Communiqué of the Committee of the International Association of Armenian Studies on the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh
As members of the committee of the International Association of Armenian Studies (AIEA), which is responsible for defending and promoting studies of Armenian language, history, culture and society, we hereby express our deepest concern and indignation. Today we are witnessing the dramatic images of the exodus of an innocent population, bruised and humiliated, eradicated from their ancestral lands. After nine months of Azerbaijan's blockade of the Lachin corridor, the only road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and enabling it to be supplied independently, military attacks were carried out on 19 September by the Azerbaijani army, striking not only military sites but also civilian buildings and villages. In a report published on 7 August, based on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, described the blockade as "genocide".
The attack was carried out on a population that had been starving, psychologically distressed and deprived of medicines, fuel, electricity and other basic necessities for nine months, forcing the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to go into exile and leave the land on which their identity is based. The path of negotiation to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh question, provided for in the ceasefire signed on 9 November 2020 by Armenia and Azerbaijan under the aegis of Russia, has been replaced by the path of military aggression. Following this lightning war and its violence, the leaders of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh were forced to capitulate and the day before yesterday (28 September 2023) proclaimed the dissolution of the Republic with effect from 1 January 2024. The Lachin corridor, blocked for almost 300 days, was reopened on 23 September and thousands of cars are fleeing every day towards Armenia, emptying Nagorno-Karabakh of its millennia-old Armenian presence. At the time of writing, more than 100,000 Armenian inhabitants have left the region to take shelter in the emergency reception centres set up by Armenia in the Goris region. In a press release dated 21 September 2023, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) stressed that "There is a real risk of genocide of ethnic Armenians in the areas under the effective control of Azerbaijan".
When explaining the reasons for the conflict, the media are often content to go back to the fall of the USSR and say that Nagorno-Karabakh claimed independence unilaterally, leading to a thirty-year conflict. They forget to point out that the Armenians have lived in this territory for more than two thousand years. They built churches there, the most important of which date from the 9th to the 13th centuries, and monasteries that were not only places of worship, but also places where knowledge and a cultural and religious identity were preserved. The Republic of Artsakh, for its part, had set up schools and a university, with international collaboration, to contribute to this same preservation.
The humanitarian crisis and ethnic cleansing, to which numerous sources of various origins bear witness (see links below), are also accompanied by the danger of cultural genocide. Guarantees that the Armenian heritage will be preserved are contradicted by a revisionist cultural policy implemented by Azerbaijan, which has already completely destroyed the medieval Armenian necropolis in the old town of Julfa, in Nakhichevan, a few years ago, in order to erase all traces of an Armenian historical presence.
All this is in danger of being erased today by tearing a population from its land, and we want to remind you of this.
We teach this history at the University of Geneva, the Catholic University of Louvain, the University of Rome, the University of Vienna and in all the universities with a chair of Armenian: Oxford, Paris, Venice, UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, Bologna, etc. We call on international organisations to react quickly and intervene effectively to defend the human rights, cultural identity and historical heritage of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The committee of AIEA
Prof. Valentina Calzolari (University of Geneva), President
Prof. Tara Andrews (University of Vienna), Secretary
Dr Irene Tinti (University of Florence), Treasurer
Prof. Marco Bais (Università La Sapienza, Rome)
Dr Emilio Bonfiglio (University of Hamburg)
Prof. Bernard Coulie (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Prof. Nazénie Garibian (Institute of Ancient Manuscrpits and Academy of Fine Arts of Yerevan)
Prof. Robin Meyer (University of Lausanne)