Hungry and exhausted Armenian families blocked roads to flee their homes in the defeated breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, as the United States called on Azerbaijan to protect civilians and allow aid to arrive.
Armenians from Karabakh, a part of Azerbaijan that has been outside Baku's control since the collapse of the Soviet Union, began fleeing this Sunday after their forces were routed in a blitzkrieg by the Azerbaijani military.
At least 19.000 of the 120.000 ethnic Armenians who call Nagorno-Karabakh home have already crossed to Armenia, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan said, as reported by the Russian news agency TASS. Hundreds of cars and buses loaded with belongings were coming down the mountain road from Azerbaijan.
Some escaped crammed into trucks with an open roof, others on tractors. Narine Shakarian, who has four grandchildren, arrived with six other people in her brother-in-law's old car. The 77 km drive took 24 hours, and they had no food.
"The children were crying all the way, they were hungry," she told Reuters at the border, carrying her three-year-old granddaughter who fell ill on the way. "We left to stay alive, not to live," she said.
As Armenians rushed to leave the capital city of Karabakh, known as Stepanakert in Armenia and Khankendi in Azerbaijan, there was panic buying at gas stations. The media reported that 125 people died in the explosion of a fuel warehouse on Monday.
The government of neighboring Armenia, facing massive protests over its handling of the crisis, may have to provide housing, schools and jobs for tens of thousands of people who have lost virtually everything they had. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called on Azerbaijan to guarantee the safety of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh.
"If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and if there are no effective mechanisms of protection against ethnic cleansing, the probability increases that they will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity," Pashinyan said. on Sunday.
US and European officials have told Baku to allay fears of such "ethnic cleansing".
Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court who earlier this year found that Azerbaijan was imposing "genocidal" conditions on Nagorno-Karabakh, wrote in a Washington Post column that Baku's ambitions "reach beyond" the ethnic Armenian enclave.
"Azerbaijan is an ally of the West against Iran. He provides energy to Europe and spends millions on sophisticated Israeli weapons. But such needs must not stand in the way of the world's responsibility to stop what is happening before its eyes: the Armenian Genocide in 2023," Moreno Ocampo wrote.
In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, the head of the UN Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, called on Azerbaijan to "maintain the ceasefire and take concrete steps to protect the rights of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh". US President Joe Biden's letter to Pashinyan expressed support for regional peace efforts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and condemned the violence, but said little to explicitly condemn Azerbaijan's actions.
Power called on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to fulfill his promise to protect the rights of ethnic Armenians, fully open the Lachin Corridor that connects the region to Armenia, and allow the entry of humanitarian aid and international monitoring missions.
Aliyev promised to guarantee the security of the Armenians in Karabakh, but said that his "iron fist" consigned the idea of an independent region to history.
The head of USAID also announced $11,5 million in emergency US aid to Karabakh.
Asked if Azerbaijani forces committed crimes against civilians or fighters in Karabakh, she said: “We have heard very disturbing reports of violence against civilians. At the same time, given the chaos here and the trauma, the collection of testimony is just beginning."
The European Union will provide humanitarian aid worth five million euros to Nagorno-Karabakh, the European Commission announced yesterday. That aid includes 500.000 euros in emergency support announced last Sunday and another 4,5 million to help refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia. The EU will send experts there who, together with local partners, will help calm the humanitarian crisis, it was stated in the announcement.
"We have nowhere to go"
Ethnic Armenians who managed to reach Armenia gave harrowing accounts of fleeing death, war and famine.
Some said they saw a lot of dead civilians, one said full trucks. The others, some with small children, wept as they described the tragic odyssey of fleeing war, sleeping on the ground and starving.
"We took what we could and left. We don't know where we're going. We have nowhere to go," 69-year-old Petja Grigorjan told Reuters on Sunday in the border town of Goris.
The Azerbaijani authorities claim that only Karabakh fighters were their target.
Parkev Agababjan is only 43 years old, but he is a refugee for the second time. Born in Baku, he fled to Nagorno-Karabakh as an orphan during the war with Armenia that followed the fall of the USSR. There, in the town of Askeran, he got married and had two children, who are now 10 and 13 years old.
Now the family was forced to pack the few things they could take and seek safety in Goris, Armenia, writes the "Politiko" portal.
"We had to leave, we had 10.000 soldiers, but we didn't have the equipment and weapons that the Azerbaijanis had," he said in the corridor of the "Goris" hotel.
In Askeran, Parkev had a house, a car and a garden full of cucumbers and tomatoes. “I had everything. Now I have nothing. I left two million drams there" (about four thousand euros). "We know we're not coming back."
"Flirting" with the West
Azerbaijan's victory changes the balance of power in the restive South Caucasus, a region crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, where Russia, the US, Turkey and Iran are jostling for influence, according to Reuters.
Since the collapse of the USSR, Armenia has relied on a security partnership with Russia, while Azerbaijan has been moving closer to Turkey, with which it shares linguistic and cultural ties.
Armenia has recently sought to forge closer ties with the West and blames Russia, which deployed peacekeepers to Karabakh in 2020 but is now preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, for failing to protect Karabakh. Moscow denies guilt and has told Pashinyan that he is making a big mistake by flirting with the US.
The Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the situation in Karabakh with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi yesterday.
On Monday, Aliyev mentioned the possibility of forming a land corridor to Turkey via Armenia. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who met with Ali on Monday, said yesterday that such a corridor must be completed.
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