How the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is still shaping the fraught relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan

One year ago this week, Azerbaijan launched a military operation that led to the displacement of more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Tens of thousands of them are now scattered throughout Armenia, with the majority settling in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Many are struggling with housing and job security.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which means “mountainous black garden,” is an enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders, but it’s been inhabited, historically, by a majority-Armenian population.

Since the final days of the Soviet Union, war, displacement and trauma have upended the lives of people from Nagorno-Karabakh. Today, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is still defining the relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, said the region has a complex history.

“It’s a region that’s at a crossroads, a region that’s very diverse, a region that’s neither quite Europe, nor quite Asia, nor quite the Middle East — and [in] the region, [these] ethnic groups have quite a long history of cooperation and coexistence, but also conflict, of which the largest conflict by far is between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.”

During the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region within Azerbaijan made up mainly of ethnic Armenians.

In 1988, many Armenians were emboldened by Soviet reforms and wanted more autonomy. The Karabakh movement led by Armenians sought to unify Nagorno-Karabakh with the rest of Armenia. 

Azerbaijanis rejected this idea, and quickly, the political disagreement led to violence.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to intervene, but his government failed to ease the tension. 

“The Armenians of Karabakh straight out say they want to join Soviet Armenia [and] leave Azerbaijan. Azerbaijanis say, ‘No, this will break up our republic.’ It starts as a political dispute, but Moscow can’t sort it out, and very quickly, it escalates into violence, already in the Soviet period,” de Waal said.

Then, in 1991, with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the conflict became a war between two independent states. It also led to ethnic clashes within each state, with Azerbaijanis killing Armenians, and Armenians killing Azerbaijanis.

“Suddenly, everyone feels mutually insecure, and the neighbor whose shop you went to, whose doctor’s office you went to, whose [kids] played with your kids, suddenly, he might be a threat, and neighbors start fighting,” de Waal said.

On top of that, hundreds of thousands of people on both sides were displaced.

The war went on until 1994, when the fighting concluded with a ceasefire. Nagorno-Karabakh remained within Azerbaijan, but Armenians controlled the territory and the area around it.

For 26 years, it was considered a frozen conflict. In 2020, the second Nagorno-Karabakh war began and lasted for 44 days, tilting the balance of the conflict.

Azerbaijan took control of most of the territory surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, but it still didn’t control the entire region.

Tigran Grigoryan is head of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, an Armenia-based think tank.

He said that Azerbaijan wasn’t satisfied with the result of the 2020 war, so it started a blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2022.

“The end goal of that strategy, of that policy, was the complete depopulation of the territory, and the full takeover of the territory.”

It resulted in a shortage of food, fuel, medicine and other necessities. 

The Red Cross and other international organizations called on Azerbaijan to allow aid into Nagorno-Karabakh to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.

“After nine months since the start of the blockade, Azerbaijan launched a military operation, and basically forced the whole Armenian population of the region to leave the territory. We’re talking about more than 100,000 people who have been living there all their lives.”

The exodus of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh began a year ago.

But in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, many people have different interpretations of these events.

Rusif Huseynov is the director of the Topchubashov Center, a Baku-based think tank.

“No one in Azerbaijan, except for a few exceptions, ever believed that it would be possible to solve the issue peacefully, or that the Armenians would return the Azerbaijani territories in a peaceful manner.”

For Huseynov, Azerbaijan’s actions are about restoring the country’s territorial integrity. 

Now, after decades of conflict, the new status quo is that Azerbaijan controls the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh. The result is the displacement of tens of thousands of Armenians.

Despite this upheaval, peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan are ongoing. Azerbaijan has said that the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is off the table, something that most Armenians are unwilling to accept.