According to Armenia’s Investigative Committee, at least 198 soldiers as well as 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed during the 24-hour hostilities that enabled Azerbaijan to regain control over the region.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia. Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s ethnic Armenian residents to flee to Armenia.
The refugees included the parents, wives and other relatives of the Karabakh soldiers killed in action. They left their homeland just days after hastily burying their loved ones.
Seeing no realistic chance of ever returning home, many of those bereaved refugees now hope to have the bodies of their soldiers exhumed, transported to Armenia and reburied there. Some have approached various government agencies in Yerevan and even the local office of the International Committee of the Red (ICRC) for that purpose. After receiving no reassuring answers, they decided to rally outside the Armenian prime minister’s office.
“If there is a slightest chance of doing that, please intervene and solve this issue,” Bella Galstian, a Karabakh woman whose younger brother Sasun was killed in action, said, appealing to the government.
Borya Arzumanian, another demonstrator, lost his 38-year-old son during the brief but fierce fighting.
“We buried him in a Stepanakert mass grave,” Arzumanian told reporters. “We have asked various people a lot but haven’t achieved any results. Our last hope is that … the Armenian government will intervene so that we exhume our boys and bring them to Armenia.”
“We are appealing, asking, begging the Armenian authorities to help us rebury them,” another woman said, breaking into tears.
The demonstrators were joined by relatives of over a dozen other Karabakh Armenians who went missing in September 2023 and remain unaccounted for. They still hope that their loved ones are alive.
Several parents of the fallen soldiers were allowed to enter the main government building. They were not received by any official, however. They said they were told to present their appeal in writing.
Meanwhile, the spokeswoman for the Red Cross office in Yerevan, Zara Amatuni, said: “Although the ICRC is in contact with the parties and the families on various humanitarian issues, it has to be said that as a purely humanitarian organization we are not involved in political processes. This means that decisions on this and other issues rest with the [conflicting] parties.”
“So as soon as the parties reach an agreement on how to deal with this humanitarian issue we will be ready to act as a neutral mediator and assist in any process agreed upon by the parties,” Amatuni told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government is not known to have raised the issue during its peace talks with Baku. Government officials have made no public statements on it.
Pashinian raised eyebrows last month when he alleged that Karabakh forces did not fight back the Azerbaijani offensive because the authorities in Stepanakert as well as the Armenian opposition wanted the region’s population to flee to Armenia to topple him.
Samvel Shahramanian, Karabakh’s exiled president, rejected Pashinian’s allegations. Shahramanian said that hours after the start of the Azerbaijani offensive the Karabakh leadership “realized that we are alone, that resisting the Azerbaijani armed forces outnumbering us by a factor of 12 to 1 was not possible and that we had to save lives.”