After nearly 2,000 years of Christian presence in the land, Nagorno Karabakh now lies empty following ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijani forces in September 2023. csi
Guest commentary by Neil Hauer
On April 20, Armenians around the world marked Easter Sunday. The celebration of Jesus’s resurrection took place in communities ranging from Yerevan to Tbilisi, from Aleppo to Los Angeles and the other great Armenian centers of the world. 2025’s commemorations marked the 1,724th time the holiday has been celebrated since the traditional date of Armenia’s conversion to Christianity in 301 AD.
Yet there was one place where it was not marked. For just the second time in nearly two thousand years, there was no celebration of Easter in Nagorno Karabakh. The brutal expulsion of the territory’s entire ethnic Armenian population by Azerbaijan in September 2023 meant that the church bells lay silent in Stepanakert, the ethnically cleansed former capital of the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.
A land continually under attack
The inhabitants of the territory known to the world as Nagorno Karabakh have never had an easy existence. The region received its name – ‘Mountainous Karabakh’ – upon its creation as a territorial unit by the Soviet Union in 1923. Despite the region’s overwhelmingly (roughly 95%) ethnic Armenian population, it was placed within Soviet Azerbaijan as an autonomous oblast. As the USSR collapsed in 1991, Nagorno Karabakh – having declared independence – found itself embroiled in war. Backed by Armenia, the region emerged as de facto independent upon victory in 1994, a status that would last until 2020.
On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan returned with a vengeance. In a 44-day campaign, Baku’s troops seized control of three-fourths of the territory held by Nagorno Karabakh’s Armenians, leaving only a rump state under Russian protection. But Ilham Aliyev, the dictatorial leader of Azerbaijan, was not done. In December 2022, he enacted a blockade of Karabakh, cutting the region’s one road linking it to the outside world and starving the 100,000 civilians remaining inside for nine months. The killing blow came on September 19, 2023. In a brazen offensive, Azerbaijan forced the unconditional surrender of the enclave, forcing the exodus of nearly the entire population in barely a week and bringing an end to the centuries-old Armenian presence in Karabakh.
The few Armenians who remained
Out of a pre-2020 population of roughly 150,000, only a handful of Armenians remain in what was once Nagorno Karabakh. A United Nations mission to the region on October 2, 2023, just two weeks after the Azerbaijani attack, found that there were as few as 50 ethnic Armenians still remaining. Those who stayed were overwhelmingly elderly and infirm, if not with psychological disorders as well, with no family members to look after them. While current statistics are impossible to come by, reports suggest that no more than 15 to 20 ethnic Armenians still reside in Azerbaijani-controlled Stepanakert, now renamed Khankendi. They are frequently mistreated, as videos circulated on Azerbaijani Telegram channels demonstrate: One man who stayed is known as ‘Fred’. He suffers from physical and mental ailments and is regularly filmed by Azerbaijanis as they mock and harass him.
Reshaping the physical geography of Karabakh
Having successfully expelled the native population, Azerbaijan is now hard at work at reshaping the physical geography of Karabakh, erasing any trace of the Armenian presence there. Satellite imagery reveals that churches, graveyards, and even entire villages have been leveled, particularly in areas that Baku captured in 2020: the village of Karin Tak, sitting at the base of the stone pillar that hosts the fortress town of Shushi, has been razed to the ground.
Numerous independent watchdogs have tracked the destruction, demonstrating its systematic nature. It is a feature, not a bug, of Azerbaijani policy. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), one such monitor, has recorded nearly 80 instances of Azerbaijani destruction of Armenian heritage sites in Nagorno Karabakh since 2021, primarily in Stepanakert, where 29 different sites have been demolished. Videos posted online show the scale of Baku’s efforts to remake the former Karabakh Armenian capital, including the demolition of the former parliament building in March 2024 and the bulldozing of entire residential neighborhoods in the city. The few historic Armenian churches that have not been threatened, meanwhile, have been rebranded as ‘Caucasian Albanian,’ a pseudohistoric narrative advanced by the Azerbaijani government that aims to deny the long history of Armenian presence in Karabakh. Aliyev’s plan for the region, it seems, involves the eradication or appropriation of Karabakh’s entire past.
Denying Karabakh’s past
There is already one blueprint for such a campaign, enacted by Aliyev and his father, former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev, in years past. Between 1997 and 2006, Azerbaijan carried out what has been called ‘the worst cultural genocide of the 21st century’ in Nakhchivan, its enclave that lies to the southwest of Armenia. Once home to a large Armenian population, Nakhchivan was steadily emptied of its indigenous Christians over the course of the 20th century, a process that reached its conclusion with the outbreak of the First Karabakh War. Following that conflict, the Aliyevs set out to avenge their loss by annihilating any trace of Armenian presence in Nakhchivan. In the span of a decade, the entire Armenian heritage of Nakhchivan – including 89 churches, 5,840 khachkars (ornately carved cross-stones) and 22,000 tombstones – was destroyed. Footage filmed from across the border in neighboring Iran shows men with sledgehammers demolishing the ancient cemetery of Julfa, until then considered one of the treasures of the Armenian world. The same process – with the same perpetrator – now appears to be underway in Karabakh.
Incursions against the Republic of Armenia
But the Azerbaijani dictator does not intend on stopping there. Since 2020, Aliyev has intensified the use of irredentist rhetoric aimed not only at Karabakh, but at Armenia itself. Referring to the entirety of the modern-day Republic of Armenia as ‘historical Western Azerbaijan,’ Azerbaijan’s president and his officials have repeatedly laid claim to their neighbor as rightful Azerbaijani land. This is not pure posturing, either: Azerbaijan has launched repeated military incursions into Armenia proper since 2020, occupying at least 215 square kilometers of Armenian territory in the country’s east and south. Baku continues to insist on its right to the ‘Zangezur corridor,’ a strip of land that, if ceded, would bisect Armenia in the south (along its border with Iran) and grant Azerbaijan full control of a territory linking its mainland with the exclave of Nakhchivan.
In line with these goals, Azerbaijan is pursuing a policy of harassment and intimidation against Armenian border settlements. Villages like Khoznavar, Khnatsakh and Nerkin Hand in southern Armenia have been persistently targeted by gunfire from Azerbaijani troops, who shoot at houses and civilian property in a campaign of terror. Having already been expelled from their original homes, Karabakh Armenian refugees now find that their lives and livelihoods are threatened once again.
A damning indictment
The most damning indictment of Baku’s rule in what was once Armenian-populated Nagorno Karabakh comes from Freedom House, an international human rights watchdog. In a report published in November 2024, Freedom House concludes: “The Azerbaijani state acted upon a comprehensive, methodically implemented strategy to empty Nagorno Karabakh of its ethnic Armenian population and historical and cultural presence.” Drawing on interviews with more than 330 victims, the report details the brutal realities of the nine-month blockade, with locals living in siege-like conditions amidst a lack of food or medicine. The report concludes that the final Azerbaijani offensive, in which the perpetrators “willfully killed civilians and enjoyed absolute impunity,” constituted ethnic cleansing. In its last-ever country report on Nagorno Karabakh in 2024, Freedom House gave the territory – already under full Azerbaijani control – an unprecedented score of -3/100: zeroes in all categories, with an extra three points deducted for “the government or occupying power deliberately changing the ethnic composition of a country or territory so as to destroy a culture or tip the political balance in favor of another group.”
Baku’s apparent impunity in the international community
Amidst it all, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Azerbaijan’s destruction of Nagorno Karabakh and its people is that Baku has suffered precisely zero consequences for it. The European Union in particular has shown an incredibly cynical attitude towards the crisis, continuing to fete Aliyev, as seen in EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas’ visit to Baku last month. The hypocrisy of the world’s largest democratic union lavishing praise upon a brutal and warmongering dictatorship as a ‘reliable partner’ is hard to ignore. Yet even the harshest of measures would be unlikely to restore the Karabakh Armenians to their homes and livelihoods. Their forced exile will continue to be a black stain on the international community that stood by and watched it happened, normalizing its perpetrators all the while.
Neil Hauer is a journalist based in Yerevan, Armenia. He has reported on the Caucasus, Russia, Ukraine and Syria, including the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
