A Stunningly Sudden End to a Long, Bloody Conflict within the Caucasus

Tens of hundreds died combating for and in opposition to it, destroying the careers of two presidents — one Armenian, one Azerbaijani — and tormenting a era of American, Russian and European diplomats pushing stillborn peace plans. It outlasted six U.S. presidents.

But the self-declared state within the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh — acknowledged by no different nation — vanished so rapidly final week that its ethnic Armenian inhabitants had solely minutes to pack earlier than abandoning their houses and becoming a member of an exodus pushed by fears of ethnic cleaning by a triumphant Azerbaijan.

After surviving greater than three a long time of on-off struggle and stress from massive outdoors powers to surrender, or no less than slender, its ambitions as a separate nation with its personal president, military, flag and authorities, the Republic of Artsakh contained in the internationally acknowledged borders of Azerbaijan collapsed nearly in a single day.

Slava Grigoryan, one of many hundreds this week who fled Nagorno-Karabakh, stated he had solely quarter-hour to pack earlier than heading to Armenia alongside a slender mountain street managed by Azerbaijani troops. On the best way, he stated, he noticed the troopers seize 4 Armenian males from his convoy and take them away.

Mr. Grigoryan took with him only some shirts and the negatives of household pictures, abandoning his condominium and a rustic home with beehives and a backyard.

One of his final acts, he stated, was to destroy a private video file of his homeland’s journey from triumph to destruction. His movies began in 1988, when each Armenia and Azerbaijan have been a part of the Soviet Union and Nagorno-Karabakh first erupted in violence as ethnic Armenians demanded after which secured self-determination.

“With tears in my eyes,” he stated, “I burned 100 cassettes.”

Sergey Danilyan, a former Artsakh soldier, fled to Armenia on Saturday, after the village headman informed everybody to depart as a result of “the Turks” — a typical slur for Azerbaijanis — have been gathering close by. “They will slaughter children, cut off their heads,” he stated.

He stated he had fled his village, Nerkin Horatagh, 3 times earlier than due to eruptions of combating. “Always war, war — 30 years of war.”

Life had been insufferable for months beneath an Azerbaijani blockade, stated his brother, Vova. “There was hunger. No cigarettes, no bread, nothing,” he stated.

Until final week, the tiny self-declared republic, with fewer than 150,000 individuals, had been a permanent function of the political and diplomatic panorama of the previous Soviet Union. Russia, Armenia’s conventional protector and ally since 1992 in a Moscow-led collective safety group, despatched peacekeepers to the realm in 2020 and promised to maintain open the one street linking the enclave to Armenia, a significant lifeline for Artsakh.

But Moscow, distracted by its struggle in Ukraine and looking forward to nearer financial and political ties with Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey, didn’t intervene this yr when Azerbaijan closed that route, reducing off provides of meals, gasoline and drugs. The Kremlin ordered its peacekeepers to face apart throughout final week’s lightning assault on Artsakh’s skinny defenses.

Hardly anyone, together with the U.S. authorities, foresaw the speedy collapse.

“We are all in shock. Everyone understands that this is the end — the complete destruction of Artsakh,” stated Benyamin Poghosyan, the previous head of the Armenian protection ministry’s analysis unit. “The only thing that really matters now is getting people out safely.”

Nagorno-Karabakh, which declared independence in 1991, has for greater than three a long time been a byword for diplomatic failure — an interminable downside akin to the Israel-Palestine dispute or Northern Cyprus.

Almost within the blink of an eye fixed, nevertheless, Nagorno-Karabakh has now been “solved” — by power of arms, leaving terrified ethnic Armenians on the mercy of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, a pacesetter who has for years stoked hatred of Armenians.

In 2012, Mr. Aliyev pardoned, promoted and hailed as a hero an Azerbaijani navy officer who had been convicted in Hungary of murdering an Armenian classmate in a NATO course with an ax. After serving six years of a life sentence in Hungary, the assassin was despatched residence to Azerbaijan, which had promised to maintain him in jail. He was met on the airport with flowers and let out.

“Anyone who thinks that Armenians can live under that regime is a fantasist,” stated Eric Hacopian, the host of a weekly present on CivilNet, a well-liked Armenian web tv channel.

Unverified reviews of mass killings and rape have flooded social media and been exchanged by individuals now in flight, stirring fears of a repeat of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire.

Artsakh has been erased, however the thought nonetheless has many supporters.

Edik Aloyan, a former gross sales supervisor in Nagorno-Karabakh, jumped off a truck carrying him to security as quickly because it reached the Armenian village of Kornidzor and declared that his misplaced homeland “is purely Armenian land.” This, he insisted, would by no means change, however “the Russians didn’t help us. They helped the Azeris.”

In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, hundreds of protesters have gathered every night time since final week in a central sq. to shout curses at Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for not sending troops to defend their ethnic kin and chant “Long live Artsakh.”

But supporters of the prime minister dismiss the protests because the work of two discredited former leaders who got here to energy by cheering on the reason for Artsakh.

The battle between the Muslim and Turkic Azerbaijanis and the Christian Armenians over Nagorno-Karabakh started beneath Soviet rule and escalated into full-scale struggle after Azerbaijan and Armenia gained independence. Ethnic cleaning on either side compelled greater than 1,000,000 individuals, by some estimates, to flee their houses. It led to 1994 with an impartial Artsakh, the Armenian title for Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenia accountable for a large swath of Azerbaijan — adjustments the world refused to acknowledge as professional.

Armenia was gripped by the euphoria of victory, and by contempt for an enemy whose military was ill-equipped, badly led and no match for Armenia’s extra motivated forces. Armenia’s first post-Soviet president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, was compelled to step down in 1998 after supporting a compromise deal over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijanis blamed their poor navy efficiency on their president on the time, Abulfaz Elchibey. He was ousted and changed by Heydar Aliyev, a Soviet-era chief of Azerbaijan and its former Okay.G.B. chief, the daddy of the present president.

For Mr. Hacopian, Armenia’s sense of superiority after 1994 was a deadly mistake that left the nation and the Republic of Artsakh blind to how a lot, within the years that adopted, the steadiness of energy had modified. Azerbaijan’s navy grew to become a fearsome power, with new weapons purchased with oil and gasoline income.

“Hubris is the biggest mistake you can make,” Mr. Hacopian stated.

Azerbaijan went to struggle once more in 2020 and received handily, retaking a lot of the territory it had misplaced a long time earlier.

When Nagorno-Karabakh first went from being an area Soviet quarrel to a world difficulty, it was so distant and obscure that “we had to look in old books to find out where and what this place was,” recalled Richard Giragosian, an Armenian-American tutorial who lives in Yerevan and advises the Armenian authorities.

Over the years, peace plans got here and went. All failed, torpedoed by the intransigence of 1 facet or the opposite.

Failed talks held in Key West, Fla., in 2001, with the United States among the many mediators, left such a bitter style that President George W. Bush stated he by no means wished to listen to concerning the difficulty once more, in line with Thomas de Waal, the creator of Black Garden, a ebook recounting 35 years of impasse over the area.

This week, Mr. Giragosian, who was in Washington to fulfill with officers blindsided by the rout of Artsakh, stated he had anticipated extra of a combat. “From a military point of view, I thought they would take to the hills,” he stated of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the Republic of Artsakh was, by the tip, bereft of supporters keen to hitch its combat. Many youthful residents had left, leaving a predominantly older inhabitants to defend their unrecognized republic. Months of deprivation had sapped individuals’s wills to combat on.

Small, militant nationalist teams in Armenia, just like the so-called Crusader detachment, made noisy statements about serving to however offered no important assist. The Armenian authorities of Mr. Pashinyan stayed out of the combat.

Less than two weeks earlier than their state collapsed on Sept. 20, elites in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway republic, have been caught up in an area energy wrestle, forcing out their elected president after he responded to the gathering storm by erecting a tent outdoors the federal government workplaces and utilizing it to stage a sit-in protest.

On Sept. 9, the native parliament chosen Samvel Shahramanyan, a longtime safety official, to be president.

“I am not revealing a secret when I say that the partial and then complete blockade of the Republic of Artsakh by Azerbaijan has created a number of problems for the republic,” Mr. Shahramanyan informed legislators.

While sneering at Armenia for pursuing a “so-called peace agenda,” he acknowledged that his beleaguered republic’s “ideas and expectations regarding international law” had been “unrealistic and divorced from reality,” an obvious reference to its longstanding opposition to any peace deal that didn’t grant Nagorno-Karabakh statehood completely separate from Azerbaijan.

As Azerbaijani forces overwhelmed the crumbling republic’s defenses final Wednesday, the brand new president held what was referred to as an “extended session of the Security Council” and introduced that “Artsakh will be forced to take appropriate steps.”

Mr. Shahramanyan has not been seen or heard from since and, like scores of different former officers, is feared to have been seized by Azerbaijani troops to face prosecution for “treason.”

“It’s a real tragedy how years of international efforts to find an equitable solution to the conflict were chopped down in 24 hours,” stated Mr. de Waal, the creator.