UNHR calls for urgent protection of vulnerable populations in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh
On September 13, Azerbaijan launched attacks on the Armenian cities of Goris, Jermuk, and Vardenis, raising serious concerns about human rights and humanitarian law violations.
Immediate human rights issues are at stake as Azerbaijani forces drive further into Armenia:
Extrajudicial killings
Arbitrary detention and torture
Ethnic cleansing
The University Network for Human Rights, in fact-finding in the region in March and June of this year, has documented grave rights abuses committed by Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. We strongly believe that as Azerbaijani forces renew their push into Armenia, the recurrence of the gross violations noted above against ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia is highly likely.
Those in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian towns near the border with Azerbaijan are particularly vulnerable right now. In the months leading up to Tuesday’s attacks, the Russian peacekeeping mission tasked with enforcing the 2020 ceasefire failed to prevent attacks on civilians. The current wave of fighting is close to or in residential areas.
Azerbaijani forces have demonstrated during and after the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020 that if not held accountable, they will capture, torture, disappear and kill civilians and soldiers alike with impunity. The only option remaining, for those who can, is to flee the areas under imminent threat before Azerbaijani forces arrive. This course of action is simply unavailable to the elderly, sick or disabled, and the family members who will not abandon them.
The University Network for Human Rights urges the United Nations Security Council to immediately authorize the deployment of a robust, multilateral peacekeeping mission to prevent these atrocities from taking place.
Read our complete statement below.
UNHR Statement on Azerbaijani Military Operations in Armenia
Two weeks shy of two years ago today war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The war was quick but brutal: 44 days, thousands dead, hundreds still missing, scores of torture victims, videos and images of decapitations and other killings on social media, and repeated threats of extermination of the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh (NK). In September 2020, the world was distracted by Presidential elections in the US, and of course, the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. When Azerbaijan embarked on a campaign to push ethnic Armenians out of NK during March 2022, all eyes were on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What will pull the world’s attention away this time?
Azerbaijan’s military victory over Armenia in 2020 was devastating and decisive. The Russia-brokered ceasefire (known as the Trilateral Statement) completely marginalized the international community by blatantly excluding the OSCE Minsk group (the platform that, until that moment, had dedicated nearly three decades to facilitating negotiations towards lasting peace). Even more troubling was the fact that the Trilateral Statement left in place a meager Russian peace-keeping force. Their mandate and agenda were (deliberately) vague, and remain so to this day. Still, ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and residents of border towns in Armenia proper desperately wanted to believe that this would be enough to guarantee their safety.
It was not. In March 2022, Azerbaijani forces directed gunfire and shelling at Armenian border villages and broadcast threats on loudspeakers. A witness we interviewed one day after her family fled the village repeated their message: “Leave the land. You are currently in Azerbaijani territory. This is not your land, we do not take responsibility for you, we don’t guarantee your safety. If you love your children, abandon this territory. ” She also described how an Azerbaijani soldier walked up to a villager who dared venture into the fields to cultivate his crops, put a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him if he ever returned. This village had been left under Armenian control in accordance with the November 10th ceasefire agreement.
In 2020, when the fighting was largely limited to Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized to be within the borders of Azerbaijan, the international community excused its lack of interest by invoking territorial integrity (rather than respect for human rights or humanitarian norms) as the controlling foreign policy principle. Today, there is no debate that Azerbaijan’s encroachment has surpassed its internationally recognized borders.
For the world, the 2020 war ended with the Trilateral Statement. The UNHR's soon-to-be published report on ongoing rights violations after the 44-day war argues that the war has raged on for ethnic Armenians whose rights to life, physical integrity and access to justice continued to be trampled long after the November 10, 2020 ceasefire agreement. The war, we now see, did not end for Azerbaijan either; capture of swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh and repopulation of the region with ethnic Azeris was in fact, not their end game. So what is?
When our team visited Armenia last March to gather testimonies from returned prisoners of war, displaced communities, families of missing persons, lawyers, and journalists, a deep sadness and quiet fear permeated virtually every space we entered. We heard, over and over again, Armenians of the most different walks of life ask (rhetorically), “what is stopping them (Azerbaijan) from reaching Yerevan (the capital of Armenia)?” There was resignation, combined with a faint hope that the Russian peacekeeping force would protect Armenia proper and allow at least some shred of Nagorno-Karabakh to remain under the control of ethnic Armenians. Last month, when the border village on the road connecting Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh was emptied of its Armenian inhabitants and Russian peacekeepers ceded the highway to Azerbaijan, that hope waned. As we write, Armenians in Yerevan are either preparing for a last stand, or contemplating sending their daughters and sons away to safety. Is this 1915 all over again?
In 2022, the seemingly unthinkable happened – a sovereign country in Europe invaded another sovereign country in Europe. The entire world watched as Ukranians a mere 890 miles away found themselves buried in the rubble of toppled apartment buildings or fleeing the country as refugees. In the west, disbelief and outrage. In Armenia, mortal fear that they would be next. Why and how on Earth would anyone stop invasion and decimation from happening in Armenia? When the protection of Armenia is in the hands of the same country that showed such blatant disregard for territorial integrity, national sovereignty and human rights in its invasion of the Ukraine?
Our report, soon to be released, documents atrocities perpetrated by Azerbaijani forces as they advanced into areas populated by ethnic Armenians. Among these are extrajudicial killings of civilians, including the elderly and disabled; enforced disappearance of Armenian servicemen; torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners of war; death threats, intimidation and harassment of families living in border villages, and ethnic cleansing.
If the current escalation is allowed to continue, these (and perhaps greater) atrocities will likely be repeated. Equally terrifying is the very real possibility that Armenia–cornered and desperate–will sacrifice the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to secure the country’s territorial integrity. Prime Minister Pashinyan suggested as much in his address to Parliament on Tuesday.
In the absence of accountability for the violations committed during and in the aftermath of the 44-day war in 2020, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Russia may well allow the situation to degenerate into wholesale ethnic cleansing and slaughter of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh, convinced that the world will shrug its shoulders and move on.
Now is the moment to prove them wrong. It may be the last.
There is a clear, concrete, and immediate course of action available. The United Nations Security Council must authorize a multinational peace-making force to bolster the Russian-led force currently on the ground. The mandate of this multinational presence should be twofold: 1) Re-establish the ceasefire; 2) Ensure that civilians in border villages in both Armenia AND Nagorno-Karabakh are protected from physical attacks, intimidation, and threats of displacement.
Country representatives at the United Nations General Assembly this week must push for the multinational peacekeeping force. The OSCE Minsk Group should make this its primary message. The Security Council should pass a resolution creating the force immediately, and countries should contribute as much as they can, keeping in mind that in a small territory, a small contribution will go a very long way.
The EU should refrain from disseminating falsely optimistic and empty statements, (on 31 August Charles Michel described the talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan as “open and productive”). These declarations are harmful. They serve to understate the threat to security in the region, permitting onlookers to shirk their responsibility to promote peace and human rights.
Finally, the UN Special Advisor to the Secretary General on Responsibility to Protect and the Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention must take an active role in designing and defending an immediate and long-term strategy for protecting vulnerable populations in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia.
