Thousands flee Nagorno-Karabakh as fears of ethnic cleansing are growing | DW News

Almost 20,000 people have left Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia in fear of Azerbaijani reprisals. Meanwhile, officials said at least 68 people were killed in a fuel depot explosion in the breakaway region. Azerbaijan's presidential foreign policy adviser on Tuesday called Armenian accusations of ethnic cleansing, "an insult to the people of Azerbaijan." In an exclusive interview with DW's Jack Parrock, President Ilham Aliyev's advisor, Hikmet Hajiyev, said that people leaving Nagorno-Karabakh "haven’t been forced" from their homes. Hajiyev, in Brussels for EU-hosted talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, said, "Azerbaijan has nothing to hide" but insisted there is, "no need for any kind of international observer mission because the realities on the ground are obvious." When pressed on whether his country was becoming a geopolitical pawn, Hajiyev concluded, "Azerbaijan was always against any kind of geopolitical competition in our region."

EU diplomats hosting national security advisors from Azerbaijan and Armenia — as well as those of France and Germany — in Brussels Tuesday, urged Azerbaijan to present its plan for ensuring the protection and rights of ethnic Armenians in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijan last week recaptured the long-disputed enclave with a lightning offensive. Since then, more than 19,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, have fled to Armenia. "The EU stressed the need for transparency and access for international humanitarian and human rights actors and for more detail on Baku's vision for Karabakh Armenians' future in Azerbaijan," read an EU statement. Representatives said Tuesday's meeting "allowed for intense exchanges between participants on the relevance of a possible meeting of the [Azerbaijan and Armenia] leaders" at an upcoming October 5, European summit in Granada, Spain. Prior to the recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh, the EU had been involved in mediation aimed at securing a normalization of relations between the two countries.

Azeri border guards on Tuesday were busy scanning the endless procession of individuals fleeing from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia in a hunt for "war criminals." More than 19,000 people have now taken the enclave's one exit route to safety. Amid warnings of possible ethnic cleansing, many of the region's ethnic Armenian population of 120,000 have decided to leave. Many of those fleeing are women, children and the elderly, who are allowed to pass into Armenia without incident. Military aged males, however, are required to be photographed as Azeri soldiers search for what they call "war criminals. Azerbaijan intends to apply an amnesty to Armenian fighters who laid down their arms in Karabakh, but those who committed war crimes during the Karabakh wars must be handed over to us," an Azerbaijani government source told AFP.

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