The 130-page report presents the findings of a joint fact-finding mission launched by them after Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that forced more than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians to flee to Armenia.
“The policy of ethnic cleansing was executed through a combination of meticulously planned violent and non-violent measures that have been in place since 2020. Violent actions included targeted killings, shootings, and military offensives,” it says, describing some of those actions as war crimes.
“These practices culminated in the large-scale offensive on September 19, [2023] which affected all residents of Nagorno-Karabakh,” adds the report based on interviews conducted with 330 Karabakh Armenian refugees.
Freedom House and its Western and Armenian partner organizations insisted that even before the offensive that restored its full control of Karabakh Baku sought to drive the Karabakh Armenians out of their homeland by “creating conditions of severe insecurity, hardship, and psychological duress.” They singled out a nearly yearlong Azerbaijani blockade of the region that preceded the exodus not prevented or stopped by Russian peacekeepers.
They went on to urge the international community to impose sanctions on Azerbaijan and refer it to the International Criminal Court (ICC) while pressuring Baku to create conditions for the “safe and voluntary return” of the Karabakh Armenians. The release of their report was clearly timed to coincide with the start of the annual UN climate change summit held in the Azerbaijani capital.
Azerbaijan denies forcing the Karabakh Armenians to flee their homes and says they can live there under Azerbaijani rule. Karabakh’s leaders and ordinary residents rejected such an option even before the Azerbaijani offensive condemned by the United States and the European Union.
Despite that condemnation, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden did not impose sanctions on Baku or Azerbaijani officials. A senior U.S. State Department official, James O’Brien, said in June that Washington has commissioned “an outside group that advocates for human rights globally” to look into the Karabakh exodus to determine whether it was the result of ethnic cleansing.
Artak Beglarian, a former Karabakh premier, suggested on Monday that the report drawn up by Freedom House and its partners is the “independent review” that was mentioned by O’Brien. Andranik Shirinyan, the Armenia country representative at Freedom House, did not deny that.
“All I can say is that they [the U.S.] are also waiting for the full report to be released to draw their conclusions,” Shirinyan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
It remains to be seen whether the report will influence the policy of the outgoing Biden administration or the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. The latter condemned the “forcible displacement” of the Karabakh Armenians and vowed to “stop the violence and ethnic cleansing” as he courted Armenian American voters in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election.
