The collapse of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh is breathtaking in its suddenness, in its total and immediate nature. In just eight days, 85% of the population of the Armenian enclave in the Caucasus (125,000 people) had already, as of 1er October, emptied the place. We can imagine that, in a few days, there will be almost no one left.
There are already hallucinatory images circulating of Stepanakert, which had 55,000 inhabitants, which has become a ghost town. The local authorities, or what remains of them, announced the self-dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh, officially on 1er January 2024 — but immediate in fact.
Today we are witnessing, in accelerated fashion, a total ethnic cleansing almost without bloodshed (for the current episode, because this intermittent war has also experienced bloody peaks – more than 6,000 deaths between September and November 2020).
The authorities of Azerbaijan assured that the Armenians could remain in the enclave, that no harm would come to them… But these “assurances” from Baku are taken as a bad joke, and the population of Karabakh does not is not mistaken. For a week, she has been voting with her feet – and with her cars in a row, on the Lachin corridor, towards adjacent Armenia. A real general save-who-can.
It is an understatement to say that Armenians fear the exactions and acts of vengeance of the Azerbaijanis (or Azeris, if that is the ethnic group) who, in popular Armenian parlance, are “Turks” like the others — that is to say “wolves who eat our children”.
Today we repeat the stories of pogroms and ethnic cleansings that populate Armenian memory. Not just the great genocide of 1915; pogroms also took place in the 1980s (Soumgaït, February 1988), while the USSR was dying.
Striking testimony published yesterday in Le Figaro : that of the Azerbaijani blogger Mahammad Mirzali, tortured in his country for having denounced the corruption of dictator Ilham Aliev before taking refuge in France in 2016, where he lives under police protection.
According to him, “hatred against Armenians has reached its peak in my country”. On often state-run Telegram channels, “participants in the war shamelessly boast of cutting off heads and practicing corporal punishment on Armenian soldiers or civilians.”
“Already, in 2020, many Azeri soldiers returned with a finger, or more often an Armenian ear, like a trophy. […] Sometimes these atrocities are done in the name of Islam. […] In some videos we see Azerbaijani soldiers beheading civilians or Armenian soldiers shouting “Allahu Akbar”. »
The geopolitical and historical significance of this reversal is considerable.
On a historical and cultural level, and without taking into account the successive sovereignties over this territory (granted to Azerbaijan by Stalin, based on territorial continuity, but not on the linguistic-cultural reality of the field), the High -Karabakh has had continuous Armenian settlement since the dawn of Christianity.
In this mountainous enclave of 4000 square kilometers, this population has been in the majority for centuries… It was even, in the 20the century, ultra-majority. At the end of the Soviet era, it represented some 75% of the total. There was, yes, a kind of ethnic cleansing in the other direction after the Armenian victory in 1994, when this percentage rose to 99% after the Azeris fled.
The military operation in Baku has reduced the Armenian presence to virtually zero these days. It is therefore an unprecedented historical eradication that we are witnessing today: for the first time in two millennia, there will be no more Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh!
Behind Azerbaijan and its demands (which are, moreover, legal; Nagorno-Karabakh had never been recognized internationally), there is Turkey and its desire for regional hegemony.
Azerbaijan, a gas power, is an ally of Ankara: in recent years, Ankara’s political, diplomatic and military support for Baku has been thunderous, militant, intransigent. The gas power provided the money, the regional sponsor provided the logistics – notably, the famous Turkish drones.
In the 1988-1994 war, Armenian warriors humiliated Azerbaijan. Today, Ilham Aliev and his mentor Recep Tayyip Erdogan can enjoy their revenge.
One country seems to have made itself very small in this episode: Russia, whose 2000 “observers” on the ground had no influence. A mixture of indifference towards the fate of the abandoned Armenians who look in despair towards the West… but also of helplessness.
Russia no longer has the influence it had in the region. Weakened by its war in Ukraine – which reduced its capacity to maneuver everywhere else – it is experiencing a very marked loss of prestige and influence, particularly in Central Asia, in the former Soviet space.
Also to be continued: the shock wave in Armenia itself. The Karabakh affair separated, in Yerevan, those who wanted to intervene and those who did not, including Prime Minister Pashinian, criticized for having completely stayed away in recent weeks.
And then… will the appetites of Azerbaijan, with Turkey behind, be whipped? Won’t they now turn their eyes to Armenia proper?