Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of Nagorno-Karabakh, signed a decree to dissolve the breakaway state, which Armenians call Artsakh, and all of its institutions on Jan. 1.
In some respects, the outcome reinforced the international order by restoring Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. That could offer some hope to countries such as Ukraine, whose borders have been violated and territories stolen, and potentially serve as a warning to regions such as Catalonia in Spain and Kurdistan in Turkey and Syria, which want to redraw maps to match their aspirations for ethno-nationalist self-determination.
But the U.N. resolutions that recognized Azerbaijan’s borders had long denounced the displacement of civilians and demanded a durable cease-fire and peaceful negotiations to resolve the territorial dispute.
The brief and brutal military offensive last week by Azerbaijan, which was condemned by the international community, caused still-untallied civilian deaths and set off an exodus of residents who say they fear genocide and, in any case, are unwilling to live under Azerbaijani rule.
More than 76,000 people — over half the region’s residents — have crossed the border to Armenia. Some officials believe the entire population will leave.
President Biden dispatched two top officials to Armenia and Azerbaijan this week to address humanitarian conditions and to press Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to accept an international mission to ensure the safety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents.
Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Yuri Kim, acting assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, met with Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and announced $11.5 million in humanitarian assistance to help people who have fled to Armenia.
Aliyev expressed openness to the international mission. But the dissolution of the government on Thursday, a day after Power and Kim met with him in Baku, suggested the U.S. outreach had done little to convince him to hold back from a full-scale crackdown.
“Last week’s unacceptable military operation has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse,” Power said Thursday in a statement. “Azerbaijan must protect civilians, uphold its obligations to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all individuals in its country, and ensure its forces comply with international humanitarian law.”
Azerbaijan’s strike highlighted the futility of decades of international diplomacy known as the Minsk process and the failure of a three-year-old Russian peacekeeping mission. The Russian force was deployed in 2020 to enforce a fragile cease-fire following a 44-day war in which Azerbaijan took back most of the territory it lost during a war in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“This is the end of Artsakh and centuries old Armenian presence in the region,” said Kevork Oskanian, a lecturer in comparative politics at Exeter University in Britain. “It is yet another trauma added to the traumas of the past.”
Oskanian, who focuses on the former Soviet Union, said the end of Artsakh also means the loss of sites that are culturally important to Armenia and could create enduring political instability and bitterness.
Azerbaijan has complained for decades about the loss of culturally important sites and the political instability and bitterness caused when Armenia seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding Azerbaijani regions. Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani residents were displaced.
On Thursday, Azerbaijani officials and diplomats insisted that they were not seeking the departure of the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and were prepared to reintegrate them. But many locals said they would not risk persecution or death at the hands of a country they have viewed for most of their lives as a sworn enemy.
During talks with Karabakh Armenians in recent days, Azerbaijani officials did not offer autonomy or plans for locally elected government, but they promised equal cultural and religious rights to those who stayed.
“The Armenian population in Karabakh can now breathe easy. They are our citizens,” Aliyev said last week. Only “those at the top of the criminal regime” in Nagorno-Karabakh would be held accountable, he said.
The push for that accountability appeared to be underway.
Prominent members of the Nagorno-Karabakh government have been arrested or surrendered at the demand of Azerbaijani authorities. Many calls and messages to Artsakh ministers went unanswered amid reports that the phone network in Nagorno-Karabakh had been shut down.
David Babayan, the longtime spokesman for the breakaway government and, briefly, its foreign minister, said he planned to hand himself over to authorities in Shusha, a city now controlled by Azerbaijan.
“You all know that I am included in the black list of Azerbaijan, and that the Azerbaijani side demanded my arrival in Baku for an appropriate investigation,” Babayan wrote on Facebook.
“This decision, of course, will cause great pain and stress to my loved ones, but I am sure they will understand,” Babayan said. “My failure to appear or worse, my escape, will cause serious harm to our long suffering people.”
Azerbaijani border guards said Wednesday that they had detained Ruben Vardanyan, the former state minister of Artsakh, and on Thursday, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service announced several charges against him, including financing state terrorism.
Azerbaijani authorities published a video of Vardanyan in handcuffs being escorted by masked armed guards at a detention center in Baku. He faces at least 12 years in prison, officials said.
In the border city of Goris, Armenian officials have converted a theater into a refugee center. Zelita Babayan, 63, and her family, who arrived Thursday afternoon, were unloading belongings in bundles onto the pavement.
Alisa, 12, sat on the bundles and cried. Babayan, still in the bathrobe and house shoes she was wearing on the day she was evacuated from the village of Chartar, said the family had barely two hours to pack their life’s belongings. A local military unit put them and 29 others into a truck and drove for three days to reach Goris.
“We loved our life there we can’t live without it,” Babayan said. “I think we can’t live here long in Armenia without it — our motherland.”
Babayan said she felt extreme fear while passing through an Azerbaijani checkpoint — a feeling described by others fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh as the reason they do not believe reintegration plans would ever succeed. “We couldn’t live like, that with them ruling over us,” Babayan said.
The long lines of vehicles streaming into Armenia, the wrenching images of exhausted children and multiple generations of families abandoning their homes with few belongings drew parallels with other historic displacements — in the Balkans, in Israel and the Palestinian territories and in Nagorno-Karabakh more than a generation ago.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been fiercely contested by predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and predominantly Christian Armenia for decades.
On Dec. 10, 1991, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh voted in a referendum for the creation of an independent state. Local Azerbaijanis boycotted the vote. A formal declaration of independence was issued in January 1992.
In the war that ensued, both sides committed massacres. It ended with a decisive Armenian victory in 1994. The vast majority of Azerbaijanis fled the territory.
Azerbaijan recaptured most of the occupied areas in the 2020 war. For roughly 10 months before the surprise offensive last week, Azerbaijan blocked the sole road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, hindering supplies of food and essential goods.
The failure, or refusal, of Russian peacekeeping forces to prevent the blockade raised suspicions about Moscow’s motives and intentions. The Kremlin has been distracted by its war in Ukraine, but it also has expressed disdain for the Pashinyan’s government. Russia also has cultivated its relationship with Turkey, a strong backer of Azerbaijan.
The 2020 cease-fire brokered by Moscow left uncertain the fate of Armenians remaining in Nagorno-Karabakh. Fifty thousand live in Stepanakert, the regional capital.
The 2020 war left the Nagorno-Karabakh government in disarray and disagreement over whether to engage in talks with Baku. There were multiple resignations and reshuffles. In May, the breakaway state denounced Pashinyan after he said Yerevan recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.
Nagorno-Karabakh President Arayik Harutyunyan resigned in August. In his final decree he appointed Shahramanyan, 44, to be state minister. Shahramanyan was inaugurated as president on Sept. 10 after an election in parliament in which he was the sole candidate.
Some refugees streaming out Nagorno-Karabakh spoke of betrayal. Some blamed Russia for failing to protect them. Others blamed Armenia or the Artsakh government. But most acknowledged that the fading, war-exhausted republic of Artsakh had few resources and little capacity to oppose the Azerbaijani army.
Elina Mkrtchyan, 22, arrived in Goris on Wednesday night with her 2-year-old daughter, Gabriela. She did not blame Shahramanyan for signing Thursday’s decree. She said the Artsakh government “hadn’t estimated Baku’s real powers” and the presidency should have been given to someone who could sit and negotiate with Azerbaijan.
“I don’t think they were working to achieve peace in the end — they were just doing what Yerevan told them to do,” she said, She said the Artsakh republic had effectively ended the day Pashinyan recognized Azerbaijan’s territorial sovereignty.
Another refugee, Artur Babayan, 26, said that “if there are no Armenians there, there is no need to have a Nagorno-Karabakh state. A president would have no people.”
Artur Babayan said he has no plans to return to Nagorno-Karabakh under Azerbaijani control, but he would fight to reclaim it. “I’m ready to get the country back at any cost,” he said. “If we have what we need to go and fight for it back, I’ll be ready to fight. I’d go back tomorrow.”
Michael Birnbaum in Washington contributed to this report.
