Armenians leave Nagorno-Karabakh enclave

According to EURACTIV, Azerbaijan said on Wednesday (20 September) it had halted military action in its breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh after Armenian separatist forces there surrendered and agreed to a ceasefire whose terms signalled the area would return to Baku’s control.

Under the agreement, confirmed by both sides and effective from 1 p.m. (0900 GMT) on Wednesday, separatist forces will disband and disarm and talks on the future of the region and the ethnic Armenians who live there will start on Thursday.

Karabakh, a mountainous area in the volatile wider South Caucasus region, is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory, but part of it has been run by separatist Armenian authorities who say the area is their ancestral homeland.

Fearful of what the future might hold, crowds of ethnic Armenians made their way to the airport in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh which is known as Khankendi by Azerbaijan. Others took shelter with Russian peacekeepers.

Azerbaijan, which sent troops backed by artillery strikes into Karabakh on Tuesday in an attempt to bring the breakaway region to heel, has said it planned to integrate the area’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians and that their rights would be protected under the constitution.

But some Armenians – given the region has been at the centre of two wars since the 1991 Soviet fall – are sceptical and neighbouring Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of trying to ethnically cleanse the territory, something Baku denies.

“They are basically saying to us that we need to leave, not stay here, or accept that this is a part of Azerbaijan – this is basically a typical ethnical cleansing operation,” Ruben Vardanyan, a former top official in Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian administration, told Reuters.

He said that close to 100 people had been killed and hundreds more injured in the fighting. Reuters could not verify that.