Kelbajar §

Mountain district between Armenia and Karabakh

Kelbajar, or Karvachar in Armenian post-1990s usage, is the mountain district west of the former NKAO. It was outside the autonomous oblast but strategically decisive because it lay between Armenia, northern Karabakh and the highland routes that could supply or threaten both. Before the First Karabakh War it was an Azerbaijani district with a largely Azerbaijani and Kurdish population. Armenian forces captured it in April 1993, displacing the civilian population and triggering UN Security Council Resolution 822.

The capture widened the war from a fight over the former NKAO into occupation of surrounding Azerbaijani districts. Armenian military logic treated Kelbajar as a security buffer and supply depth for Karabakh. Azerbaijani and international legal readings treated it as the occupation of territory beyond the disputed autonomous region. Human Rights Watch documented the displacement and the broader pattern of abuses in the surrounding districts HRW. Both the strategic and legal descriptions are true; the moral consequence was the long-term displacement of Kelbajar's Azerbaijani population. contested

After 1994, Armenian settlers and displaced Armenians from other areas lived in parts of the district, but the settlement remained internationally unrecognised and legally precarious. Under the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement, Armenian forces withdrew from Kelbajar by 25 November 2020. Images of departing Armenian residents burning homes became one of the defining visuals of the ceasefire aftermath. Azerbaijan framed the return as liberation and began reconstruction under the Great Return programme.

Kelbajar shows why "security belt" and "occupied territory" were not rhetorical opposites but descriptions from different positions. For Armenians it reduced vulnerability. For Azerbaijanis it prolonged dispossession. For international law it remained Azerbaijani territory. editorial