GORIZ, Armenia – The leader of the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh signed a decree on Thursday officially dissolving the breakaway state. He confirmed his surrender to Azerbaijan following a failed 32-year bid for independence and international recognition.
Samvel Shahramanian, the president of Nagorno-Karabakh, which its Armenian residents call Artsakh but is internationally recognized as Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory, said in a decree that all state institutions would be dissolved.
Azerbaijan’s lightning military offensive last week forced the Nagorno-Karabakh government to surrender and disarm its armed forces. The advance of Azerbaijani forces also resulted in the exodus of the ethnic Armenian population of the highlands, who say they fear genocide and are unwilling to live under Azerbaijani rule anyway.
More than 66,000 people — more than half of the region — have crossed the border into Armenia, and some officials believe the entire population will leave.
Exiting Nagorno-Karabakh: ‘I never imagined we would ever leave’
Key members of the Nagorno-Karabakh government have also been arrested or surrendered to the Azerbaijani government.
David Babayan, a longtime spokesman for the breakaway government who also briefly served as its foreign minister, said he planned to hand himself over to authorities in the now-Azerbaijani-controlled city of Shusha.
“You all know that I have been blacklisted in Azerbaijan, and the Azerbaijani side has requested that I come to Baku for proper investigation,” Babayan wrote on Facebook. “This decision will certainly cause great pain and stress to my loved ones, but I hope they will understand. My failure to appear, or worse, my escape, will have a huge impact on our long-suffering people.
Azerbaijani border guards said Wednesday they had arrested former Artsakh state minister Ruben Vartanyan, and on Thursday, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service announced his arrest on charges of financing state terrorism.
After a war in the late 1980s and early 90s, when the region’s majority Armenian population sought to secede from the newly independent country of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh was hotly contested by the two former Soviet republics.
That first Nagorno-Karabakh war ended in a decisive Armenian victory. Massacres were committed by both sides, but eventually the majority of Azerbaijanis—hundreds of thousands—were forced to flee the territory.
In a brief war in 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured much of Nagorno-Karabakh, ending decades of Armenian control of the region.
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