Armenia appeals to UN over ‘full-fledged’ crisis in Karabakh

By Mark Dovich

Armenia has called on the United Nations’ most powerful body to hold talks on Azerbaijan’s blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, which stretched past the eight-month mark on Saturday.

The day before, Armenia’s UN ambassador formally requested the Security Council to convene an emergency meeting on the blockade, which has pushed Nagorno-Karabakh’s roughly 120,000 Armenians to the brink of famine.

The appeal to the UN came just days after the International Criminal Court’s former chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, said the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh should be considered a genocide and called on the Security Council to refer the issue to the tribunal.

“There is a reasonable basis to believe that a genocide is being committed against Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Luis Moreno Ocampo wrote in a widely publicized report. “Starvation is the invisible genocide weapon.”

What’s the context?

On Monday, Nagorno-Karabakh’s state-run InfoCenter announced a “major accident in Artsakh’s largest flour mill” and warned of potential bread shortages. It did not elaborate on the cause or nature of the accident, but said it expected the problem to be fixed “in a few days.”

Meanwhile, Stepanakert residents have also been struggling in recent days to cope with intermittent water supplies, with a local utility company citing the lack of fuel to run pumps, according to the InfoCenter.

As critical medications run low, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Health Ministry reported last week a substantial uptick in the number of deaths due to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and strokes, as well as surges in cases of anemia, fainting, and high blood pressure.

“The situation has become even more dire,” wrote Siranush Adamyan, a Stepanakert-based reporter for CivilNet. “From the outside, it may seem that if we haven’t died of hunger yet, then things aren’t so bad, but people are suffering every day.”

“There is no food, no medicine, no electricity, no natural gas, no public transport, and now not even water,” she added.

“The people of Nagorno-Karabakh are on the verge of a full-fledged humanitarian crisis,” Armenia’s permanent representative to the UN, Mher Margaryan, wrote in a letter last Friday to the Security Council president, according to Armenia’s Foreign Ministry.

It was not immediately clear if or when the 15-member council, the only UN body with the power to issue legally binding resolutions, would hold such a meeting.

The Security Council has met just once to discuss the matter, about a week after the blockade began last December. The council failed to issue a joint statement at that time, reportedly amid diplomatic infighting between permanent members France and Russia.

In February, a UN court ordered Azerbaijan to “ensure unimpeded movement” between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, but the International Court of Justice has no enforcement powers to back up its rulings.

What’s the background?

The blockade began when a group of self-styled Azerbaijani environmental activists set up a roadblock on the Lachin corridor, the sole overland route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. Many of them were later revealed to be connected with the Azerbaijani government.

In April, Azerbaijani border guards in effect formalized the blockade by setting up a checkpoint on a different section of the road in violation of the ceasefire declaration that ended the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

The ceasefire says Russian peacekeepers should control the route, while Azerbaijan “shall guarantee the security of persons, vehicles, and cargo” moving along the corridor.

For most of the blockade, Azerbaijan has allowed only a limited number of vehicles belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Russian peacekeepers to transit along the Lachin corridor.

In June, Azerbaijan tightened the blockade further, suspending all deliveries of medical supplies and basic foodstuffs to Nagorno-Karabakh and blocking all Russian peacekeeper vehicles. That left the ICRC able only to conduct occasional medical evacuations to Armenia.

In a statement last month, the humanitarian organization, which has evacuated more than 700 people in urgent need of medical care since the blockade began, called on “the relevant decision makers to allow the ICRC to resume its essential humanitarian operations in the area.”

Since the 2020 war, CivilNet has been the only outside media organization with a field office in Stepanakert, providing real-time, on-the-ground coverage of the critical situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.