On 19–20 September 2023 Azerbaijan initiated a military offensive in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region which ended with the surrender of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh and the disbandment of its armed forces. Prior to this offensive, Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but governed and populated by ethnic Armenians, had an estimated population of nearly 120,000. Faced with threats of genocide and ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, over 100,400 ethnic Armenians, nearly the entire current population of Nagorno-Karabakh, had fled by the end of September 2023. This mass displacement of people has been described by international experts as a war crime or crime against humanity. While the Azerbaijani government and its officials assured residents of their safety and emphasized their intent to reintegrate the Armenian population, skepticism surrounded these assurances, stemming from Azerbaijan's established track record of authoritarianism and repression of its Armenian population.
Background
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is located within Azerbaijan but is predominantly inhabited by Armenians.
During the Soviet era, Armenians residing in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast experienced significant discrimination. The authorities of Soviet Azerbaijan suppressed Armenian culture and identity within Nagorno-Karabakh, actively encouraging Armenians to migrate out and Azerbaijanis to settle in. Despite these measures, Armenians remained the majority. In 1988, during the glasnost period, a referendum was conducted in Nagorno-Karabakh proposing its transfer to Soviet Armenia. This act was met with a series of pogroms against Armenians across Azerbaijan, before violence committed against both Armenians and Azerbaijanis occurred, leading to the outbreak of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
The war resulted in the displacement of approximately 500,000 Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent occupied territories as well as 186,000 from Armenia, and between 300,000 and 500,000 Armenians from Azerbaijan. A subsequent conflict, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, caused thousands of casualties and ended with a significant Azerbaijani victory. This war allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim all the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and a third of the Nagorno-Karabakh region itself. Since the 2020 war, violations of the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh and at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border have persisted, resulting in sporadic casualties.
In December 2022, Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia that was supposed to be under the control of Russian peacekeepers, leading to shortages. In February 2023 the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to ensure free movement to Nagorno-Karabakh, ruling that the blockade posed a "real and imminent risk" to the "health and life" of Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenian population. By early September 2023 the blockade had caused supplies to all but run out; there was little medicine or fuel, while bread, a staple in the region, was rationed to one loaf per family per day. Azerbaijan also sabotaged critical civilian infrastructure in the region, including gas, electricity, and Internet access. Azerbaijan installed a border checkpoint on the corridor and, following a border shootout near the checkpoint in June 2023, tightened the blockade by not allowing any transportation to the region.
International observers, including Luis Moreno Ocampo, the inaugural prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, expressed concerns that Azerbaijan's blockade could be the onset of a genocide. Ocampo specifically stated that Azerbaijan's actions, which included withholding essential supplies like food and medicine, appeared to be a calculated effort to inflict on the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. In August 2023, as a direct result of the blockade, the first resident of Nagorno-Karabakh succumbed to starvation. The Armenian President denounced Azerbaijan, asserting it was committing genocide by causing Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh to starve. Similarly, Ronald Grigor Suny stated, "Baku is determined to make the Armenians' lives impossible, starve them out, and pressure them to leave."