Your reporting on the Karabakh Armenian exodus (‘It’s a ghost town’: UN arrives in Nagorno-Karabakh to find ethnic Armenians have fled, 2 October) does not reflect the trauma felt by Azeris when they were forced out of their homes across the disputed territory and from large swathes of Azerbaijan proper in 1992-94. I understand why the emphasis is on the tragic exodus of Karabakh Armenians from their ancestral homes, and I am no fan of Azerbaijan’s autocracy, but I was in the region in 1992-94, reporting for the Guardian and the BBC, and I think some perspective is in order.
I watched thousands of Azeris fleeing with all their worldly possessions on foot over mountains and across plains in the face of the Armenian advance in 1992-94. By some calculations, 800,000 Azeris lost their homes in Karabakh, the surrounding areas of Azerbaijan and Armenia during the 1988-94 period.
There is the personal trauma of becoming a refugee and then there is the humiliation of a state: in 1992-94 Azerbaijan lost about 15% of its territory to the Karabakh Armenians, army units from Armenia proper and volunteers from the Armenian diaspora.
Azerbaijan was always going to hanker after its lost lands, and petrol wealth was always going to make reconquest likely. That’s why the Armenian exodus today is so tragic in a Shakespearean sense; the Armenians should have negotiated a sensible settlement when they were in the ascendant. Now it’s sadly much too late.
Alexis Rowell
Paris, France
• Thanks to Nathalie Tocci for her article (Nagorno-Karabakh’s tragedy has echoes of Europe’s dark past. But a remedy lies in Europe too, 2 October). EU membership for Armenia would ensure its survival as a small, landlocked nation whose citizens have worked incredibly hard to build democracy in a region bereft of it. I sincerely hope it can be achieved. Tocci’s analysis is insightful. The blame for the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh lies with both Azeris and Armenians, who had 30 years after the 1988-94 war to find a solution for the governance of the enclave. That they did not is a serious failure of diplomacy on both sides.
However, Tocci writes that Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev “has not ordered the 120,000 local Armenians to leave, let alone pointed a gun at their heads”. While there may not have been physical guns pointed, there were virtual guns – big ones – pointing right at them. The Aliyev regime ordered a 10-month blockade, during which time local Armenians were starved and deprived of medicine. And it ordered the shelling of Stepanakert, violating ceasefire agreements and threatening civilians with death. The regime now offers Armenians citizenship in an autocratic country in which they are widely and openly despised. The idea that there are “no guns pointing at their heads” is precisely the Azerbaijani state narrative. Let us not repeat it without these important qualifications.
Gascia Ouzounian
Oxford
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