Presenting the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and stressing that its people are “on the verge of a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe”, Mher Margarian, permanent representative of Armenia to the United Nations, said in his August 11 letter to the president of the UN Security Council that “under current circumstances, the Government of Armenia requests the intervention of the UN Security Council as a principal body of safeguarding global security and preventing mass atrocities including war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide.”
According to the press office of Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Margarian emphasized that “the severe shortage of essential goods, including food, medicines and fuel, has been exacerbated since June 15, 2023, when Azerbaijan fully blocked the Lachin corridor - the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia and the outer world - by banning any access to Nagorno-Karabakh, even humanitarian. The continued deliberate obstruction of natural gas and electricity supply to Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan has been detrimental for the daily life of the people.”
“The suspension of all humanitarian supplies coupled with the gradual utilization of limited domestic stocks, targeted shootings of agricultural areas by Azerbaijani Armed Forces, has resulted in an acute food shortage and closures of shops. Due to the lack of essential food and vitamins, approximately 2,000 pregnant women, around 30,000 children, 20,000 older persons, and 9,000 persons with disabilities are struggling to survive under conditions of malnutrition,” Margarian wrote.
“People with chronic diseases, including 4,687 individuals with diabetes and 8,450 individuals with circulatory diseases, are left almost without any medicine needed. As a result of this situation there has been a recorded increase of mortality from several diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and malignant neoplasms. From January to July, compared to the same period of the previous year, the level of anemia among pregnant women under medical observation has reached around 90 percent. This is due to inadequate nutrition and the absence or insufficiency of appropriate medications. Moreover, the hot weather conditions and absence of sanitizers and medicine create risks of epidemics in the region,” Armenia’s permanent representative to the UN added.
Margarian went on to emphasize that “the deliberate creation of unbearable life conditions for the population is nothing but an act of mass atrocity targeting the indigenous people of Nagorno-Karabakh and forcing them to leave their homes and homeland.”
“Such an infliction of collective punishment upon the people of Nagorno-Karabakh constitutes an existential threat to them should they be left alone vis-a-vis the Azerbaijani aggressive policy,” the Armenian representative underscored.
On August 8, Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian leader Arayik Harutiunian issued an urgent appeal to the international community, asking for immediate action to lift the de facto blockade imposed by Azerbaijan and prevent what he called “the genocide of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.” He also called on Armenia to immediately turn to the UN Security Council requesting a discussion of the “humanitarian disaster that has emerged in Nagorno-Karabakh as a result of Azerbaijan’s illegal blockade of the Lachin Corridor.”
Armenia and ethnic Armenian authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh see the checkpoint that Azerbaijan installed in the Lachin corridor in April as a violation of the terms of a Moscow-brokered 2020 ceasefire agreement that they insist places the vital route solely under the control of Russian peacekeepers.
Azerbaijan denies blockading Nagorno-Karabakh and offers an alternative route for supplies via the town of Agdam, which is situated east of the region and is controlled by Baku.
Aykhan Hajizade, a spokesman for Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on August 11 that Karabakh Armenians scuttled at the last moment arrangements made through the efforts of international partners for the use of the Agdam road by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a further intensification of traffic through the Lachin road through the ICRC’s agency.
Hajizade was commenting on a publication in Kommersant, a leading Russian newspaper, that wrote earlier that day, quoting an official “familiar with the regional situation”, that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had proposed opening the Agdam road first, through which Red Cross vehicles would deliver what was necessary to Nagorno-Karabakh, and a day later, according to Moscow’s proposal, the Lachin road would be opened.
According to the unnamed official, Karabakh Armenians first set a condition that Lachin should be opened not one day later, but simultaneously and then demanded that no Azerbaijani goods be delivered through Agdam. The paper wrote that then a scandal related to Azerbaijan’s arrest of a Karabakh resident at a checkpoint in the Lachin corridor on charges of war crimes allegedly committed during the early 1990s emerged and “the compromise did not happen.”
Commenting on the article in the Russian daily, Nagorno-Karabakh’s de facto Foreign Ministry said on Friday that “any initiatives which seek to link the use of the Lachin corridor… with unrelated matters or alternative routes, including through Agdam, are essentially attempts to legitimize Azerbaijan’s breach of its international commitments concerning the Lachin Corridor and to call into question the Trilateral Statement signed by their country’s president on November 9, 2020.”
“This approach, which is being put forward by Azerbaijan, deliberately infringes upon the rights and dignity of the people of Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh – ed.] and runs counter to the norms of international humanitarian law and human rights-related international law,” it said.