LAST UPDATE | 14 Oct 2023

ARMENIA’S AMBASSADOR TO Ireland and the UK has decried the United Nations monitoring mission that was sent to Nagorno-Karabakh earlier this month as being a “circus” and said it has come too late. 

At the beginning of Ocotber, the UN sent a fact-finding mission to Nagorno-Karabakh to assess claims of ethnic cleansing following Azerbaijan’s nine month blockade and subsequent offensive on the area – which has resulted in a huge refugee crisis as thousands fled the disputed territory.

Speaking to The Journal, Ambassador Varuzhan Nersesyan, warned that the situation with Azerbaijan is at risk of deteriorating further and urged the international community to guarantee the rights of ethnic Armenians to return to the region. 

In September, Azerbaijan seized back the mostly Armenian-populated  breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive.

This came after the Azerbaijani government imposed a nine month long blockade of the only land corridor linking the region with Armenia – denying basic food and supplies to the region’s approximately 120,000 people.

Since then, almost all of the 120,000-strong ethnic Armenian population has fled, resulting in a massive humanitarian crisis. 

Nagorno-Karabakh has a complex history – After six years of separatist fighting ended in 1994 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by Armenia, turning about a million of its Azerbaijani residents into refugees.

After a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back back parts of the region in the South Caucasus Mountains, along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had captured earlier.

Earlier this month, the European Parliament accused Azerbaijan of carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, and urged the bloc to impose sanctions on Baku.

The European Parliament approved a resolution saying it “considers that the current situation amounts to ethnic cleansing and strongly condemns threats and violence committed by Azerbaijani troops.”

But while Armenia’s ambassador to Ireland, Varuzhan Nersesyan, said he is grateful for the European Union and United Nations support, he said the international response so far has been “soft”.

Nersesyan said that the failure of the international community to impose sanctions or other measures on Azerbaijan to force it to re-open the corridor before the exodus of ethnic Armenians from the region resulted in ethnic cleansing.

Likewise, Nersesyan said the United Nations fact-finding mission that arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh at the beginning of October – and stayed for one day – was too late. 

A UN spokesperson said that the mission to assess humanitarian needs “did not come across any reports… of violence against civilians” following the latest ceasefire.

Nersesyan said the mission was “senseless” and added that he did not accept it.

He pointed out that Armenia had repeatedly called for a UN fact-finding mission which was continuously blocked by Azerbaijan.

“Now when the people have gone and nobody’s left Azerbaijan allows the UN mission to go there. Well, I think it’s a circus.

“It’s a circus because that mission doesn’t have any mission if the people aren’t there.

I mean, what are they going to monitor? The empty houses? The empty shops?

“People were starved with hunger for 10 months. I really do not accept this mission, it is a senseless mission to send the United Nations once the people have left,” Nersesyan said.

Nerseyan said the priority of Armenia and the international community needs to now be guaranteeing refugees the right to return to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan has promised to respect minority rights, but Armenia does not believe this will be the case.

On this, US officials have called for a longer-term force to monitor the situation for the sake of residents who wish to return.

For now though, Armenia is working to provide food and shelter for the over 100,000 refugees who have fled, with Nersesyan describing it as an “immense challenge”.

“Those 100,000 people arrived in Armenia in miserable conditions. Hungry, malnourished, starving. In desperate need of medications, children simply just looking for food, for chocolate, because they have been deprived for months of proper food and nutrition. This is a tragedy,” Nersesyan said.

The wounds of the Nagorno-Karabakh ethnic cleansing are still very fresh. 

“The trauma that people have is very fresh and it needs to be addressed,” he said.

The ambassador said the Irish government was “very helpful” when Ireland was a non-permanent member on the United Nations Security Council.

“We have seen continuously Ireland’s support in this from humanitarian purposes. We appreciate Ireland’s very targeted approach,” he said, noting that Ireland called for the opening of the land corridor while a non-permanent member on the United Nations Security Council.

Further deterioration 

While Armenia and Azerbaijan have now taken the issue to the International Court of Justice, Nersesyan warned that a further escalation is plausible given that Azerbaijan has refused to recognise Armenia’s territorial integrity. 

“We know that Azerbaijan has openly expressed territorial claims towards the Republic of Armenia and there is a risk of Azerbaijan having this type of temptation to attack Armenia again, this time, the Republic of Armenia, under all kinds of pretexts that Azerbaijan has been inventing meticulously throughout the past few years,” Nersesyan said.

“So the risk of escalation is high. And the international community should play, in these circumstances, a preventive or pre-emptive role with messages and more concrete steps to force Azerbaijan to forget about any kind of aggression against Armenia.”

Additional reporting from Press Association and AFP.