Forced displacement of Karabakh Armenians §

Background

The displacement followed directly from the 24-hour Azerbaijani offensive of 19–20 September 2023, which itself followed nine months of blockade and three years of post-war attrition under Russian peacekeeping. The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh in mid-September 2023 numbered approximately 120,000, concentrated in Stepanakert (~70,000), Martuni, Askeran and surrounding villages. The community had been cut off from food, medicine and fuel supply for nine months.

The terms of the 20 September ceasefire integrated Karabakh Armenians "as ordinary citizens" of Azerbaijan, with no specific guarantees of property, language or community rights. President Ilham Aliyev's public statements in the days that followed offered amnesty for civilians but left the legal status of the Armenian population, the property rights of those who fled, and the safety of those who remained substantially unspecified.

Within hours of the ceasefire, Karabakh Armenians began moving toward the Lachin Corridor with what they could carry. The Azerbaijani checkpoint that had defined the blockade was reopened to Armenian movement out of the territory.

The event

The exodus is one of the most rapid mass displacements of the twenty-first century. UNHCR registration data, processed at the Goris border crossing in Armenia, recorded the following progression:

• By 25 September: 6,650 displaced persons registered.
• By 27 September: 53,000.
• By 30 September: 88,780.
• By 1 October: 100,437.
• By 4 October: 100,617, the final consolidated figure.

The flow was constrained primarily by physical road capacity through the corridor; the Stepanakert–Goris road, normally a four-hour drive, was reduced to a two- to three-day journey by traffic congestion and fuel shortages. Multiple deaths during the exodus were caused by a fuel-depot explosion at Berkaber on 25 September that killed at least 68 people who had been queuing for petrol. Several elderly residents died in transit.

By 4 October, only a few hundred Armenians remained in the territory, almost all elderly, disabled or part of mixed households. The Armenian Apostolic Church's clergy were among the last to leave. By September 2024, the Armenian-government estimate was that 14 ethnic Armenians remained, all of them elderly or part of mixed households, with no functioning community institutions.

The Azerbaijani government characterised the exodus as voluntary emigration contested. The legal characterisation by independent observers, most clearly articulated by the EP resolution of 5 October 2023 (491–9 with 33 abstentions), was "ethnic cleansing." The Ocampo opinion characterised the underlying course of conduct as genocide; Genocide Watch reached a similar conclusion.

Aftermath

Inside Armenia, the displaced population, equivalent to about 3.5% of Armenia's pre-arrival population of 2.8 million, strained housing, social services and labour markets. The Armenian government issued temporary residence and welfare provision, but conversion to permanent status has been slower. Many displaced families settled in Yerevan and the eastern provinces; significant numbers have emigrated onward to Russia, North America and Europe.

In NKR itself, Azerbaijani authorities began through October–December 2023 a programme of physical reorganisation: military deployment was extended; Armenian street names were replaced; the Stepanakert state institutions were reopened as Khankendi institutions. The fate of Armenian heritage sites, churches, cemeteries, monasteries, including Gandzasar, Dadivank, Amaras, has been the subject of continuous monitoring by Caucasus Heritage Watch. Some sites have been converted to "Caucasian Albanian" historiographical attribution under the albanianisation policy documented by Armenian and international scholars; others have been damaged or destroyed.

Legal consequence

The ICJ order of 17 November 2023 required Azerbaijan to ensure that "persons who left Nagorno-Karabakh after 19 September 2023 and who wish to return to Nagorno-Karabakh are able to do so in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner; persons who remained in Nagorno-Karabakh after 19 September 2023 and who wish to depart are able to do so in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner; and persons who remained in Nagorno-Karabakh after 19 September 2023 or returned to Nagorno-Karabakh and who wish to stay are free from the use of force or intimidation that may cause them to flee." Compliance has been minimal: no significant return has occurred editorial.

The substantive ICJ proceedings on the merits of Armenia's ICERD application continue. They will not produce a final judgment for several years.

The BBC, the New York Times and Le Monde produced extensive contemporaneous reportage; the Armenian government and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have continued documentation through 2024–25. The European Union, in March 2024, agreed a Refugee Support Framework with Armenia targeting the displaced population; the United States Congress in 2024 made specific appropriations for support.

Memory and politics

The Karabakh exodus closed a question that had been open since the 1921 Kavbiuro decision: who would live in Nagorno-Karabakh? In 1921 the answer was Armenians under Azerbaijani sovereignty. In 2023 the answer became no Armenians at all editorial.

The political consequences in Armenia have been profound. The Pashinyan government's strategic posture, that legal acquiescence in Soviet-era borders combined with international advocacy could secure rights for the Karabakh Armenian population, failed catastrophically editorial. The opposition, organised around the Tavush for the Homeland movement of Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, has run the argument that the strategy itself caused the exodus rather than failing to prevent it. The 2024 border delimitation of four villages in Tavush triggered the largest domestic protests of the Pashinyan era.

The Armenian diaspora reaction was the largest mobilisation since the genocide-recognition campaign of the 1980s. The European Parliament's October 2023 resolution, the US Senate's parallel statements, and the Ocampo opinion all responded to that mobilisation as much as to the underlying events.

The legal designation of the events remains under dispute. The political characterisation as ethnic cleansing is broadly accepted by Western governments and by the academic mainstream editorial. Whether it constitutes genocide is the subject of ongoing legal proceedings. What is uncontested is the fact: more than two thousand years of continuous Armenian habitation in the mountains of Karabakh ended in ten days.