The fall of an enclave in Azerbaijan stuns the Armenian diaspora, extinguishing a dream

BEIRUT: The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world. Traumatized by genocide a century ago, they now fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh on Thursday announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year’s end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de-facto independence.

Azerbaijan, which routed the region’s Armenian forces in a lightning offensive last week, has pledged to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian community. But by Thursday morning, 74,400 people – over 60% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population — had fled to Armenia, and the influx continues, according to Armenian officials.

Many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear in what they call a new wave of ethnic cleansing. They accuse European countries, Russia and the United States – and the government of Armenia itself – of failing to protect ethnic Armenians during months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military and in the lightning blitz earlier this month that defeated separatist forces.

Armenians say the loss is a historic blow. Outside the modern country of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of the only surviving parts of a heartland that centuries ago stretched across what is now eastern Turkey, into the Caucasus region and western Iran.

Many in the diaspora had pinned dreams on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history,” Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian university instructor in Beirut, said Thursday.

“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours … For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians on Thursday protested outside the Azerbajani Embassy in Beirut. They waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and burned pictures of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents. Riot police lobbed tear gas when they threw firecrackers at the embassy.

Ethnic Armenians have communities around Europe and the Middle East and in the United States. Lebanon is home to one of the largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, 4% of the population.

Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.