events that are happening even today and tens of thousands of our compatriots from Nagorno Karabakh are forcibly displaced and come to Armenia.

We think that this is one of the crimes under the Rome Statute," Kirakosyan emphasized.

According to the representative of international legal affairs, the ratification of the Rome Statute will enable the Republic of Armenia to become a full member of the International Criminal Court.

"It is clear that the main target is to launch a new additional international legal mechanism for the responsibility of crimes committed by Azerbaijan, as well as to have an additional preventive mechanism for the Republic of Armenia. We are sure that the ratification of the charter will create another additional legal preventive mechanism in the territory of the Republic of Armenia from the point of view of preventing the commission of the most serious crimes subject to the jurisdiction of the charter. This is no less important goal in terms of solving security problems," Kirakosyan said.

Earlier, the Constitutional Court recognized the obligations stipulated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, signed on July 17, 1998, as conforming to the constitution. In 2022, the Government appealed to the Constitutional Court on this issue. The executive branch later sent the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) to the National Assembly for ratification.

The government has again returned to the issue of recognizing the Rome Statute, because, according to the rationale of this project, they see an opportunity to call Azerbaijan to account.


Noah's Ark - What is the press writing?

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as of 10pm local time , some 88.000 Armenians have left Artsakh

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looks like Iran might be stepping in as a peacekeeper in Artsakh

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it makes sense, its officials are democratically elected, except the president, and referendum has been done 30 years ago.

remember 10 days prior to sighing president arayik was forced to step dawn , the qocharyan & dashnaks signed it.

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can anything be done ?

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will anyone go back /. knowing azeris this will cost more ++++ many more life's

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[Yervant1]

Spiegel International, Germany

Sept 29 2023

Exodus from Nagorno-KarabakhThe Day Anna, 36, Lost Her Home

Anna Khachatryan had to flee Nagorno-Karabakh with her children when Azerbaijan attacked. Her story is part of a bigger one about the tragedy of the Armenians, who must now fear the looming threat of an even bigger invasion.

By Walter Mayr in Goris, Armenia

"I want the world to see through my eyes what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh," says Anna Khachatryan. That's why she is now sharing her story – that of her expulsion from her homeland.

The dark-haired woman, 36 years old, is sitting on the seventh floor of a hotel together with her husband, four children, grandmother and great-grandmother. She arrived here the day before, in the Armenian provincial town of Goris: the temporary end of a hasty escape from Nagorno-Karabakh, from the self-administered Armenian republic not recognized by the international community that is located in Azerbaijani territory.

Outside, in front of the hotel, scenes of a biblical-like exodus are playing out: People squeeze out of overcrowded minibuses and cars around the clock, stuffing their remaining belongings into plastic bags and suitcases.

All Are Fleeing

From frail old men to toddlers, everyone is getting out. Late at night, refugees are still desperately looking for a place to stay in this city of 20,000.

Inside the hotel, Khachatryan is struggling to keep her composure as she talks about her life. It's a narrative that begins and ends with the word "war," a story that reveals the tragedy of the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The majority Armenian-populated area, a would-be state not recognized internationally, surrendered to Azerbaijani autocrat Ilham Aliyev after a lightning strike that began on September 19. More than half of all residents have since fled.

On Thursday it was announced that Nagorno-Karabakh as an entity would be dissolved by the end of the year. There is nothing to suggest that residents will be able to return.

Anna was four when she arrived in what was then a Soviet autonomous region. The giant empire of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was on its last legs. In the struggle for a post-Soviet order, war had broken out between the South Caucasian republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, primarily over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

It was reason enough for Anna's father, a native of Nagorno-Karabakh, to enlist at the front. He wanted to fight for the independence of his homeland, an area sacred to Armenians as a cultural landscape: They had settled there even prior to the birth of Christ, a thousand years before the first caliph appeared in the region.

It took until 1994 for the Christian Armenians to prevail in their longed for victory over the Muslim Azerbaijanis, whose language is related to Turkish.

A Conflict Spirals Out of Control

Tens of thousands died on both sides in that war. Khachatryan's father lost two of his brothers.

"The road we used to drive into the war zone in 1991, to Nagorno-Karabakh, is the same one we used to flee to Armenia yesterday," says Anna Khachatryan. She sounds like she's watching a movie rewind to the beginning. Her life reads like the chronicle of a conflict that spun out of control.

Only months after Anna's birth, in August 1987, the Karabakh Armenians petitioned Gorbachev for the region to become part of Armenia. Wars followed, massacres perpetrated by both sides, a never-ending spiral of violence. And now? It appears as though the final battle for Nagorno-Karabakh was fought last Tuesday.

Anna Khachatryan says life in Nagorno-Karabakh wasn't bad. She worked as a pharmacist there, while her husband, a lawyer by training, served in the military.

A Mercedes and a Lexus

There was no lack of money, and a Mercedes and a Lexus were parked in front of the house on Sasuntsi Davit Street, located near the market in the capital city of Stepanakert.

It wasn't until a shell hit in the immediate vicinity of the Khachatryans in the autumn war of 2020, so that "even the window panes in our house shook," not until their five-month-old daughter Magdalena began to have breathing problems in the bunker and the supplies in the pharmacy began to run low – did Anna Khachatryan, her husband and their older children realize that their lives in Nagorno-Karabakh were threatened.

The rebel republic, known as "Artsakh" by Armenians, lost a third of its territory in the 2020 Azerbaijani advance - fighting that cost the lives of another 6,000 people in the battle for Nagorno-Karabakh. The cease-fire, negotiated by the Russians, resulted in Azerbaijani troops posted barely 10 kilometers from the Khachatryans' home.

A little over two years later, on December 12, 2022, the blockade of the Lachin Corridor began. The road leading to Armenia was a lifeline for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Everything needed to endure in the hostile environment came from the Armenian motherland via that one road, the asphalt equivalent of an umbilical cord.

The emergency began when the Aliyev regime ordered the closure of the corridor. "We ran out of medications pretty quickly at the pharmacy, especially blood pressure-lowering drugs and blood thinners," Khachatryan says.

Bulgar and and Marmelade

For the first six months, the situation was bearable because supplies of medicine and food could be obtained from Armenia via an alternative road through the forest. It was extremely expensive, but it did the job. Then the Azerbaijanis put an end to that as well.

"We ran out of cooking oil in June," Khachatryan says. "We lived on our supplies. I made bread with my own hands from low-quality grain meal, we ate fig or strawberry jam. The electricity was usually only available for two hours at a time."

By mid-September, the rebel republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, placed under a stranglehold by Azerbaijan, was threatened with famine. The European Union contented itself with polite outrage; anything more would have lacked credibility: One year earlier, at the peak of the energy crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had praised the "reliable partnership" with Ilham Aliyev and suggested that the "excellent relations" would be further deepened.

And Vladimir Putin? On September 12, the Kremlin chief uttered a sentence in Vladivostok that at first attracted little attention. He said that he hoped an early solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem would be smooth – if possible "without ethnic cleansing."

A week later, the first bullets struck Stepanakert, and the bulk of the Armenians fled.

Anna Khachatryan says she was at home alone when Azerbaijan's "anti-terrorist operation" began on Tuesday, September 19. She says her husband was with the troops, two of her children were in daycare and the other two at school. At 12:50 p.m., the first heavy explosions shook Stepanakert.

Khachatryan immediately set off to pick up her youngest child. The daughter cried and trembled. By 3 p.m. that afternoon, they were all together again. Under the cover of darkness, the family moved together to the sister's basement. She also has three children.

Children Count the Shell Impacts

The seven girls and boys stayed awake until 3 a.m., Khachatryan says. They whiled away the time by counting shell impacts. And they prayed for their fathers at the front, both of whom had been wounded already in the earlier war.

The older children laid on tarpaulins, the linens from old Soviet cots, and the adults sat up awake all night. There was no electricity, no internet and no news. Fears spread that the Azerbaijanis had already long since entered the city.

The next day, the house no longer had any running water. They kept themselves fed in the basement with pita bread and leftover kurkut, a stew of meat and bulgar.

The family only learned about the end of the operation at noon three days later from acquaintances. After another night in the basement, the Khachatryans returned to their home, where their father joined them. When the children weren't listening, the parents spoke about missing relatives and fatalities: The brother of a sister-in-law had been killed by a sniper, and two of the sons' schoolmates had died.

On the evening of September 22, a Friday, the family decided to flee Nagorno-Karabakh. But the corridor was still closed. "We still didn't have electricity or anything to eat, and the state and its institutions no longer existed," says Anna Khachatryan. When schools began issuing report cards for the instructional year that had just begun, she says, it was clear that "this is the end."

"I Hate the Turks"

It's Sunday morning in the Armenian border village of Aravus, on the other side of the Lachin Corridor, which looks like an ordinary road from up here. It is the day the exodus will begin, but the passage is still blocked on this morning – for Anna Khachatryan and for tens of thousands of residents of Nagorno-Karabakh who want to flee to Armenia.

"I hate the Turks" – a reference to the Azerbaijanis – says one of the Armenians standing guard at the border here in Aravus at an altitude of 1,400 meters (4,600 feet). The civilian defenders have gathered in the home of the village elder. They wear flak jackets or simple camouflage clothing, their Kalashnikovs are casually leaning against the wall, and there are pictures of Jesus on the cases of their mobile phones.

They agree on their core beliefs. One says: "Armenians and Azerbaijanis, it's like fire and water; that's why the compatriots from Nagorno-Karabakh will all end up coming to us – because what Aliyev is offering them for staying sounds like forced integration."

The village guards from Aravus suggest climbing a nearby hill, where there is a good view across the border between the hostile states.

"We're surrounded now by 13 positions of the Azerbaijani army," one of the men says, pointing his arm to the north. "They gradually took 68 acres of pasture and farmland from us; land where we harvested wheat and barley, grazed our cows and sheep."

During the Soviet times, there were no fixed borders between the republics here, just maps showing the outlines of individual municipalities. That went well for decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he says, "but then, almost three decades later, the Azerbaijanis came up with Google Maps and suddenly said: This and that are ours now." The Armenians, by now dramatically outnumbered militarily, couldn't defend themselves.

Not in Aravus and not elsewhere. The Azerbaijani military apparatus, fed by billions of dollars in oil and gas, including money from Western sources, is slowly eating its way into Armenian territory. Between 150 and 215 square kilometers of territory, depending on estimates and the type of satellite imagery analyzed, are believed to have been secretly occupied by Baku's forces since 2020.

Burning Uniforms

Shortly before the battle for Stepanakert got underway, Anna says, she took charge of the household. She told everyone they could pack just one change of clothing, no more. One suitcase would have to suffice for the entire family. Jewelry and documents were to go in one small bag. The family photos were too heavy, so they burned most of them.

They also burned her husband's uniforms. It's important not to leave any traces behind. And they buried the medals for bravery Anna's husband had earned as a veteran of multiple wars.

They then headed in the Mercedes and the Lexus to the airport, where the Russians were stationed. The Khachatryans left the cars. "Maybe someone can use them later."

The family was fortunate. Whether it's because of the cars they essentially gave away, their four children in tow, or just chance, the Khachatryans were waved forward by the Russian soldiers, and at 1 p.m., they were on the bus to Armenia. At the checkpoint, there was a brief shock – a last bit of cruelty from the victorious power. The adult Armenian men were taken off the bus and told they had to cross the border on foot. Fear quickly spread that the men of military age were to be separated from their families.

Children on the bus started screaming. Anna Khachatryan says she fought back the panic as it began to build. "My last image of Nagorno-Karabakh will forever be this Azerbaijani soldier taking my husband off the bus – there was no room at all for any other emotions," she says. In the end, though, everything turned out fine. The men marched across the border on foot and the families were reunited on Armenian soil.

In the following days, satellite images would show the enormous exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh; miles-long lines of cars, often filling multiple lanes, could be seen crawling their way through the Lachin Corridor on the way to Goris.

Anna Khachatryan was born in Kapan in 1987, on the Armenian side. In the future, if she wanted to visit her birthplace from Goris, she would have to take a long detour through the rugged mountainous terrain.

The direct road to the city is no longer passable. The route zigzags a total of 28 times across the border between the two republics. Azerbaijani and Russian troops have blocked the road to Kapan since the 44-day war in the fall of 2020, when the now highly equipped Azerbaijani army inflicted a devastating defeat on the Armenians.

The village of Shurnukh, for example, located 27 kilometers north of Khachatryan's birthplace, is now divided and accessible only with a special permit.

An iron cross marks the outermost position of the defenders commanded from the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Not 200 meters away are Azerbaijan's troops and the Kremlin's armed scouts.

Traditionally, the Russians have been Armenia's allies in the region, with Turkey siding with Azerbaijan. Russian peacekeepers stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh, however, have recently barely lifted a hand to slow the Azerbaijani advance.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has sought to distance himself from Moscow in recent years. But Putin knows that Armenia is reliant on Russian gas and will be dependent on Moscow's military assistance in the long run. Meanwhile, NATO is making no effort to create another problem for itself in the region.

Is an Invasion of Armenia Next?

Yerevan, meanwhile, is threatened with yet another calamity in the near future if Azerbaijan advances into Armenian territory.

"I see a probability at 50 percent that Azerbaijani troops will invade us no later than spring to force an extraterritorial corridor across Nakhchivan toward Turkey," says Benyamin Poghosyan, a defense expert at the think tank APRI in Yerevan.

For years, the corridor has been part of the arsenal of demands with which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Azerbaijani ally Ilham Aliyev have been pressuring the small Caucasus republic of Armenia. The Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan and, especially, Turkey, which borders it, would thus gain direct access to Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea and further to the republics of Central Asia.

Erdoğan would come closer to his self-image as a beacon of light in the Turkic-speaking world; Armenia, on the other hand, would be sliced into pieces and ultimately exposed to ridicule as a "failed state," says Poghosyan.

Aliyev's Blatant Territorial Claims

If Azerbaijani leader Aliyev is to be believed, Anna Khachatryan and her family now live in "Western Azerbaijan." That's what Aliyev, without justification, has been calling Armenia's territory for months now. It's not only nationalists in Yerevan who interpret this as a threat and a blatant territorial claim.

Khachatryan wants to leave Goris, which is flooded with refugees, in the coming days. She says that all the property they left behind in Stepanakert "counts for nothing compared to the fact that we are all together again."

"We want to stay in Armenia with the children, we don't have another home anymore," she says. "We will start over again in Yerevan – we'll earn money and rent a house."

"And," she says, pausing for a moment: "live."

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/exodus-from-nagorno-karabakh-the-day-anna-36-lost-her-home-a-8e4f604c-911c-433e-94dc-11f9d5eca064

[Yervant1]

Sept 29 2023

Nagorno-Karabakh: the world should have seen this crisis coming – and it’s not over yet

As a result of the Azerbaijani attack on the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19 and the forced exodus that followed it, this region will soon be empty of Armenians – for the first time in more than two millennia.

This was a tragedy that could have been avoided. The New York Times recently wrote about what’s now happening in Nagorno-Karabakh that “almost no one saw it coming”. Nothing could be more wrong. Armenians, as well as those who have followed the conflict, have warned for a long time that this was coming.

The global community and its institutions, including the EU, arguably let Azerbaijan get away with its military adventures, which only spurred the country on.

In the summer of 2022, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, visited Baku and concluded an agreement on gas supplies from Azerbaijan to Europe. She has several times since then praised the country as the EU’s “reliable energy partner”.

Bolstered by this backing, a few months later Azerbaijan launched an attack, not on Nagorno-Karabakh but on several areas inside Armenia itself. Since then, Azerbaijan has occupied more than 100 square kilometres of Armenia’s uncontested and internationally recognised territory.

The EU could only appeal for restraint and was relieved when the fighting stopped after two days.

Global inaction

In December 2022, Azerbaijan began a blockade of the Lachin corridor, the only connection between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. In February, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued a binding order that Azerbaijan must immediately allow the unimpeded movement of people and goods along the corridor. Azerbaijan ignored this.

During the summer, the situation worsened for the 120,000 residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, with acute shortages of food, petrol and medicine. Malnutrition was rife. The situation became so serious that several organisations warned of a possible genocide.

At the beginning of August, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued an expert opinion, in which he stated that what Azerbaijan was doing “should be considered a Genocide under Article II, © of the Genocide Convention”.

The article in question gives one definition of genocide as: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

During the more-than-nine months that the blockade lasted, western leaders condemned it and demanded that Azerbaijan lift it. But no measures of force whatsoever were put behind this demand and there were no sanctions, or even threats of sanctions.

The government of Azerbaijan understood the signals. You can bring down a humanitarian crisis on more than a 100,000 people, even to the brink of genocide, without suffering anything but verbal condemnations.

This is ethnic cleansing

After the latest escalation, various prominent EU representatives have once again condemned the use of force and made various appeals. It is as if they don’t see what’s in front of them: the aggressive plans of authoritarian states are not stopped by condemnations and appeals. Much sharper measures are required.

The government that ran what Armenia called Artsakh, or the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, has now collapsed. Its president, Samvel Shahramanyan, has declared that the state will be formally dissolved at the end of this year. The UN has estimated that 88,000 of its 120,000 inhabitants have already fled to Armenia.

Azerbaijan claims that they were not forced to do this, they fled voluntarily. On a superficial level, that is correct as no Azerbaijani soldiers forcibly removed them.

But they are not fleeing voluntarily. Instead they have been put in a situation where they have no other choice. In just over 30 years, Azerbaijan has attacked them four times.

In 2020, many of them sat for weeks in bomb shelters while Azerbaijan attacked with missiles and drones. This summer they have endured acute shortages of food and medicine due to the illegal blockade.

The last straw was the 24-hour bombardment on September 19 that has finally driven the ethnic Armenian population from their homes. I therefore believe it is correct to call this ethnic cleansing.

Five days before the Azerbaijani attack on the enclave a representative of the US government said that the USA would not tolerate the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. Now it has happened and Washington seems to tolerate it, if the lack of sanctions on Azerbaijan are any indication.

It is not over

There is reason to remain concerned about Azerbaijan’s plans. After the suppression of the Karabakh Armenians, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, reiterated what he has said before that he sees what he calls “Western Armenia” as historical Azerbaijani territory that Azerbaijan therefore has the right to reclaim.

By this he means Armenia. In these plans, he has the full backing of Turkey. The first target will be the southern part of Armenia, the province of Syunik, which Azerbaijan calls Zangezur.

Resolute action from the west is needed to ensure that the aggressive Azeri regime does not, in its current victory rush, embark on new military adventures. The EU could introduce sanctions against this regime, something that more than 60 MEPs from different party groups have already recently called for.

Azerbaijan’s assault on Nagorno-Karabakh must have consequences. Should the regime in Baku get away with this with impunity, it will be inspired to continue its aggression against Armenians. This would be a dangerous signal to leaders of other authoritarian states.

The lesson of the tragedy now unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh is that verbal condemnations and appeals do not stop the aggression of authoritarian states. Only sharp measures can do that.

Jo Adetunji

Editor, The Conversation UK

https://theconversation.com/nagorno-karabakh-the-world-should-have-seen-this-crisis-coming-and-its-not-over-yet-214663

[Yervant1]

Canada - Sept 29 2023

Tragedy in real time: The Armenian exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh

Neil Hauer

Special to CTVNews.ca

GORIS, ARMENIA -

It’s the kind of scene that many had hoped were confined to history -- particularly those caught up in them now.

For the past five days, vehicles laden with refugees have poured into Armenia, fleeing from the crumbling enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in neighbouring Azerbaijan. Driving down the Lachin corridor, the only road linking the territory with Armenia and the outside world, they come packed in whatever vehicles they could find.

Cars hold five or six people each, suitcases strapped to the top, while lorries carry stragglers in their open-air cargo beds. Some even arrive on tractors, now their owners’ most valuable possessions.

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Of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 residents, more than 84,000(opens in a new tab) have since left to Armenia. All of them are leaving their homes and lives behind. Few believe there will ever be any return.

ROOTS OF CRISIS GO BACK DECADES

The present crisis has roots stretching back decades, as well as a much more proximate cause. When the internal borders of the Soviet Union were drawn a century ago, Nagorno-Karabakh, despite its overwhelmingly ethnic Armenian population, was placed inside Soviet Azerbaijan. All part of the same country, these borders mattered little -- until they did.

With the Soviet Union crumbling in the late 1980s, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh agitated to be joined with their ethnic kin in Armenia itself. Azerbaijan refused, violently. In the ensuing war, ethnic Armenians came to control not only Nagorno-Karabakh itself but several neighbouring regions of Azerbaijan proper, declaring their own, unrecognized independent state.

That status quo held from 1994 until 2020. Three years ago, Azerbaijan struck back, seizing three-quarters of the land held by the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia brokered a ceasefire and sent its peacekeepers to uphold it. But over the past year-and- a-half, with Moscow both weakened by its war on Ukraine and growing closer to Baku, Azerbaijan pushed the ceasefire’s limits. It blockaded the only road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to the outside world in December, leading to a nine-month siege in which the territory’s 120,000 civilians were pushed into starvation.

Then, last week it struck the finishing blow, launching a 24-hour military offensive that displaced thousands and pushed Nagorno-Karabakh’s government to unconditionally surrender. As part of that surrender, Karabakh’s Armenians were forced to lay down arms and disband their army. Their ability to defend themselves gone, few, if any of them are choosing to stay.

Ethnic Armenians refugees stand with their bags as they return to Stepanakert, the capital of the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

“We left Artsakh [the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh] when they told us to give up our weapons and said we couldn’t defend ourselves anymore,” says Vahe, a 26-year old from the eastern town of Martuni. He does not give his last name for fear of Azerbaijani retribution against his family members who have not crossed into Armenia yet.

Like most young men in Nagorno-Karabakh, Vahe was a member of the Artsakh Defence Army, as the territory’s de facto military is -- or rather, was -- known. He took part in the 24-hour war Azerbaijan launched last Tuesday.

“We quickly went to our [military] unit, got our guns, and went to our positions,” he says. “When we got there, the bombing had already started. They said there was a ceasefire, but soon after, the shooting began again,” says Vahe.

Contrary to Azerbaijan’s insistence that “only military targets” were struck during the offensive, Vahe says artillery shelling struck across Martuni.

“The whole city of Martuni, and all the other towns and cities [of Nagorno-Karabakh], were bombed,” he says.

Vahe’s assertion matches with descriptions of indiscriminate bombardment and war crimes committed by Azerbaijan given by many erstwhile residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. One woman from the village of Sarnaghbyur told the BBC that Azerbaijani shelling of her village killed her two young sons.

Another woman recounted how Azerbaijani soldiers arrived at her village, Vaghuhas, and fired weapons into the air, demanding that all Armenians leave -- the opposite of Azerbaijan’s narrative that the Armenian exodus has been ‘voluntary.’

HIGH CASUALTIES

The casualties in the fighting were high, despite its short duration. Nagorno-Karabakh’s officials have reported at least 190 killed and 360 wounded on their side, although the real number, obscured by a lack of communications and the chaos of the aftermath, is suspected to be far higher. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, officially admits 192 of its servicemen were killed and another 511 wounded.

Many of those displaced now had already lost their homes in the 2020 war. Shura and Arega, an elderly couple who have just arrived in Goris, are one such -- their home village, Mets Tagher, was conquered by Azerbaijan three years ago. All of the inhabitants were either forced out or executed by Azerbaijani troops.

“We went from Mets Tagher to Stepanakert,” says Arega. “Now, we’re going from Stepanakert to Yerevan [Armenia’s capital]. Where is going to be next?” she asks.

It took them 36 hours to pass through the nearly 100 km-long traffic jam leading from Stepanakert to the Armenian border. Like everyone else, they had no access to food, water or medicine on the journey -- Azerbaijan has blocked all international aid organizations from accessing Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin road. They were lucky enough to survive the journey -- reports are rife of deaths occurring among the stranded refugees.

The organization of their arrival has held well enough, at least in the short term. Refugees arriving in Goris are registered at the local coordination point, after which many are placed on buses that take them to cities, towns and villages across Armenia. There are still issues -- many families do not yet have long-term housing sorted -- but despite being a developing country of under three million people, Armenia appears to be coping with the influx better than many expected.

An elderly refugee being helped onto a bus that will take her to her new accommodations in Armenia's northern Tavush province (Neil Hauer for CTV News)

This is all very appreciated by those coming from Nagorno-Karabakh. But it will never replace home.

“We all long for the day we can return to our homeland,” says Vahe. “But we know it will never come about under Azerbaijan.”

Neil Hauer(opens in a new tab) is a Canadian journalist and analyst focused on the Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine

The Armenian exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh | CTV News

[Yervant1]

 

CounterPunch

Sept 29 2023

 

Responsibility to Protect the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh

BY ALFRED DE ZAYAS

If the “doctrine” of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) means anything[1], then it applies to the tragedy unfolding since 2020 in the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, better known as Nagorno Karabakh. The illegal aggression by Azerbaijan in 2020, accompanied by war crimes and crimes against humanity, as documented among others by Human Rights Watch[2], constituted a continuation of the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians[3]. It should be duly investigated by the International Criminal Court in the Hague pursuant to articles 5, 6, 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute.[4] The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev should be indicted and prosecuted. There must not be impunity for these crimes.

As former UN Independent Expert, and because of the gravity of the Azeri offensive of September 2023, I have proposed to the President of the UN Human Rights Council, Ambassador Vaclav Balek, and to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk to convene a Special Session of the Human Rights Council to stop the egregious violations of human rights committed by Azerbaijan and provide immediate humanitarian assistance to the Armenian population, victim, among other things of an illegal siege and blockade which have caused deaths by hunger and a massive exodus toward Armenia.

This mountainous region adjacent to Armenia is what is left of 3000-year-old settlements of the Armenian ethnic group, already known to the Persians and Greeks as Alarodioi, mentioned by Darius I and Herodotus. The Armenian kingdom flourished in Roman times with is capital, Artashat (Artaxata) on the Aras River near modern Yerevan. King Tiridates III was converted to Christianity by St. Gregory the Illuminator (Krikor) in 314 and established Christianity as the state religion. Byzantine emperor Justinian I reorganized Armenia into four provinces and completed the task of Hellenizing the country by the year 536.

In the 8th century, Armenia came under increasing Arab influence but retained its distinct Christian identity and traditions. In the 11th century, Byzantine Emperor Basil II extinguished Armenian independence and soon after the Seljuq Turks conquered the territory. In the 13th century the whole of Armenia fell into Mongol hands, but Armenian life and learning, continued to be centered around the church and preserved in the monasteries and village communities. Following the capture of Constantinople and the killing of the last Byzantine Emperor, the Ottomans established their rule over the Armenians but respected the prerogatives of the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. The Russian Empire conquered part of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh in 1813, the rest remaining under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. With the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians and other Christian minorities began. It is estimated that approximately a million and a half Armenians and nearly a million Greeks from Pontos, Smyrna[5] as well as other Christians of the Ottoman empire were exterminated, the first genocide of the 20th century.

The suffering of the Armenians and in particular of the population of Nagorno Karabakh did not end with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, because the revolutionary Soviet Union incorporated Nagorno Karabakh into the new Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, in spite of the legitimate protests of the Armenians. Repeated requests for the implementation of their right of self-determination to be part of the rest of Armenia were dismissed by the Soviet hierarchy. Only following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did Armenia become independent and Nagorno Karabakh similarly declared independence.

Here would have been the moment for the United Nations to step in and organize self-determination referenda and facilitate the reunification of all Armenians. But no, the international community and the United Nations again failed the Armenians by not ensuring that the successor states of the Soviet Union would have rational, sustainable frontiers conducive to peace and security for all. Indeed, by the same logic as Azerbaijan invoked self-determination and became independent from the Soviet Union, the Armenian population living unhappily under Azeri rule had a right to independence from Azerbaijan. Indeed, if the principle of self-determination applies to the whole, it must also apply to the parts. But the people of Nagorno Karabakh were denied this right, and no one in the world seemed to care.

The systematic bombardment of Stepanakert and other civilian centers in Nagorno Karabakh during the 2020 war caused very high casualties and enormous damage to infrastructures. The authorities of Nagorno Karabakh had to capitulate. Less than three years later their hopes for self-determination have vanished.

The Azerbaijani aggressions against the population of Nagorno Karabakh constitute egregious violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force. Moreover, there were grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Red Cross Conventions and 1977 Protocols. Again, no one has been prosecuted for these crimes, and it does not seem that anyone will be, unless the international community raises its voice in outrage.

The blockade of foods and supplies by Azerbaijan, and the cutting of the Lachin corridor certainly fall within the scope of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which prohibits in its article II c “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”[6] Accordingly, any state party can refer the matter to the International Court of Justice pursuant to article IX of the Convention, which stipulates “Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”

Simultaneously, the matter should be referred to the International Criminal Court because of the flagrant commission of the “Crime of aggression” under the Statute of Rome and Kampala definition. The International Criminal Court should investigate the facts and indict not only Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev but also his accomplices in Baku, and, of course, Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Nagorno Karabakh is a classical case of unjust denial of the right of self-determination, which is solidly anchored in the UN Charter (articles, 1, 55, Chapter XI, Chapter XII) and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 1 of which stipulates:

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.

3. The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.

[7]

The situation in Nagorno Karabakh is not unlike the situation of the Albanian Kosovars under Slobodan Milosevic.[8] What takes priority? Territorial integrity or the right of self-determination? Paragraph 80 of the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Kosovo ruling of 22 July 2010 clearly gave priority to the right of self-determination[9].

It is the ultima irratio, the ultimate irrationality and criminal irresponsibility to wage war against the exercise of the right of self-determination by the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh. As I argued in my 2014 report to the General Assembly[10], it is not the right of self-determination that causes wars but the unjust denial thereof. Hence, it is time to recognize that the realization of the right of self-determination is a conflict-prevention strategy and that the suppression of self-determination constitutes a threat to international peace and security for purposes of Article 39 of the UN Charter. In February 2018, I spoke before the European Parliament on this very subject, in the presence of many dignitaries from the Republic of Artsakh.

The international community cannot condone the aggression of Azerbaijan against the people of Nagorno Karabakh, because that would establish a precedent that territorial integrity could be established by State terror and force of arms against the will of the populations concerned. Imagine if Serbia were to attempt to reestablish its rule over Kosovo by invading and bombarding Kosovo. What would the world’s reaction be?

Of course, we are witnessing a similar outrage, when Ukraine tries to “recover” the Donbas or Crimea, although these territories are populated overwhelmingly by Russians, who not only speak Russian, but feel Russian and intend to preserve their identity and their traditions. It is preposterous to think that after waging war against the Russian population of Donbas since the Maidan coup d’état in 2014, there would be any possibility of incorporating these territories into Ukraine. Too much blood has been shed since 2014, and the principle of “remedial secession” would certainly apply. I was in Crimea and Donbas in 2004 as a representative of the UN for the parliamentary and presidential elections. Without a shadow of a doubt, a very large majority of these people are Russians, who, in principle, would have remained Ukrainian citizens but for the unconstitutional Maidan coup d’état and the egregious official incitement to hatred against everything Russian that followed the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych. The Ukrainian government breached Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights when it persecuted the Russian-speaker in Ukraine. The Azeri government has also violated Article 20 ICCPR because of its incitement of hatred toward the Armenians — for decades.

Another hypothesis that no one has hitherto dared to raise: Imagine, just as an intellectual exercise, that a future German government, relying on 700 years of German history and settlement in East-Central Europe, were to reclaim by force the old German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, which were taken by Poland at the end of WWII[11]. After all, Germans had settled in and cultivated these territories in the early Middle Ages, founded cities like Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Stettin, Danzig, Breslau, etc. We remember that at the end of the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, pursuant to articles 9 and 13 of the Potsdam communiqué (it was not a treaty), it was announced that Poland would get “compensation” in land and that the local population would be simply expelled — ten million Germans who lived in these provinces, a brutal expulsion[12] that resulted in the death of approximately one million lives[13]. The collective expulsion of ethnic Germans by Poland 1945-48, exclusively because they were German, was a criminal racist act, a crime against humanity. It was accompanied by the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, entailing five more million expellees and an additional million deaths. By far and away this mass expulsion and spoliation of mostly innocent Germans from their homelands constituted the worst ethnic cleansing in European history.[14] But, really, would the world tolerate any attempt by Germany to “recover” its lost provinces? Would it not violate article 2(4) of the UN Charter in the same way that the Azeri onslaught on Nagorno Karabakh has violated the prohibition of the use of force contained in the UN Charter and thereby endangered international peace and security?

It is a sad commentary on the state of our morals, on the non-respect of our humanitarian values, that many of us are accomplices in the crime of silence and indifference toward the Armenian victims of Azerbaijan[15].

We see a classical case where the international Responsibility to Protect principle must apply. But who will invoke it in the UN General Assembly? Who will demand accountability from Azerbaijan?

Notes.

[1] Paragraphs 138 and 139 of General Assembly Resolution 60/1 of 24 October 2005. https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FRES%2F60%2F1&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False

[2]https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/11/azerbaijan-unlawful-strikes-nagorno-karabakh

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/19/azerbaijan-armenian-pows-abused-custody

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/10/human-rights-groups-detail-war-crimes-in-nagorno-karabakh

[3] Alfred de Zayas, The Genocide against the Armenians and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention, Haigazian University Press, Beirut, 2010

Tribunal Permanent des Peuples, Le Crime de Silence. Le Genocide des Arméniens, Flammarion, Paris 1984.

[4] https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf

[5] Tessa Hofmann (ed.), The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, Aristide Caratzas, New York, 2011.

[6] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf

[7] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

[8] A. de Zayas « The Right to the Homeland, Ethnic Cleansing and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia » Criminal Law Forum, Vol.6, pp. 257-314.

[9] https://www.icj-cij.org/case/141

[10] A/69/272

[11] Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge 1977. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, Macmillan, 1994.

De Zayas “International Law and Mass Population Transfers”, Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 16, pp. 207-259.

[12] Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values, London 1946, Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London 1947.

[13] Statistisches Bundesamt, Die deutschen Vertreibungsverluste, Wiesbaden, 1957.

Kurt Böhme, Gesucht Wird, Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, Munich, 1965.

Report of the Joint Relief Commission of the International Red Cross, 1941-46, Geneva, 1948.

Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Dokumentation der Vertreibung, Bonn, 1953 (8 volumes).

Das Schweizerische Rote Kreuz – Eine Sondernummer des deutschen Flüchtlingsproblems, Nr. 11/12, Bern, 1949.

[14] A. de Zayas, 50 Theses on the Expulsion of the Germans, Inspiration, London 2012.

[15] See my BBC interview on Nagorno Karabakh, 28 September 2023, beginning on minute 8:50. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172z0758gyvzw4

Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of twelve books including “Building a Just World Order” (2021) “Countering Mainstream Narratives” 2022, and “The Human Rights Industry” (Clarity Press, 2021).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/09/29/responsibility-to-protect-the-armenian-population-of-nagorno-karabakh/

[MosJan]