Armenia is ready to receive all Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said in his address to the nation on Sunday.
According to Pashinyan, the probability that the Armenians living in Karabakh will leave their homes is constantly increasing.
– Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are still at risk of being victims of ethnic cleansing. Humanitarian aid has arrived, but it will not change the situation in any direction, says Pashinyan, according to Russian state-owned news agency TASS.
– If living conditions are not genuinely created for the Armenians of Karabakh that protect them from ethnic cleansing, leaving might be the only way for them to be saved.
The prime minister also indirectly criticized Russia for abandoning the Armenians by stating that the country’s international defense cooperation has shown its ineffectiveness. For decades, Russia has been Armenia’s biggest supporter in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and has tried to act as a mediator in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Earlier on Sunday, the advisor to the president of Nagorno-Karabakh, i.e. Artsakh Republic David Babayan stated that virtually all Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh want to leave the region if it comes under Azerbaijan.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a region belonging to Azerbaijan that has been under Armenian administration. Last week, Azerbaijan nudged the Karabakh resistance militarily.
In Babayan’s practice, all the Armenian residents of Karabakh, i.e. 120,000 people, move to mother Armenia through the Lachin pass. He did not say when this would happen.
Armenians do not want to live under the command of the Azeris, and they are also afraid of the repressions of the Azeris. According to Babayan, the fate of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh is a shame for Armenia as well as for the whole world that abandoned them.
At the moment, claims about the escape of Karabakh Armenians are still at a theoretical level. An expert who followed the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict closely Mikko Palonkorpi however, I don’t think it’s just an empty threat.
– In my opinion, no one stays there. Armenians experience genocide earlier in their history causing fear, and they always put security before economy. They fear a repeat of the genocide of World War I and the Karabakh wars.
According to Palonkorva, the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, in which almost 1.5 million Armenians were killed, is almost comparable to the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War.
Azerbaijan has denied allegations of ethnic cleansing and says it will protect the rights of the region’s Armenian population within the framework of its own constitution. Palonkorpi believes that moving Armenians is more about fear than the actual threat of genocide.
“Armenia has probably calculated that this conflict is lost”
On Tuesday, Azerbaijan launched a powerful offensive in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus Mountains. A ceasefire was agreed in Nagorno-Karabakh after a day of fighting, and the Armenian separatist regime that had ruled the region for decades was forced to surrender.
Nagorno-Karabakh has a long history of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The dispute between the countries over the control of the region escalated into a war after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
During the time of the former Soviet republics, the difficult-to-navigate mountain area was also mostly inhabited by Armenians, and Armenia’s goal has been to annex the areas to itself. Internationally, the region is recognized as belonging to Azerbaijan, but the region unilaterally declared itself an independent state in 1991.
Efforts have been made to soften the relationship between the countries for decades. Now Palonkorpi believes that the dispute has come to an end.
– Armenia has probably calculated that this conflict has been lost. They no longer have Russian support and have been left completely alone, Palonkorpi estimates.
– The Armenians had the opportunity to conclude a peace agreement that was better for them four years ago, before Azerbaijan was militarily on its neck. At that time, Azerbaijan offered extensive autonomy to Karabakh and repeatedly brought up the Åland model.
Accommodating 100,000 refugees is difficult
About 2.7 million people currently live in Armenia. According to Palonkorvi, receiving 120,000 refugees would not be easy for a small state like Armenia.
– Armenia is a poor and isolated country, from which a lot of labor has gone abroad. It will certainly need international help, but even the country’s closest ally Russia has not assisted Armenia in the last three years.
According to Palonkorvi, there are already a lot of refugees in Armenia, and the coming wave of migration would make the situation even worse. For example, many Armenians have lived in Syria, and many of them have fled the war to Armenia or the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
– Those arriving from Karabakh will certainly put the tasks of the civil administration and healthcare to the test, and it is very difficult to imagine how they could accommodate more than 100,000 people in an instant.
At the same time, he believes that giving up Karabakh and concluding a peace agreement may in the long run open the borders to Turkey and Azerbaijan, and thereby ease the country’s political and economic situation.