The Cultural Destruction of Nagorno-Karabakh

It’s now over a year since the apocalypse came to one small corner of the South Caucasus. Over a year since a de facto independent republic collapsed into dust, and almost every single inhabitant was forced to flee the land their people had inhabited for centuries. The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani forces took place on September 19, 2023, and was the great, ignored news story of last year.

A seismic event that was somehow lost between the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and the eruption of the Gaza War less than three weeks later. But make no mistake, what happened amid the South Caucasus mountains that September day was monumental. The final, bitter end to the long story of Armenian life in the region was a geopolitical triumph for Azerbaijan and its main backer, Turkey.

Yet it was also a humanitarian disaster, one which saw roughly 100,000 ethnic Armenians forced from Nagorno-Karabakh and into exile. Nearly thirteen months later, an examination of this overlooked event reveals what happened to those who suffered the conquest of their homeland, as well as the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Because, if the subsequent period has shown anything, it is that the shockwaves of this short war could reverberate across the region for decades to come.

The first step in understanding this crisis is examining what, exactly, Nagorno-Karabakh was.

Historical Context and the Cycle of Ethnic Cleansing

The unrecognized republic—which Armenians called Artsakh—was a slice of self-governing land within Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized borders. One in which an ethnically-Armenian population lived with support from Armenia itself. The ethnically-Armenian chunk of land wound up within Azerbaijan’s borders due to shenanigans in the Soviet era.

When drawing the maps, Moscow had a tendency to create semi-autonomous ethnic enclaves within its republics. The Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was home to the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. This was all well and good when everyone was living together in the USSR, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, it meant the newly-independent nations of Azerbaijan and Armenia both claimed the region for themselves.

The history is that, as the USSR disintegrated, Nagorno-Karabakh was stranded beyond the reach of the Armenian mothership, with a population that was 75 percent ethnic Armenian. It was, in short, the perfect recipe for a bitter, vicious war. And a bitter war is exactly what broke out.

The fighting ran between 1988 and 1994, and killed somewhere in the region of 30,000 people. But it was the atrocities that really made it stand out. In Azerbaijan, pogroms saw ethnic Armenians murdered and chased from their homes.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, a contemporary Human Rights Watch report documented how Armenian forces shelled civilian areas and burned the homes of Azeris. By 1994, the atrocities had grown to include widespread ethnic cleansing. When Armenia declared victory, taking full control of both Nagorno-Karabakh and seven ethnically-Azeri districts surrounding it, they expelled nearly the entire Azerbaijani population—over 600,000 people.

On the opposite side of the border, 350,000 Armenians were forced to flee Azerbaijan. Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal has written for Carnegie Europe that both sides were complicit in the extraordinary violence: “The long and tragic story of Karabakh leaves many open wounds. Azerbaijan was the clear aggressor in 2023, but over the long duration of the conflict, its military operation was the last round of a cycle of ethnic cleansing committed by both sides.”

Recognizing these open wounds is key to understanding what happened last September. For nearly thirty years, Azerbaijan nurtured a national story of displacement and victimhood. One that focused not just on the 600,000 forced to flee their homes, but on the destruction that took place afterwards.

This destruction included Armenian forces razing villages in the seven districts that had been ethnically Azeri, as well as the mining of much of the land. Using satellite data, Cornell University project Caucasus Heritage Watch recently released an accounting of all the Azeri sites damaged during the era of Armenian rule in Nagorno-Karabakh, noting that the adverse impacts on Azerbaijani cultural heritage were significant, and that heavily damaged or destroyed sites represented a majority of their dataset. However, they clarify that forensic evidence shows no attempt by Armenian authorities to systematically erase the material traces of Azerbaijani history and cultural life in the lands they controlled from 1994 to 2020.

The 2020 Offensive and the Severing of the Lachin Corridor

Systematic or not, there’s no denying that the damage to Azeri buildings was significant. More importantly, it played into the broader Azerbaijani narrative of the war: that Armenians had slaughtered their people, driven them into exile, and now were erasing their culture. A narrative that, at its heart, promised both an eventual reclaiming of those lost lands, as well as a healthy dose of revenge.

It would ultimately fall to President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to turn that dream into a brutal reality. The groundwork for Azerbaijan’s conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh began in 2020. That autumn, as the world was distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, Baku launched a devastating surprise attack on the de facto republic.

With the help of Turkish drones, Azeri forces destroyed most of Artsakh’s air defense within a couple of hours. What followed was a spectacularly lopsided conflict. Unable to match Baku’s hi-tech army—one funded through oil wealth and bulked out with Turkish and Israeli equipment—the Armenian forces were devastated.

All told, 7,000 people lost their lives. By the time Russia stepped in to broker a peace, those seven districts lost in the first war were back in Azerbaijan’s hands, and Nagorno-Karabakh was nearly surrounded. The word “nearly” is used because one link to internationally-recognized Armenian territory still remained.

One single road, known as the Lachin Corridor, patrolled by Russian peacekeepers, was supposed to ensure the safety of Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians. That it failed in this endeavor is largely thanks to the Ukraine War. With Russia bogged down in Eastern Europe, Baku calculated that Moscow’s peacekeepers wouldn’t intervene.

In autumn of 2022, Azeri forces went on the offensive again, capturing critical high ground. Not long after, the lifeline of the Lachin Corridor was severed. For most of 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh was placed under a state of siege, leading to catastrophic shortages of everything from food, to fuel, to medicine.

Then, just when the Karabakhi Armenians were at their weakest, Azerbaijan launched its final offensive. Bombs began falling on September 19, 2023. As Baku’s forces surged forwards, the Russian peacekeepers stepped aside.

Beaten, exhausted, the Armenian leadership of the de facto republic surrendered. Within twenty-four hours, Nagorno-Karabakh had fallen. This, then, was the background to the exodus.

The apocalypse that saw Artsakh wiped from the map, and over 100,000 ethnic Armenians forced to flee their ancestral home. Within days of the attack, only a handful of Karabakhis too old or ill to escape remained.

The Systematic Erasure of Armenian Heritage

A survey of Nagorno-Karabakh itself reveals the dramatic ways in which this land has changed since Baku’s victory last year. At the moment the unrecognized republic fell, the Conversation notes that there were “around 500 historical sites, home to approximately 6,000 Armenian monuments.” The past tense is notable, because the last year has seen Baku working busily to reduce that number.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reports that Azeri workers have torn down the former parliament building used by the separatist authorities, destroyed the hall of veterans, and demolished hotels, banks, and recreation zones linked to the old Armenian rulers. This is something President Ilham Aliyev himself has remarked on. When the Artsakh parliament was torn down, its destruction was timed to coincide with Azerbaijan’s Norouz holiday, leading Aliyev to comment that the Norouz bonfire was “doing the final cleaning.”

Less openly acknowledged has been the ransacking of residential buildings in the old capital—which Armenians call Stepanakert, and Azeris call Khankendi. In an investigation undertaken using satellite imagery, open-source intelligence site Bellingcat documented hundreds of instances of Armenian homes being smashed and emptied of their contents. For those who grew up in Azerbaijan, hearing tales of Armenians destroying their ancestral villages after 1994, this doubtless feels like the “revenge” part of the narrative.

But evidence suggests Azeri forces might be taking the process further than the Karabakhis ever did. In fact, Baku’s current efforts may amount to the systematic erasure of the region’s Armenian past. Outside the former capital, Baku’s forces have undertaken a concerted campaign of destruction.

The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data non-profit has recorded the bulldozing of entire villages, such as Mokhrenes and Karin Tak, as well as the desecration of Armenian cemeteries. Churches dating back to the mid-19th century have been torn down, most notably in the town of Shushi. To be clear, some of this infrastructure is being demolished as a side effect of initiatives like road-building projects, rather than just wanton vandalism.

Caucasus Heritage Watch has even cautioned against placing too much emphasis on heritage destruction, noting that a politicized discourse pervades the conflict and that exaggerated reports have obscured the facts on the ground. Still, it’s hard to argue that the region’s face isn’t being fundamentally altered under Azeri rule. After leaving their mark on the region for centuries, the history of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians is now vanishing.

In its place, the faint outlines of Aliyev’s vision for the future are emerging. One that imagines Nagorno-Karabakh repopulated by Azeris living in model towns of multistory apartment complexes. So far, it’s a vision that’s only slowly becoming reality.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reports that only 8,000 former residents have moved back since Azerbaijan captured the seven surrounding districts in 2020. And while the former capital recently reopened its university to accept a new influx of students, it’s still thought that the city only has 3,000 permanent residents. The construction work has also been characterized by odd design choices, with small villages replaced by grand housing estates that returning exiles do not seem to want to occupy.

The Plight of Refugees and the Geopolitical Implications

As for the Karabakhi Armenians who fled in 2023, the picture is significantly less rosy. For those who took part in the exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh, it seems likely that the flight to safety is an ordeal they will never forget. The road was so blocked, and the journey to Armenia took so long, that some sixty-nine people are estimated to have died en route—on top of another 200 or so who were killed when a gas station many cars were waiting at exploded.

Those who did make it found themselves pouring into an Armenia not prepared for such an influx. It’s estimated that today four percent of the country’s entire population is made up of Karabakhi refugees—a group that includes 30,000 children, and 18,000 pensioners. The Armenian state did its best to try and integrate them as quickly as possible.

Crisis Group reports that every adult received a one-off payment of $250, followed by a $185 monthly stipend, which matches the minimum wage in Armenia. There are also plans to offer each family with two or more children a one-time cash injection of $7,400 per person, to allow them to buy or build a house. Compared to the squalid camps set up for refugees in some countries, Armenia’s behavior towards the exiles has been spectacularly generous.

However, the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin estimates that nearly a quarter of all Armenians live below the poverty line. After a year of support payments, the government in Yerevan is now having to cut back. From the beginning of the new year, Karabakhi refugees will start receiving progressively smaller stipends.

While many of the exiles have settled around Yerevan to be closer to the nation’s biggest job market, unemployment is still a major problem in the community. Karabakhis have reported resentment and suspicion from some Armenians, leading some to seek new lives elsewhere. By July, official figures reported that 11,500—or over ten percent of the exiles—had left Armenia, usually for Russia or Europe.

Another sticking point has been the government’s refusal to organize any commemorations for the loss of Artsakh. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has staked his nation’s future on his ability to strike a comprehensive peace deal with Azerbaijan. Thomas de Waal writes that Pashinyan makes it clear his number one priority is reaching an agreement that normalizes relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey.

His calculation is that the Republic of Armenia will not be able to survive and free itself of a dangerous over-dependence on Russia unless it secures a deal with its adversaries. Pashinyan has therefore made a series of concessions to Azerbaijan, operating under the assumption that making a disadvantageous peace deal now is better than being forced into a much worse one at gunpoint later. Remarkably, Pashinyan’s approach seems to be working.

As recently as the spring, observers were worried that Baku might be preparing for a full-scale war with Yerevan, with President Ilham Aliyev openly referring to Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan.” Today, though, most of the talk is of peace, with Pashinyan claiming a comprehensive peace deal is eighty percent done, supposedly to be signed during the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan. But even if a stable peace does return to the South Caucasus, it will be too late for the Karabakhi Armenians.

They are a people who lost everything—not just their possessions and homes, but their entire country. Such total erasure of a state is shockingly rare in the modern world. The end of Nagorno-Karabakh passed with barely a whisper internationally, but it stands as a monumental geopolitical event that permanently altered the landscape of the South Caucasus.

Sources

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