Armenians, Azerbaijanis Still Dreaming Of Home A Year After Karabakh Recaptured – Analysis
By Eva Baghdasarian, Joshua Kucera and RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service
(RFE/RL) -- While Tatevik Khachatrian was forced to leave everything behind one year ago, Vasila Mammadova was hopeful that, for the first time in 30 years, there was a chance she might get everything back.
On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched an offensive to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory it had lost to Armenian forces in the 1990s. Within 24 hours, Karabakh's Armenian de facto leadership surrendered, and, in the days that followed, nearly the entire population of the territory, virtually all ethnic Armenians, fled. They included Khachatrian, a journalist, and her husband and young son.
It was the second time the territory had been completely emptied of one ethnic group since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Armenian forces won the first war between the two sides in the 1990s, the entire ethnic Azerbaijani population fled. Those fleeing included Mammadova and her family, farmers from the village of Xocali (aka Khojaly) -- the site of the worst massacre of civilians during the first war.
One year on, Azerbaijan is trying to rebuild and resettle the territories it retook. Mammadova, who since the 1990s has lived in a settlement for displaced people in Pirsagi, about 30 kilometers north of Baku, visited Xocali on a government-sponsored trip after last year's offensive.
"I imagined Xocali as a city of ghosts, where ghosts of people who had been killed there were flying in the sky. Where, wherever you dig, people's bones come to the surface," she said. "But my impression from the first visit was different and mostly positive. A lot of new buildings have been built in the last year. Everything has changed." Mammadova hopes to move back next year.
Meanwhile, the Armenians who fled Karabakh are trying to rebuild their lives. Khachatrian and six members of her extended family live in a distant suburb of Yerevan, in an apartment that hasn't been renovated since the Soviet era yet still stretches their budget. She gets the impression that the Armenian government is trying to get people to forget about them.
"After all these tragic events, not even a day of mourning was declared in Armenia. There is no day of either commemoration or celebration about Artsakh," she said, using an alternative Armenian name for Karabakh. "It seems that an attempt is being made to finally close the page on the Republic of Artsakh."
Rebuilding Karabakh
The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was part of Soviet Azerbaijan, but its population was about 75 percent ethnic Armenian. As the Soviet Union collapsed, war over the territory broke out and Armenian-backed separatists managed to seize control. They also took control of seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts -- populated almost only by ethnic Azerbaijanis -- forcing the entire population of more than 600,000 to flee.
Diplomatic efforts to settle the conflict brought little progress. The two sides fought another war in 2020 that lasted six weeks before a Russian-brokered cease-fire, resulting in Armenia losing control over parts of the region and the seven adjacent districts. The two sides started negotiations over a full resolution of the conflict but, in 2023, Azerbaijan, impatient with the progress of those talks, launched a one-day offensive that resulted in the Karabakh leadership's full surrender and the exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians.
Azerbaijani reconstruction of the seven districts outside of Karabakh began in 2020 but has been complicated by the fact that the former cities and villages had been mostly razed since the 1990s and much of the territory mined. The parts of Karabakh that Azerbaijan retook in 2023 were largely still populated, so infrastructure was largely intact and has been easy for Azerbaijan to repurpose over the last year.
Workers have removed the Armenian inscriptions over the buildings of the former Artsakh State University in preparation for opening the new Karabakh University. (Under Soviet rule, it was the Stepanakert State Pedagogical Institute.) They have torn down buildings built by the former separatist authorities, such as the de facto parliament building and a hall of veterans.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev celebrated the destruction of those two buildings on a visit in March to mark the Norouz holiday. "There is no longer any trace of separatists here," he said. "The Norouz bonfire is doing the final cleaning."
Other demolitions have taken place in greater secrecy. A 19th-century Armenian church in the town of Susa (known to Armenians as Shushi) has been destroyed, according to satellite imagery examined byCaucasus Heritage Watch,an academic organization documenting the fate of cultural heritage in the region. Other Armenian heritage sites have also been razed, in particular those that have stood in the way of Azerbaijan's ambitious road-building projects, the organization has reported.
Despite the rapid construction, repopulation of Karabakh has gone slowly. As of the end of July, close to 8,000 former residents had moved back to the territories that Azerbaijan retook since 2020 -- nearly all of them to districts outside of Nagorno-Karabakh -- according to Azerbaijani state figures. About 3,000 more have moved to the region's main city, Xankendi, known by Armenians as Stepanakert, to work, including at Xankendi University, which is scheduled to start instruction to a further 1,100 students in the fall semester.
One of the few formerly Azerbaijani-populated areas retaken by Azerbaijan in 2023 was Xocali, Mammadova's home village. As of June, 50 families had moved back and officials promised that 228 will have done so by the end of the year.
The reconstruction process has been plagued by criticisms of corruption, inefficiency, and a failure to take into account what residents want. AliyevvisitedXocali in May to show off a new multistory apartment complex. But what Mammadova wants is the village life she used to have.
Her son visited Xocali shortly after the September 2023 offensive and found the foundation of their house still standing. But when the family returned for another visit months later, they found a construction site where their house had been; only a few hazelnut trees remained.
"I wasn't happy with that, and I asked the government to give us back our yard," she said. "But they told us that the city was being rebuilt according to the plan of the government and they could give us a plot of land of a comparable size in any other part of Xocali."
What the authorities are building is "beautiful, but they are not letting us even keep one chicken," she said. "We didn't live in Moscow, we lived in Xocali, the village." She gestured to her yard in Pirsagi. "You see how many chickens I have here, I don't pay for eggs. I kill a chicken, the children eat it. We want it to be the same there, but there aren't the conditions for it."
Life As A Refugee
In the days after last year's offensive, more than 100,000 Armenians fled to Armenia. While the refugee influx amounted to about 4 percent of Armenia's entire population, they were absorbed relatively easily, either staying with relatives, finding rental housing, or staying in government-run refugee accommodation.
One year on, though, there is still much uncertainty among Karabakh refugees about their future. The government has announced it will cut back the rental subsidies it has been giving to refugees, starting at the beginning of next year. And it has rolled out a program to give one-off payments to refugees to help them buy homes, but it's come under criticism from advocacy groups.
Khachatrian, who hosts a video podcast about issues related to Nagorno-Karabakh, said her family, for example, won't be eligible to get any money until the third phase of the program, in 2027.
"People have completely lost faith [in the government] and have come to terms with the fact that this is how it is," she said. "This also means that people will have to emigrate, because renting a home somewhere in Tikhoretsk [in Russia] will be less expensive than in Armenia."
Refugees from Karabakh also come up against social discrimination, in particular resentment that they are a burden on an already under-resourced country. "There is obvious discrimination against people from Artsakh," Khachatrian said. "It is influenced by the media, government propaganda that 'we give this or that to people from Artsakh,' while in reality they don't give us anything."
Over 10,000 refugees from Karabakh have already left Armenia, with many heading for Russia. Still, Khachatrian intends to stay in Armenia if she can afford it. "It is our homeland, and it is much easier to find yourself in your linguistic and cultural environment than in a foreign country," she said.
Refugees, and many other Armenians, have also been dispirited by the government's apparent disinterest in promoting the rights of the Karabakh Armenians to return to their homes.
Officials from the United States, Europe, and Russia, in their statements on a resolution to the conflict, have all mentioned the rights of the Armenian population to return to Karabakh. But the Armenian government itself has poured cold water on the possibility and, in its statements on the issue, implies that it is only on the agenda of the domestic political opposition.
"All those who are trying to convince the people of Nagorno-Karabakh that there is a possibility of return are adventurers trying to create tension in Armenia...in order to put a new political leash on Armenia's neck," Artur Hovannisian, a lawmaker from the ruling Civil Contract party,toldRFE/RL's Armenian Service.
The Armenian government's disavowal of the Karabakh Armenians' right of return has encouraged Azerbaijan to proceed at full speed with its resettlement of Karabakh, including previously Armenian-inhabited areas like Xankendi, says the human rights ombudsman of the former de facto Karabakh government, Gegham Stepanian.
"They have completely closed this topic, and if they hadn't done this, today [Azerbaijanis] would not be settling Stepanakert at such a rapid pace and taking over the homes of Stepanakert residents," hesaidin an interview with local news website Armenia Today.
An Uncertain Future
While the Armenian government may be trying to close the topic, it's not closed among the refugees themselves. In the early days following the exodus, there was talk among some refugees that if conditions in Armenia continued to be difficult, they might try to return to Karabakh, even if it meant submitting to Azerbaijani rule. That talk has now quieted.
"I don't know a single Armenian who would say they are ready to live in Artsakh" under those conditions, Khachatrian said.
In the long term, though, she and other Armenians hope that the political and military fortunes may again turn.
"None of us know what to expect in the future, what geopolitical changes might happen. Maybe things will change in a way that what seems impossible today will become possible tomorrow," she said. "And maybe one day Artsakh will become Armenian again. At least that's the dream I have and instill in my child as well."
Azerbaijan, meanwhile, regards sentiments like that as revanchist and is trying to stamp out any remaining embers of Armenian ambition to take back Karabakh. That includes strong-arming Armenia into changing its constitution, which still contains language calling for "reunification" of Armenia and Karabakh.
And while Aliyev had, before September 2023, said the civilian Armenian residents of Karabakh should remain, those sentiments also are no longer expressed: Aliyev now studiously avoids any mention of the Armenian population other than the separatist leadership.
Among the Azerbaijani returnees, too, there is little interest in the return of their former Armenian neighbors.
Mammadova said that, before the first war, there was plenty of friendly contact between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. "But not now," she said. Her husband, Ramil, was killed in the first war, in 1992.
"My four children were left fatherless, and I was left homeless," she said. "How can I be friends with them? Maybe time will solve the problem. I don't know. But my heart cannot be healed."
- Eva Baghdasarian is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Armenian Service.
- Joshua Kucera is a journalist living in Tbilisi. He also contributes to Eurasianet, The Economist, and other publications.