YEREVAN, Armenia –
Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general issued an arrest warrant for former Nagorno-Karabakh leader Arayik Harutyunyan on Sunday, as the first United Nations mission to visit the region in three decades arrived in the former state separatist.
Harutyunyan ruled the breakaway region, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians, between May 2020 and early September. Less than a month later, the separatist government announced it would dissolve by the end of 2023 after three decades of trying for independence.
Azerbaijani police arrested one of Harutyunyan’s former prime ministers, Ruben Vardanyan, on Wednesday as he tried to cross into Armenia with tens of thousands of others who fled after Baku’s 24-hour blitz last week last to regain control of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Harutyunyan and the enclave’s former military commander, Jalal Harutyunyan, are accused of firing missiles at Azerbaijan’s third-largest city, Ganja, during a 44-day war in late 2020, the media reported. local media. The clash between the Azerbaijani military and Nagorno-Karabakh forces led to the deployment of Russian peacekeepers to the region.
The announcement of the arrest warrant by Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev reflects Azerbaijan’s intention to quickly and forcefully impose its grip on the region after three decades of conflict with the separatist state.
While Baku has pledged to respect the rights of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, many have fled for fear of reprisals or loss of freedom to use their language and practice their religion and cultural customs.
At a press briefing on Sunday, Armenian presidential press secretary Nazeli Baghdasaryan said that 100,483 people had already arrived in Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, which had a population of around 120,000 before the offensive. Azerbaijan.
Some people queued for days to flee the region, as the only route to Armenia – a winding mountain road – was clogged with slow-moving vehicles.
A United Nations delegation arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday to monitor the situation. This is the organization’s first mission to the region in three decades, due to the “very complicated and delicate geopolitical situation,” UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters on Friday.
Local authorities considered this visit a formality. Hunan Tadevosyan, a spokesperson for Nagorno-Karabakh’s emergency services, said U.N. representatives had arrived too late and that the number of civilians remaining in the regional capital, Stepanakert, could “be counted on one hand “.
“I did volunteer work. The people who remained sheltered in the basements, even those who suffered from mental disorders and did not understand what was happening, I put them on buses with my own hands and we took them taken out of Stepanakert,” Tadevosyan said. told Armenian media outlet News.am.
“We searched the whole city but we found no one. There is no population left,” he said.
Armenian Health Minister Anahit Avanesyan said some people, including elderly people, had died while on the road to Armenia because they were “exhausted from malnutrition, left without even taking medication with them and being on the road for more than 40 hours.”
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Thursday that the exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh amounted to “a direct act of ethnic cleansing and deprivation of the people of their homeland.”
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected Pashinyan’s accusations, saying the Armenians’ departure was “their personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced resettlement.”
In Athens, Greece, several hundred Armenians gathered in front of the Greek Parliament on Sunday evening to protest the upcoming dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh – or Artsakh, as they called it in the banners they carried, in Greek and in English. They then walked to the European Union offices, located a few blocks away. The demonstration was peaceful.
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Associated Press writer Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.
