Armenia’s Labor and Social Affairs Minister Arsen Torosian was the first to announce the arrival of the 10 Karabakh Armenians and one ethnic Russian woman. Health Minister Anahit Avanesian said shortly afterwards that they all underwent a medical examination in the southeastern Armenian town of Goris. One of them was hospitalized as a result, she said in a short Facebook post.
The Armenian government did not identify the evacuees. It thus kept relatives of a handful of Karabakh Armenians, who refused to flee the region during its September 2023 recapture by Azerbaijan, guessing about their whereabouts.
They include Eleonora Hambardzumian who failed to convince her 67-year-old brother Slavik to take refuge in Armenia at the time. He decided to stay on in Khnatsakh, a village 15 kilometers east of Stepanakert.
Torosian said that all 11 Karabakh residents themselves asked to be transported to Armenia. Gegham Stepanian, Karabakh’s exiled human rights ombudsman, questioned the claim.
“Not only did they not say they wanted to come [to Armenia], but I also have information that there was a person whose relatives were persuading him at the time to leave, saying that they are ready to organize it through the Red Cross, and the person refused,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Stepanian said at the same time that he is not sure what exactly caused their departure from Karabakh.
“Perhaps there were some discussions between the Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities, as a result of which it was decided to take such a step,” he said.
A satellite image shows a long traffic jam of vehicles along the Lachin corridor as ethnic Armenians flee from Nagorno-Karabakh , September 26, 2023.
More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining population, fled to Armenia in the space of a week following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 assault. Baku denies that the mass exodus was the result of ethnic cleansing committed by it.
The precise number of Armenians who chose not to leave their homeland was never known. Azerbaijan’s state-controlled media has used some of them for propaganda purposes.
Another Karabakh Armenian, Karen Avanesian was arrested by Azerbaijani security services last September for allegedly plotting a “terrorist” attack on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. An Azerbaijani court sentenced Avanesian to 16 years in prison on December 25 at the end of what human rights lawyers in Armenia condemned as a sham trial. Citing Karabakh’s former health authorities, they say that the 58-year-old man suffers from a serious mental disease and should not have been put on trial in the first place.
Earlier in December, Karabakh’s exiled ethnic Armenian leadership based in Yerevan vowed to continue fighting for the displaced Karabakh Armenians’ right to return to their homeland despite the Armenian government’s refusal to raise it on the international stage. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly said that the refugees should stop hoping to return to Karabakh and should “settle down” in Armenia instead.