Azerbaijan carried out “ethnic cleansing” against the Armenian population 14 months ago in attacks on the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, a new report by the Washington-based non-profit organization Freedom House has concluded.
The comprehensive report, released on the first day of COP29, the United Nations climate conference that took place this month in Azerbaijan, draws upon interviews with more than 300 Karabakh Armenians. The summit, which began on Nov. 11, wrapped up this weekend in Baku, the country’s capital, under the auspices of the same government that’s accused of committing crimes against humanity.
Human rights groups, environmental activist Greta Thunberg and politicians in Canada and the United States were among those expressing disappointment and alarm that the conference was being held in a major oil-producing country with a dubious record of upholding rights — a charge that Azerbaijan’s political leaders called “disgusting” and a “smear campaign.”
The Freedom House report includes accounts from survivors of last fall’s military action, including from this woman about the start of the assault: “On September 19, [2023], I came home at noon to have lunch. My child came and told me they had heard an explosion. I saw through the window that they were shooting at the residential area.”
Less than two weeks later, the interviewee, her child and more than 100,000 other ethnic Armenians would be refugees, part of a campaign of violent forced displacement that ended more than a millennium of Armenian settlement there.
The report, titled Why Are There No Armenians In Nagorno-Karabakh?, is an exhaustive indictment of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his government.
Conducted by researchers from Freedom House and six partner organizations — four Armenia-based groups experienced in field research, a Ukrainian NGO focused on Russian war crimes, and a Brussels-based group — its conclusions do not mince words.
The final 24-hour offensive by Azerbaijani troops on the territory last year was “the culmination of an intensive, years-long campaign,” in which the perpetrators “willfully killed civilians and enjoyed absolute impunity” in doing so, the report said. “The Azerbaijani state’s actions,” it concludes, “constitute ethnic cleansing using forced displacement as a means.”
Exodus of almost entire population
The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh was one of the former Soviet Union’s longest-running disputes. Local Armenians in the region, backed by Armenia itself, fought a successful war to secede from newly independent Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Azerbaijan struck back in 2020, conquering three-quarters of the territory in a 44-day war.
Russian peacekeepers entered the territory following the war’s end but proved helpless to stop either Azerbaijan’s nine-month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh or its military offensive on Sept. 19, 2023 — the latter of which resulted in its complete capture and the exodus of nearly its entire population.
The hundreds of testimonies on these events gathered in Freedom House’s new report make for a harrowing read.
“People were starving and were fainting in the lines for bread,” one interviewee states, describing the famine-like conditions during Azerbaijan’s blockade, which cut off all access to the outside world — including crucial food supplies. “It was very difficult to survive. We were thinking that at the end we would really starve.”
The testimonies on the final Azerbaijani offensive and subsequent exodus paint an even worse picture. “I was surrounded by children and tried to prevent panic,” says one woman, from the village of Sarnaghbyur. “I told them not to be afraid and suggested they pray. And right at that moment we heard an explosion near us,” she says, describing how Azerbaijani shelling killed five civilians, including three children.
Others detail Azerbaijani servicemen mocking and harassing them — sometimes even beating them or stealing their jewelry — as they made the perilous journey to Armenia. “[The Azerbaijanis] turned up their music loud, yelled something at us, insulted us with finger gestures and told us: ‘Leave, leave!'” says another local.
The intensity of these stories made even producing the report a difficult experience, researchers say.
“There are chilling testimonies from Karabakh Armenians that were hard to read, even for us,” said Andranik Shirinyan, Freedom House’s country representative for Armenia. “Mentally and psychologically, working on this report has been difficult for everyone involved.”
Evidence in report a ‘call to action’
The sum total of the Azerbaijani government’s actions, and the unlivable environment created by them in Nagorno-Karabakh, was the basis of Freedom House’s declaration of ethnic cleansing in the region.
“‘Ethnic cleansing’ is not a defined legal term — it’s a political term that is used to stress the gravity of the atrocities that have happened in a given territory,” Shirinyan said.
“We analyzed three periods — the post-2020 war period, the blockade and the exodus. While analyzing these, we came across findings of extrajudicial killings, of torture, of human rights violations, of grave human rights violations. We realized that Azerbaijan created an environment in Nagorno-Karabakh that wouldn’t allow the ethnic Armenian community there to stay and live in dignity.”
Freedom House based its assessment in part on legal conclusions from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a United Nations body that prosecuted war crimes committed during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s.
A United Nations spokesperson on Friday said the UN would be sending a humanitarian team to Nagorno-Karabakh this weekend as more than 100,000 refugees have now arrived in Armenia from neighbouring Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan retook control of the enclave in a military offensive on Sept. 19.
The similarities between war crimes there and the Azerbaijani government’s actions in Nagorno-Karabakh make the term “ethnic cleansing” entirely appropriate, other human rights experts say.
“Freedom House’s in-depth investigation demonstrates how Azerbaijani authorities’ September 2023 offensive is in line with similar crimes of forced displacement [that] international courts have examined,” said Steve Swerdlow, a human rights lawyer and international relations associate professor at the University of Southern California.
“These include the former Yugoslavia, as well as more recent cases, such as Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. The damning evidence in this report is a call to action to international courts against impunity.”
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.
‘Now I truly have nowhere to return’
Amid the brutality, the nearly 2,000-strong Russian peacekeeping contingent stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh merely stood by and watched, the report says. It’s replete with anecdotes describing their passivity and refusal to confront Azerbaijani violence.
“We saw so many instances where Russian soldiers just stood by while Azerbaijani soldiers were threatening the livelihoods of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians,” Shirinyan said. “It is safe to say that the Russian peacekeepers were unable or unwilling to fulfil their duties.”
Shirinyan said he hopes that the report will help to bring about some sort of accountability for the Azerbaijani government, at least in the long term, despite the fact that Baku is presently engaged in erasing all traces of Armenian presence in the region.
Most Karabakh Armenians have long since lost such hope.
“Until recently, I had a tiny little hope, fuelled by international calls for the return of Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh,” said Lilit Shahverdyan, a journalist from Stepanakert, the now-empty capital of the region.
“A few days ago, our house was demolished, along with the entire neighbourhood where I grew up. Countless other residential buildings are being ransacked daily,” she said.
“I firmly believe that Aliyev’s intention is to crush any hope we have of going back…. Now I truly have nowhere to return.”