Nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population has left Nagorno-Karabakh, as the first United Nations mission arrived in the largely deserted mountainous region on Sunday.
Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN secretary general, said the United Nations team on the ground, the first UN mission to the region in 30 years, would “identify the humanitarian needs” both for people remaining and “the people that are on the move”.
Many of the Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabkah said they felt the international mission’s visit came too late, after Azerbaijan reclaimed the area in a lightning military operation last month.
Sitting on a bench near the central Republic Square in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, Aren Harutyunyan, who left the region known by Armenians as Artsakh last week, blamed the “international community” for the exodus.
“What is there left for the UN to monitor?” said Harutyunyan, 53, who arrived in Yerevan on Friday after a gruelling three-day journey from Stepanakert, the Nagorno-Karabakh capital.
“No one is there any more, everyone is gone, it’s a ghost town.”
Armenian authorities said that by Monday evening, more than 100,500 people, from a population of about 120,000, had fled to Armenia from Artsakh.
In footage aired by the Al Jazeera TV channel over the weekend, an empty central square in Stepanakert can be seen, littered with rubbish, abandoned prams and children’s scooters.
“Where were the international monitors when we were being starved? It is too late now,” Harutyunyan grumbled, referring to the months-long Azerbaijani blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
Hunan Tadevosyan, a spokesperson for Nagorno-Karabakh’s emergency services, said on Sunday that the number of civilians left in Stepanakert could be “counted on one hand”.
Artak Beglaryan, an Armenian former separatist official, said that “the last groups” of Nagorno-Karabakh residents were on their way to Armenia. “At most a few hundred persons remain, most of whom are officials, emergency services employees, volunteers, some persons with special needs,” he wrote on social media.
In a report about its visit, the UN on Monday confirmed the mass Armenian exodus. “As few as 50 to 1,000 ethnic Armenians are reported to be left in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan after the exodus of recent days saw more than 100,000 flee,” it said.
“The mission was struck by the sudden manner in which the local population left their homes and the suffering the experience must have caused.”
The exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh has been described by Armenian officials as “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing”, an accusation Azerbaijan has rejected, saying the departure of Armenians was “their personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation”.
Armenia, a country of 2.8 million, faces a major challenge housing the sudden influx of refugees, many of whom “are hungry, exhausted and need immediate assistance”, according to the UN refugee agency.
On the northern outskirts of Yerevan, Tamara, 35, was sitting on a bench near a small playground, watching over her two young children. “I try not to cry in front of them,” she said. “But it is very hard. We lost everything.”
“It’s not just our house that we abandoned … It’s our history, who we are,” she said.
After leaving her home in Nagorno-Karabakh, Tamara, like most other refugees from the region, first arrived in Goris, a resort town near the border with Azerbaijan, where she spent three nights with her children in a crowded hostel.
Last Saturday, Tamara’s cousin picked her up from Goris and drove the family to Yerevan, where she now shares a cramped two-bedroom flat with six other relatives. “Back there we had our own garden and now we have to sleep on the floor,” she said. “But at least I have my children with me, they are safe.”
Tamara said she decided to burn her family books and other personal belongings, including an old piano, fearing they would fall into Azerbaijani hands.
Her desperate act highlights some of the deep-rooted distrust felt on both sides, poisoned by ethnic hatred ensuing from three wars in as many decades. In the 1990s, the Azerbaijani population was itself expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced within Azerbaijan.
On Monday, Azerbaijan’s officials said they would guarantee “the equal rights and freedoms of everyone” in Nagorno-Karabakh, “regardless of ethnic, religious or linguistic affiliation”.
Most Armenians have left because they do not believe that Azerbaijani authorities will treat them fairly and humanely or guarantee them their language, religion and culture.
For many Armenians, grim memories of the previous round of fighting linger. In 2020, during a six-week war, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region in the south Caucasus mountains along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed earlier.
Explaining her decision to leave, Tamara brought up the graphic social media clips of Azerbaijani soldiers desecrating corpses and prisoners being shot dead, clips that raised the alarm of international human rights groups. “I don’t see how we can trust Azerbaijan,” she said, shaking her head.
The recent arrests by Azerbaijan of several high-profile officials from Karabakh further hardened the concerns of ethnic Armenians.
Last week, Azerbaijani border police detained Ruben Vardanyan, a billionaire banker and philanthropist, who previously headed Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist government between November 2022 and February 2023.
Since then, Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general, Kamran Aliyev, has announced that 300 criminal cases have been initiated into war crimes committed by 300 separatist officials.
Over the weekend, several other senior former officials of the breakaway region were also detained as they left Nagorno-Karabakh, including Davit Manukyan, a former commander of the Artsakh defence army.
It remains unclear how many of those wanted by Baku remain in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“I urge those persons to surrender voluntarily,” Aliyev, the prosecutor, told journalists on Sunday.
