OPINION:
Two years after Azerbaijan forced more than 100,000 Armenians from the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, their homes remain empty and their voices absent from the world’s headlines. They have been forgotten amid even more catastrophic conflicts and sidelined as Washington brokers a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Something is missing in this because peace cannot be a ratification of ethnic cleansing.
Yet last month, when Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a pledge to finalize a peace accord at the White House, the text made no reference to the destroyed Armenian community nor to its 23 political prisoners still held in Baku. These omissions must be addressed. True reconciliation requires that the displaced be guaranteed safe return and that the prisoners be freed.
The history is complex. Nagorno-Karabakh, or “Artsakh” to its indigenous population, is a disputed territory. Though legally recognized as part of Azerbaijan based on Soviet-era delineations, the region was autonomously governed by its ethnic Armenian majority until Azerbaijan’s aggressions began in earnest five years ago.
The first major phase of the ethnic cleansing was activated in September 2020 when Azerbaijan launched a military offensive that took swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh. The abuses were ruthless. Azerbaijani forces carried out widespread torture, mutilations and destruction of religious sites with a clear intention of eliminating ethnic Armenians and their history from the enclave. A ceasefire was signed after 44 days, but carnage continued.
I spent several years documenting rights abuses in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia for the University Network for Human Rights. On my first fact-finding trip, I met Margarita from Hadrut. She escaped her village before Azerbaijani forces arrived, but her neighbors, particularly the elderly, did not. Soldiers captured her friends, executed and beheaded them on camera and then shared the videos on social media. “This is not war,” she told me. “It’s genocide.”
In September 2022, Azerbaijan upped its attacks on villages in Nagorno-Karabakh as well as in sovereign Armenia. Two months later, Azerbaijan initiated a blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road and the lifeline between Nagorno-Karabakh and the outside world. With Azerbaijan preventing the entry of food, fuel and medicines, a humanitarian crisis ensued. The University Network for Human Rights joined Genocide Watch, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, the first United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide and the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in warning of ethnic cleansing and possible genocide.
On Sept. 19, 2023, with Nagorno-Karabakh’s population starved and exhausted, Azerbaijan landed its final blow. It launched a final military incursion into Nagorno-Karabakh and, in only two days, expelled all but a few dozen of Nagorno-Karabakh’s remaining 100,000 ethnic Armenians. In all, about 150,000 have been displaced in recent years.
A peace agreement in name only
The day before his August meeting with Mr. Aliyev and Mr. Pashinyan, President Trump went to Truth Social to declare that a “Historic Peace Summit” would come from the gathering. The announcement suggested an end to the decades of conflict between the two countries and a potential road map for the return of Nagorno-Karabakh’s displaced people. The next day, Messrs. Aliyev and Pashinyan joined Mr. Trump at the White House, and the two leaders signed a peace pledge.
The White House hailed the meeting as “a landmark achievement for international diplomacy that only Mr. Trump could deliver,” and Mr. Aliyev announced that he and Mr. Pashinyan would nominate Mr. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Some pundits and journalists declared that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue is finally “coming to an end,” but the meeting proved to be little more than a photo op.
No binding treaty was signed. Rather, the two leaders signed a pledge to complete a proposed peace agreement that was discussed and initialed in the meeting. Nowhere in the draft was there a mention of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been the focal point of the conflict between the two countries, or the 150,000 people expelled from their homeland.
Any agreement that does not include a right of return for Nagorno-Karabakh’s uprooted people is an erasure of these people and a legitimation of the ethnic cleansing. For a peace deal to be meaningful and lasting, it must incorporate the needs of those most impacted by the conflict.
Here’s how: For starters, the agreement must guarantee a right of return. Several international instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Geneva Conventions, as well as provisional measures by the International Court of Justice, impose an obligation on Azerbaijan to ensure the right of safe return for those displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh.
The accord must also incorporate mechanisms for justice. Those who carried out rights abuses during the ethnic cleansing should be held to account. Otherwise, their impunity will breed further impunity. Finally, the agreement must facilitate the release of political prisoners. At least 23 ethnic Armenians are being held in Azerbaijan, including former state minister and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, whose foundation is supported by Nobel laureates, former U.N. High Commissioner Mary Robinson and actor George Clooney.
Though the period around the two-year mark is a remembrance, it also offers an opportunity to call for remedial action. As atrocities continue in Gaza and Ukraine, it is even more imperative that the international community come together to demand a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan that centers on its victims. Otherwise, there will be no peace.
• Thomas Becker serves as the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights and teaches human rights at Columbia Law School.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.