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YEREVAN — The U.N. Security Council has scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss the worsening humanitarian situation in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, after Armenia urged the international community to help end Azerbaijan’s months-long blockade of the isolated territory.
A schedule for the work of the Security Council, published late Monday night, confirmed that the appeal will be discussed on Wednesday. Armenia’s ambassador to the U.N., Mher Margaryan, last week wrote to the international conflict resolution body to warn Nagorno-Karabakh is “on the verge of a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe.” The country’s Foreign Minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, will fly to New York to take part in the session.
Inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders, the mountainous region is home to tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians, governed autonomously as an unrecognized, self-declared state since the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2020, the Azerbaijani government launched an offensive to take back swathes of territory, and now insists that the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians must lay down their weapons and submit to being ruled from Baku.
Despite a Moscow-brokered ceasefire assigning Russian peacekeepers to guard the only road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and the outside world, Azerbaijan took effective control of the highway last year. For the past two months, humanitarian aid has been blocked and the ICRC warns it is unable to take supplies of food and medicine in or out.
In a statement issued Monday, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said the upcoming meeting represents an attempt by Armenia “to instrumentalize the U.N. Security Council for its political, military and informational manipulation campaign.”
Baku insists the reports of a burgeoning humanitarian crisis are “groundless” and that the population can receive food directly from Azerbaijan — an offer local leaders say is tantamount to capitulation.
With warnings of an impending famine and reports that the rate of pregnant women miscarrying has almost tripled as a result of malnutrition, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, last week issued a report arguing there is “a reasonable basis to believe a genocide is being committed.” If the international community fails to act, he told POLITICO, then they are “complicit in genocide.”
Azerbaijan has since commissioned British barrister Rodney Dixon to refute the claims. In a preliminary opinion seen by POLITICO, he insisted there “is no basis for claiming that a genocide is currently being perpetrated.”
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