• Last week, the Azerbaijani military routed Armenian forces in a 24-hour blitz, forcing the separatist authorities to agree to lay down weapons and start talks on Nagorno-Karabakh’s reintegration into Azerbaijan.
• Nagorno-Karabakh is a region of Azerbaijan that came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by the Armenian military, in separatist fighting that ended in 1994.
• The Azerbaijani military reclaimed full control of the breakaway region.
• The separatist government of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic announced that it will dissolve itself and the unrecognised republic will cease to exist by the end of the year.
• More than half of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population, over 65,000 people, had fled to Armenia.
• The massive exodus began on September 24, and the only road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia quickly filled up with cars that created an hours-long traffic jam.
• The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) raised concerns over the movement of a large number of civilians to Armenia as a result of the recent hostilities in the region.
Dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh
• After the collapse of the Tsarist regime in Russia, Nagorno-Karabakh became a disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1921, Stalin decided to place the entity, predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, under Baku’s control as a way to divide and rule the South Caucasus.
• This uneasy arrangement lasted until the Soviet Union started to disintegrate in the late 1980s. Serious inter-ethnic clashes erupted in 1988 after the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast voted to join Armenia. Moscow rejected this decision and sent troops to Yerevan to calm the situation but to no avail.
• As the Soviet Union collapsed, Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in September 1991. Inter-ethnic clashes intensified and, by early 1992, Armenia and Azerbaijan were at war. While there were several attempts to end the fighting, it was Russia that managed to mediate a ceasefire, in May 1994.
• Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian government since 1994. The region in the Caucasus Mountains of about 4,400 sq km, is 50 km from the Armenian border.
• The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has risked dragging in the big regional powers, Russia and Turkey, and destabilising the South Caucasus region, an important corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, while Ankara backs its ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.
• International mediation efforts by the Minsk Group of Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to determine the region’s final status faltered. The Minsk Group, the activities of which are known as the Minsk Process, spearheads the OSCE’s efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is co-chaired by France, the Russian Federation, and the United States.
• Conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region has persisted for more than three decades.
• During a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed during the earlier conflict.
• A ceasefire and subsequent Trilateral Statement was agreed in November 2020 following six weeks of fighting, by the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, leading to the deployment of several thousand Russian peacekeepers.
• The UN has supported the full implementation of the Trilateral Statement by the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, following the ceasefire of that year, together with efforts to reduce tensions and advance the normalisation of relations between Baku and Yerevan.
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