The president of the self-declared “Republic of Artsakh”, Samvel Shahramanyan, has dissolved all institutions of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh and almost all Karabakh Armenians are now thought to fled the enclave being reintegrated into Azerbaijan. What lessons can be drawn from the tragic epilogue of this three decades-long secessionist conflict in Europe?
The images of long queues of cars escaping mountainous Karabakh to neighbouring Armenia bring back dark memories of ethnic cleansing that Europe thought had been relegated to its past. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its imperial follies, trenches and wanton destruction, catapulted Europe back into the harrowing days of the world wars, the flight of ethnic Armenians rewinds us to the Balkans of the 1990s – or even further back, to the end of the Ottoman empire during the first world war.
