The Tip of the Iceberg: Understanding Azerbaijan’s Blockade of the Lachin Corridor as Part of a Wider Genocidal Campaign against Ethnic Armenians

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1. The University Network for Human Rights, in collaboration with students, lawyers, and academics from Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights, UCLA’s Promise Institute for Human Rights, Wesleyan University, and Yale’s Lowenstein Project conducted two fact-finding trips in Nagorno-Karabakh and four in Armenia between March 2022 and July 2023.

   We documented atrocities perpetrated by Azerbaijani forces against ethnic Armenians during the 44-Day Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, after the ceasefire, during the 2022 attacks in sovereign Armenia, as well as in times of relative peace. Among these are extrajudicial killings of civilians, including the elderly and disabled; enforced disappearance of Armenian troops; torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners of war; death threats, intimidation, and harassment of residents of border communities; and life-threatening restrictions on freedom of movement and access to vital infrastructure.

   Moreover, the abuses we documented are not a string of unrelated rights violations; taken together, these abuses reveal a synchronized, comprehensive campaign to empty Nagorno-Karabakh and parts of Armenia of Armenians. Over the past three years, thousands of Armenians have faced an impossible decision: abandon their homes — and sometimes their sick or elderly family members — or face death or worse at the hands of Azerbaijani forces. Today, the population of Nagorno-Karabakh, sequestered by Azerbaijan’s total prohibition on movement along the Lachin Corridor, may not even have the luxury of choosing escape. As the humanitarian crisis in the Lachin Corridor reaches a boiling point, the door is closing on the chance to prevent another genocide against ethnic Armenians.

   Azerbaijan has deployed a series of mutually reinforcing measures that have made life in Nagorno-Karabakh impossible for its 120,000 inhabitants.

   This situation will result in the mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh (if Azerbaijan lifts the blockade of the Lachin corridor), the coerced surrender of the self-declared independent republic to Azerbaijan, or the slaughter of the Armenians still living in Nagorno-Karabakh.

2. The report presents detailed accounts of the use of high caliber weapons, including grenade launchers and firearms, on agricultural lands and equipment and near administrative and residential areas, prompting the evacuation of women and children as well as the cessation of all agricultural activity.

   Over a period of five days, shelling from Azerbaijan pushed Armenian residents in seven different communities from two of the easternmost regions of Nagorno-Karabakh to cease agricultural work and thus sacrifice their only source of livelihood, and to abandon their homes.

   To say that this situation is unsustainable for Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh is a gross understatement. Viewed alongside the discriminatory policies and hate speech emanating from the highest levels of the Azerbaijani government, as well as directly from perpetrators of abuses as they are committing them, there is only one way to read the situation: Azerbaijan is openly pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing and is dangerously close to carrying out the genocide of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians.

   Allegations of ethnic cleansing are not alarmist. Genocide Watch had issued a Genocide Warning in September 2022, considering “Azerbaijan’s assault on Armenia and Artsakh” to have fulfilled four key steps on the road to genocide: dehumanization, preparation, persecution and denial. In August 2023, former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampos asserted, “There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

3. Since the ceasefire, Azerbaijan has seized Armenians outside the scope of regular military operations, including by detaining Armenian civilians who accidentally crossed unmarked borders in disputed territory; detaining villagers as they tended to their land and herded their livestock; and capturing Armenian soldiers in groups through entrapment. The latter has occurred after surprising or luring in Armenian soldiers and feigning good-faith negotiations.

   Azerbaijani forces have also subjected Armenians to due process violations after detaining them, including: spurious charges such as illegally crossing a border in the context of a territorial dispute; use of coerced self-incriminating testimony; and lack of access to interpreters, adequate legal representation and trial by an independent and impartial tribunal.

   Torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment have taken place throughout detention, and differences in conditions and treatment tend to correlate with the location or stage of detention:

   Forms of torture and mistreatment have included prolonged and repeated beatings with batons, skewers, brooms, and firearms; lacerating wrists with zip-ties; employment of electro-shock and stress positions; sleep deprivation; confiscation of warm clothing during extreme cold; deprivation of food, water, and hygiene products; and infliction of mental suffering and humiliation.

   Torture has sometimes been accompanied by expressions of religious or ethnic discrimination. Additionally, Azerbaijani state forces have often shared videos of torture on social media and public television, which serves to further humiliate the victims, instill fear among Armenians, and perpetuate the forced displacement of those remaining in Nagorno-Karabakh.

4. Azerbaijani forces have carried out extrajudicial killings of Armenian soldiers and civilians both during and following the 44-Day War

   Postwar killings have ranged from summary execution of soldiers in the wake of combat who had been injured and/or disarmed prior to their execution to entering communities and killing the civilians who remain. Among non-combatants who have been extrajudicially killed are the elderly and disabled who would not or physically could not escape before Azerbaijani forces overtook their towns.

   Azerbaijan’s leadership condones and encourages the cruelest forms of violence against Armenians through widespread hate speech and racist propaganda, as well as by failing to investigate and hold perpetrators to account.

   The acts of many executions were filmed and posted to social media by the perpetrators themselves, then widely circulated on TikTok and Telegram.

   Azerbaijani forces have also filmed the bodies of combatants killed in action, which they mutilated post mortem. It is not always apparent solely based on the content of the videos whether the mutilation occurred before or after death, but practices include chopping off limbs, carving messages across torsos, exposing victims’ genitals and breasts, inserting digits or foreign objects into victims’ mouths and empty eye sockets, severing victims’ heads, placing severed heads onto the bodies of animals, and other forms of horrific treatment. Azerbaijani forces have also summarily executed and mutilated civilians who remained in the towns that they captured and soldiers whom they took after an Azerbaijani victory in the battlefield.

   During that time, stickers, memes and emojis surfaced, displaying the victims in made-up degrading scenes. They were often sent by perpetrators to family members through their social media feeds and messages. The latter practice occurred in the case of soldiers killed in combat as well.

   The widespread and numerous nature of these killings in conjunction with frequent expressions of praise from the Azerbaijani public and the absence of accountability suggests that this has been a systematic practice within the Azerbaijani military, rather than isolated or fringe cases.

5. The rights abuses committed during and following the 44-Day War exist in a context of decades of racial animosity expressed by Azerbaijani leadership towards ethnic Armenians. The Azerbaijani government has fomented ethnic hatred by destroying cultural heritage sites, utilizing genocidal rhetoric about Armenians, and promoting discrimination in State institutions and projects. Hate speech and discrimination against Armenians in Azerbaijan is not new, and has worsened during and following the 2020 war; as many of our older interviewees recalled from their own lives, pervasive hate speech and discrimination in Azerbaijan has been a major driver of violence against ethnic Armenians at least since the 1980s. In November 2017, the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe acknowledged that “an entire generation of Azerbaijanis has now been raised with a rhetoric of hate, hostility and victimhood, which may have an impact on prospects of future reconciliation.”

   Hateful rhetoric has emanated from the highest levels of the Azerbaijani government. President Aliyev has referred to ethnic Armenians as “barbarians and vandals,” who are infected by a “virus” for which they “need to be treated.” Elnur Aslanov, head of the Political Analysis and Information Department of the Presidential Administration, referred to Armenia as a “cancerous tumor,” while Ziyafat Asgarov, First Deputy of Parliament called Armenians a “disease.”

   Genocidal and expansionist remarks by government officials reveal the aims of this degrading rhetoric.

   “Turkey and Azerbaijan could together wipe Armenia off the face of the Earth at a blow, and the Armenians should beware of that thought.”
   Elman Mammadov, former Azerbaijani Parliamentarian

   “Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians.”
   Hajibala Abutalybov, Former Mayor of the Capital of Azerbaijan, Baku

   “[Armenia’s capital] Erivan is our historical land and we, the Azerbaijanis, must return to these historical lands. This is our political and strategic goal, and we must gradually approach it.”
   President Aliyev

   Discourse from these high-level leaders has inevitably bled into popular Azeri society. In a nationwide address during the hostilities in September 2020, President Aliyev described how “Azerbaijani soldiers drive [Armenians] away like dogs.” This phrase exploded across Azerbaijani social media and eventually became a popular hashtag.

   “We must kill Armenians. No matter whether a woman, a child, an old man. We must kill everyone we can and whoever happens. We should not feel sorry; we should not feel pity. If we do not kill (them), our children will be killed.”
   Nurlan Ibrahimov, public relations and media manager of the Azerbaijani football club “Qarabağ”

   Azerbaijan opened a Military Trophy Park after its victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War featuring degrading statues of defeated Armenians; though the park was subsequently downsized after Armenia applied to the International Court of Justice to issue a provisional measure closing the park, it remains open to the public. In another post-war example, Azerbaijan began producing a commemorative stamp showing a split-screen image of an Azerbaijani soldier and a man in a chemical biohazard suit standing over a map of Azerbaijan and fumigating the area of Nagorno-Karabakh.

   Ethnic hatred has underpinned much of the Azerbaijani forces’ deliberate infliction of physical pain, emotional suffering, and public humiliation upon Armenians captured or executed both in wartime and peacetime.

   This is particularly apparent in the widely circulated videos of soldiers using discriminatory rhetoric as they attack soldiers and civilians, including the sexual mutilation of bodies of female combatants and other forms of extreme violence. The widespread regard for Armenians as a people to be eradicated from or supplanted in the region has underlain Azerbaijani soldiers’ practice, recounted in our interviews with victims and documented widely, of forcing captives to declare Nagorno-Karabakh to be Azerbaijan’s and Azerbaijan’s alone.

   These methods are consistent with the overarching pattern of ethnic discrimination that characterizes all the categories of rights violations analyzed in the forthcoming report.

6. Azerbaijan’s aspiration to “wipe out” Armenians affects not only Armenian people, but also physical symbols of their existence as a culture and society. To this end, Azerbaijan has carried out a multi-pronged attack on Armenian cultural heritage that has involved destruction, erasure and revisionism, and obstructing access to cultural sites:

   Destruction. Azerbaijani forces have destroyed Armenian churches, cemeteries, museums, and monuments during the 2020 war and afterwards as they took control of additional territory.

   Erasure and revisionism. As a matter of state policy, Azerbaijan has imposed revisionist history of Armenian cultural monuments that have come under their control by erasing Armenian writing and markings from structures. Meanwhile, high-level officials have publicly expounded revisionist discourse. The revisionism has extended to a successful campaign to rename and publish false historical data about Armenian churches on Google Maps, including sites known to and visited by our team.

   Obstructing access. Intimidation by Azerbaijani forces near border communities have effectively blocked residents and pilgrims from reaching places of worship.

   In March 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution acknowledging, “Elimination of the traces of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nagorno-Karabakh region is being achieved not only by damaging and destroying it, but also through the falsification of history and attempts to present it as so-called Caucasian Albanian.” Further, the resolution strongly condemned “Azerbaijan’s continued policy of erasing and denying the Armenian cultural heritage in and around Nagorno-Karabakh” and recognized that the “erasure of the Armenian cultural heritage is part of a wider pattern of a systematic, state-level policy of Armenophobia, historical revisionism and hatred towards Armenians promoted by the Azerbaijani authorities.”

7. Nearly a year ago, the University Network issued the following statement:

   If the current escalation is allowed to continue, these (and perhaps greater) atrocities will likely be repeated. Equally terrifying is the very real possibility that Armenia–cornered and desperate–will sacrifice the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to secure the country’s territorial integrity… In the absence of accountability for the violations committed during and in the aftermath of the 44-day war in 2020, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Russia may well allow the situation to degenerate into wholesale ethnic cleansing and slaughter of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh, convinced that the world will shrug its shoulders and move on.
   Unfortunately, the above holds true now more than ever. The window to prevent yet another collective failure to live up to “never again” is closing.