The Caucasus mountain region has been of great geopolitical significance to South-East Europe. It’s home to a vast supply of oil and natural gas and serves as a shatterbelt between the powers of Russia and Turkey.
Yet shatterbelts are further characterized as being under constant political stress resulting from their status of fragmentation. Two states located in the Caucasus are Armenia and Azerbaijan, both of which were a part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. As with many of the nations once a part of the USSR, ethnic tensions were—and continue to be—prevalent between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The two nations have ensured the Caucasus lives up to its fragmented status with their persistent, on-again-off-again dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
So what’s the deal with Nagorno-Karabakh? The region is, by majority, ethnically Armenian, with over ninety-nine per cent of the population being a part of the Christian faith. Ninety-eight per cent of such belongs to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Yet when the Soviet Union was formed in the 1920s, the region was put under Azerbaijani control. Azerbaijan’s religious composition has consistently been predominantly Muslim, and current statistics cite ninety-four to ninety-six per cent of Azerbaijan’s population to be Muslim.
While the population and authorities of Karabakh were already dabbling in separatist conversation during the 1980s, tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan remained relatively peaceful. However, the decline of the Soviet Union roused these tensions and gave the enclave its chance to give self-governance a whirl. By 1988, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were accusing each other of threatening ethnic cleansing and pogroms against the other, Karabakh regional authorities officially voted to unify with Armenia, and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War began.
Human Rights Violations During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War
While the accusations of pogrom threats from either side were used as a form of slandering the other, massacres would soon become prevalent in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. Once both nations became independent in 1992, the war reached its climax. As many as 230,000 Armenians from Azerbaijan and 800,000 Azerbaijanis from Armenia and Karabakh were displaced. Essentially, Armenia and Karabakh were cleansed of Azerbaijanis. Likewise, the Armenian population of Azerbaijan became almost nonexistent. The death toll of the war between 1988 and 1994 is estimated to have between 5,000 and “tens of thousands”, according to BBC. Massacres on either side of the conflict contributed substantially.
1988 marked the start of the atrocities with the 3-day Sumgait pogrom. Armenians living in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait were massacred and forcefully displaced by Azerbaijani thugs bearing hatchets, knives, gas tanks and makeshift weapons made of broken glass. Thomas de Waal, a British journalist renowned for his writing on the Caucasus, published the book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War in 2003 to record the course of the Nagorno-Karabakh War, including the Sumgait pogrom. His commentary on the massacre claimed Azerbaijani actions were “acts of horrific savagery” consisting of looting, rape and mutilation to the point “that their bodies could not be identified”. Local Armenian testimonies claim that the massacre was premeditated as evidence shows the culprits sought out the names and addresses of all Armenian tenants in the town beforehand. Local police are said to have done little to nothing, as forces were comprised mostly of Azerbaijanis and only one Armenian official, according to de Waal. The number of deaths caused by the Sumgait pogrom ranges from 32 to 200, coming from official Soviet and Armenian data respectively.
Responses to Sumgait weren’t many, unfortunately. Soviet officials reacted slowly to the issue in hopes that it would die out quickly and would exhaust the need for formal intervention. However, Sumgait suffered three consecutive days of chaos until Soviet troops were sent in. Internationally, the US Senate unanimously passed an amendment to the Fiscal Year 1989 Foreign Operations Appropriations bill in July, calling upon the USSR to acknowledge the massacre and to respect Armenian sentiment of wanting unification with Nagorno-Karabakh. This seems to have been an abate condemnation of the USSR’s lacking interference in the issue. That same month, the European Parliament passed a resolution to condemn Azerbaijani violence against Armenians.
Perhaps most admirable was the New York Times published “Open Letter to International Public Opinion on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union” of July 27, 1990. The letter was written and signed between 130 international academics and human rights advocates calling upon the international community to protect the rights of Armenians against Azerbaijani violence.
However, as seen with many human rights violations, condemnation and even the prospect of punishment did not deter the escalation of massacres throughout the First Karabakh War. Up until its end in 1994, around 13 other pogroms occurred. It is important to note that these were not one-sided. Armenian persecution of Azerbaijanis was also prevalent, as seen with the Khojaly Massacre of 1992, which had a death toll of at least 200, as reported by Human Rights Watch. Azerbaijani officials estimated the death toll to be 613, yet either number would still put the Khojaly Massacre at the top of the list for largest massacres during the war.
Massacres seem to have ended once the war ended, with the last recorded pogrom having been in 1993, in which 27 Azerbaijanis were killed by Armenian Armed Forces in the village of Bashlibel. It’s impossible to produce an exact figure for how many died by massacre and war crimes during the First Karabakh War, and a range for this number has yet to be provided, as well. Regardless of this, it is a clear violation of countless humanitarian conventions and an issue that cannot—and should not—be justified.
The Outcomes of the War and Nagorno-Karabakh Today
Despite Armenia having control of most of the enclave, the 1994 Russian-brokered ceasefire called for Karabakh to remain in Azerbaijan’s possession. Nonetheless, the region continues to be a self-declared republic and remains to be ruled by separatist ethnic Armenians backed by the Armenian government. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group serves as the regulator for peace-talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The current issue is that the OSCE and the rest of the global community have seemingly failed to carry out the mission of facilitating peace between the two nations. Since 1994, several clashes resulting in numerous Armenian and Azerbaijani fatalities alike have surfaced. It is likely that the massacres that occurred throughout the course of the first war never lost momentum due to a lack of intervention by any outside forces such as the USSR and OSCE Minsk. The culmination of these clashes seems to be the beginning of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War on the 27th of September this year.
UPDATE: 11/12/2020
Human Rights Violations During the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War
After 44 days of fighting, the second war came to an end on the 10th of November after yet another Russian-brokered peace deal. The Guardian estimates that “thousands have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in the worst fighting since the early 1990s”. The peace deal once again leaves Karabakh under the control of Azerbaijan and free of Armenian troops.
On the 10th of December, however, Amnesty International has spoken out about discovering war crimes to have become rampant between Armenian and Azerbaijan once again in the midst of the Second Karabakh War. Once again, both sides are guilty of engaging in these atrocities.
This time around, the war crimes come in the form of mutilation, specifically by decapitation, as well as desecration of enemy corpses. The torturing of prisoners of war is also largely reported on. Of these, decapitation seems to be the surfacing relic of the first war. Amnesty came across and analyzed twenty-two videos featuring the atrocities, two of them showing the decapitation of Armenian civilians by Azerbaijani soldiers and one showing an Armenian official murdering an Azerbaijani border guard by cutting his throat. In total, twelve of the videos demonstrated violations by Armenian forces while 9 of them incriminated Azerbaijani forces.
Amnesty calls upon both countries to investigate the war crimes. Denis Krivosheev, the organization’s research director for eastern Europe and central Asia writes in the issue report that “the depravity and lack of humanity captured in these videos shows the deliberate intention to cause ultimate harm and humiliation to victims, in clear violation of international humanitarian law,”.
In October of this year, Human Rights Watch had also condemned Azerbaijan for using cluster munitions against Armenia, a type of weapon that has been widely banned from any sort of use since 1993. The munitions were said to have been dropped in civilian towns as well, leading to the destruction of at least three cities in which Human Rights Watch found the remains of cluster munitions. Likewise, the organization also condemned Armenia for using unlawful missiles during the forty-four days of war, reporting eighteen distinct occurrences in which the Armenian Armed Forces launched ballistic missiles on civilian towns in Azerbaijan. The report claims the attacks “killed 40 civilians and wounded dozens more, based on in-person interviews with 53 witnesses to attacks and 12 phone interviews, news reports, and governmental data”.
Takeaways & Resources
It is my impression that conflict and subsequent atrocities in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh will continue unless proper action is taken by organizations such as OSCE Minsk and the UN to provide proper leverage against the prospect of war between the two South Caucasus countries. Judging by the history of Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, tensions are far from being relieved. Little to no distinction can be made between the two short-lived truces of 1994 and 2020. Azerbaijan has remained in control of the enclave since the 1920s, and the ethnic Armenians of Karabakh show no sign of letting up on fulfilling their cultural identity. In fact, cleansing of the regions since the First Karabakh War may only serve to rekindle the separatist movement with a stronger fire now that ethnic Azerbaijanis are void from the region. Conflict is even less likely to be refused by either side considering the minimal interference provided by the OSCE and other organizations.
Nonetheless, it is not acceptable to stand by when making these realizations. Currently, few resources are available to take action against the human rights violations that have occurred in the past months in Karabakh. The current peace-deal implies that fighting has ceased and as a result, Armenians and Azerbaijani’s have no reason to clash if not at their international border, which has yet to occur since July 2020. However, as mentioned before, it is likely that tensions escalate once more and skyrockets the prospect of war crimes to pick up once again. As of now, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are the best sources to find ways to help out in putting an end to the atrocities of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.