- Ethnic Armenians leave Karabakh – leadership
- 120,000 people could move to Armenia
- The process of surrendering weapons is underway
- Humanitarian aid begins to arrive
- Some wounded were evacuated from Karabakh (Armenia).
NEAR KORNIDSOR, Armenia, Sept 24 (Portal) – Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians will leave for Armenia because they do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan and fear ethnic cleansing, the breakaway region’s leadership told Portal on Sunday with.
The Armenian prime minister also said Karabakh Armenians were likely to leave the region and that Armenia was ready to accept them after Azerbaijan suffered defeat last week in a conflict dating back to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but previously outside Baku’s control, were forced to declare a ceasefire on September 20 after a lightning-fast 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.
Azerbaijan says it will guarantee their rights and integrate the region, but Armenians say they fear repression.
“Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. 99.9 percent prefer to leave our historic country,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, told Portal.
“The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and shame for the Armenian people and for the entire civilized world,” Babayan said. “Those who are responsible for our fate will one day have to answer to God for their sins.”
The ethnic Armenian fighters have started giving up their weapons, Babayan said. He said it was unclear when the population would move down the Lachin corridor, which links the territory with Armenia, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has faced calls to resign over his failure to save Karabakh.
Addressing the nation, Pashinyan said some humanitarian aid had arrived but Karabakh’s Armenians still faced “the risk of ethnic cleansing.”
“If real living conditions and effective mechanisms for protection against ethnic cleansing are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in their homes, the likelihood that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see expulsion from their homeland as the only way out increases.”
Armenia “will lovingly welcome our brothers and sisters from Nagorno-Karabakh,” Pashinyan said, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
A mass exodus could alter the delicate balance of power in the South Caucasus region, a patchwork of ethnic groups crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines and where Russia, the United States, Turkey and Iran vie for influence.
AZERI VICTORY
Azerbaijan’s victory last week appears to finally end one of the decades-old “frozen conflicts” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. President Ilham Aliyev said his iron fist had made the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karabakh a thing of the past and that the region would be turned into a “paradise” as part of Azerbaijan.
According to Armenia, more than 200 people were killed and 400 injured in the Azerbaijani military operation. The fate of the ethnic Armenian population has raised concerns in Moscow, Washington and Brussels.
Nagorno-Karabakh, called Artsakh by Armenians, lies in an area that over the centuries has come under the rule of Persians, Turks, Russians, Ottomans and Soviets. After the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, it was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia. During Soviet times, it was designated as an autonomous region within Azerbaijan.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Armenians there escaped Azerbaijani control and conquered neighboring territories in what is now the First Karabakh War. From 1988 to 1994, about 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people, mostly Azerbaijanis, were displaced.
In 2020, with support from Turkey, Azerbaijan won the decisive 44-day Second Karabakh War after decades of skirmishes and recaptured territories in and around Karabakh. That war ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal that Armenians accuse Moscow of failing to guarantee.
Armenian authorities in the region said late Saturday that about 150 tons of humanitarian cargo from Russia and another 65 tons of flour shipped by the International Committee of the Red Cross had arrived in the region.
“Given the scale of the humanitarian needs, we are strengthening our presence there with specialized personnel in the areas of health, forensics, protection and weapons contamination,” the ICRC said in a statement.
With 2,000 peacekeepers in the region, Russia said six armored vehicles, more than 800 small arms, anti-tank weapons and man-portable air defense systems and 22,000 ammunition rounds had been surrendered as part of the ceasefire by Saturday.
Pashinyan, who publicly accused Russia of not supporting Armenia, said on Friday that space had been prepared in Armenia for 40,000 people from Karabakh.
Azerbaijan, which is mostly Muslim, has said that Armenians, who are Christians, can leave if they want.
Around 20 ambulances are expected to evacuate some of the wounded from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, a humanitarian source who spoke on condition of anonymity told Portal.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has held urgent talks with Armenia and Azerbaijan, said on social media: “The United States will continue to provide unwavering support for Armenia and its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Reporting by Felix Light near KORNIDZOR in Armenia and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow. Text by Lidia Kelly and Guy Faulconbridge. Edited by William Mallard and Peter Graff
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