Friday, January 12 2024 14:13

ArmInfo.Azerbaijan was building a concentration camp for 30,000 males before the September,  according to an investigation by New Lines magazine. 

Late last spring, Armenian residents in the disputed territory of  Nagorno-Karabakh heard the clamors and loud noises of construction  work. At night, from their sleepy village of Khramort, they could see  bright lighting and hear screeching noises emanating from the nearby  region of Aghdam, across the de facto border in Azerbaijan. "We can't  be sure what they were building," said Aren Khachatryan, a boutique  winemaker whose vineyards were only 500 yards from Azerbaijani  military positions, "but the sound wouldn't stop."

As gentle breezes gave way to the hot summer months, the specter of  violence for those living in the ethnically Armenian enclave  increased. Azerbaijani soldiers would periodically open fire on the  harvesters picking grapes for Khachatryan and his father, Arkadi, the  two men told New Lines.

Soon, rumors swirled that Azerbaijani soldiers had prevented a man  from leaving Nagorno-Karabakh to seek medical treatment in Armenia,  promising him a bleaker future than dying untreated: He would instead  be sent to a large prison complex being built for the men of the  self-declared republic. In September 2023, after nine months of  living under a siege that cut off access to essential goods including  food and medicine, Nagorno-Karabakh was captured by Azerbaijan in a  rapid military operation. Since the assault, the overwhelming  majority of the region's 100,000 people have fled for neighboring  Armenia. Baku has said it seized control of territory that was  rightfully part of Azerbaijan - "Azerbaijan restored its sovereignty  as a result of successful anti-terrorist measures in Karabakh," said  the country's President Ilham Aliyev in a televised address on Sept.  20, while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan accused its  neighbor of "ethnic cleansing."

The goal Aliyev had long sought - "If they do not leave our lands of  their own free will, we will chase them away like dogs," he  proclaimed in an October 2020 wartime address to his nation - was now  a reality: The long Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh, or  Artsakh, as it is known to Armenians, had ended. On Jan. 1, the  self-declared republic formally ceased to exist, a condition of the  cease-fire that ended Azerbaijan's military operation.

Using satellite imagery of both the site of a potential prison and  surrounding areas, applying lessons drawn from the politics of memory  and the region's history of heritage crime, and constructing a  timeline leading up to the depopulation of the region, New Lines has  pieced together the role played by intimidation in the dissolution of  Nagorno-Karabakh, cultivated by Azerbaijan over many months leading  up to the September attack. Nagorno-Karabakh's violent end is a  chilling lesson of the risks involved in aspirant statehood, and one  that feels especially relevant today.

The top court of the United Nations recently acknowledged how  coercion by Baku has played a role in the conflict. In mid-November,  judges at the International Court of Justice ordered that Azerbaijan  allow those who recently fled their homes to return to  Nagorno-Karabakh "in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner" and  "free from the use of force or intimidation" that caused them to  flee.

In August of last year, Ara Papian, a former Armenian ambassador to  Canada and leader of a pro-Western party, said on an Armenian talk  show hosted by online media outlet Noyan Tapan that Azerbaijan was  building a "concentration camp for 30,000 males." The Armenian  newspaper Hraparak reported the same a month later, citing an unnamed  military source. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because they  were not authorized to speak publicly, a high-ranking Armenian  government official told New Lines that Yerevan possessed classified  knowledge of the construction of such a structure before the  September attack, saying the government believed it was intended for  over 10,000 individuals.

The risk of incarceration was already high: Over the summer of 2023,  four male civilians were detained by Azerbaijan in what local human  rights groups have decried as arbitrary arrests and abductions. The  most publicized of these cases is that of Vagif Khachatryan (no  relation to the winemaker Aren), whom Baku accused of killing its  civilians in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s,  charges he denied in a court of law. The 68-year-old was heading for  Armenia for an urgent heart procedure, as noted by the members of the  International Committee of the Red Cross who accompanied him, when he  was arrested by Azerbaijani authorities. On Nov. 7, after a trial  that involved a translator who occasionally misconstrued his  statements - as shown on courtroom video released by the Azerbaijani  authorities - Khachatryan was sentenced in Baku to 15 years in jail.  This followed the detention, in late August, of three university  students from the enclave who were charged with "violating"  Azerbaijan's national flag. They were later released.

Also currently awaiting trial are eight high-ranking officials of the  breakaway government, including three previous presidents. Among them  is Ruben Vardanyan, a former state minister. The Russian-Armenian  philanthropist and businessman, who founded an international high  school in the Armenian countryside, was detained in September while  trying to cross into Armenia and is now languishing in an Azerbaijani  jail.

Azerbaijan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to New  Lines' request to clarify the nature of the construction identified  by satellite imagery.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, driven in part by a century-long  enmity between Christian-majority Armenians and Muslim-majority  Azerbaijanis, saw its first intercommunal clashes during the Russian  Revolution of 1905. The Soviet Union, to which both countries  belonged, largely managed to keep ethnic tensions at bay, but these  unfroze as the superpower began to crumble in the late 1980s.  Deep-rooted distrust and ethnic hatred on both sides has been  intensified by the four wars that have since ensued.

Buoyed by independence movements across the Soviet bloc, ethnic  Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been designated by Moscow as  an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan, sought unification  with Soviet Armenia. The peaceful 1988 protests in the regional  capital of Stepanakert were met with violence elsewhere in Soviet  Azerbaijan, including anti-Armenian pogroms and expulsions, which  prompted the formation of Armenian self-defense units, transforming  both the nature and the scope of the conflict. Years of war and  mutual bloodletting followed. By the time a Russian-brokered  cease-fire was signed in 1994, at least 1 million people had been  displaced, according to Human Rights Watch. In October last year, the  New York-based group estimated that 700,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis were  then either expelled or displaced from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and  seven surrounding districts, while 300,000 to 500,000 ethnic  Armenians fled or were expelled from Azerbaijan.

Defeated and traumatized, Azerbaijan soon developed into an  oil-producing, authoritarian and dynastic regime whose political  legitimacy depended almost exclusively on its revanchist posture.  Equally important was the cultivation of the image of the Armenians  as the leading existential enemy of the people of Azerbaijan. Hatred  has been common on both sides - some Armenian nationalists belittle  Azerbaijanis by declaring that "Coca-Cola is older than Azerbaijan,"  an English-language phrase that first appeared a decade ago on the  online Armenian news site mamul.am. Accompanied by a photo of the  drink with the year 1892 and the flag of Azerbaijan with the year  1918, the phrase became a popular social media meme during the 2020  war - a nod to the notion that Armenia is an ancient state while its  enemy is an extension of Turkey and not a real country in its own  right. The Azeri language is Turkic, and Armenians often refer to  Azerbaijanis as "Turks," a terminology that connects them in the  Armenian psyche with the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide of  1915. Until the early 20th century, Azerbaijanis were referred to as  "Tatars," a generic name for Turkic-speaking people.

Yet unlike in Armenia or Nagorno-Karabakh, following the 1990s war  the hatred of the enemy in Azerbaijan became institutionalized, from  popular culture to news. The official virtual presidential library,  ebooks.az, features regime-approved titles like "Armenian Terror" and  "Armenian Mythomania," while books that acknowledge Armenian  antiquity and suffering - like prominent Azerbaijani author Akram  Aylisli's novella "Stone Dreams" - are banned on the president's  orders. "It was only a matter of time before the revanchist machinery  would realize its deadly potential," Artak Beglaryan,  Nagorno-Karabakh's former human rights ombudsman, told New Lines.

A closer inspection of the timeline leading up to the September  offensive shows how Azerbaijan's international partners paved the way  for what Armenia and prominent human rights activists, like the  former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo,  say has been a concerted effort to intimidate Armenians in  Nagorno-Karabakh and permanently remove them from the region.

In September 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,  Azerbaijan, with the aid of the Turkish military and Syrian rebel  fighters, launched a war against Nagorno-Karabakh. Lasting 44 days,  that war came to a halt when Russian President Vladimir Putin  brokered a cease-fire. Azerbaijan began to nurse other plans.  Restocking its depleted military arsenal and riding a new wave of  popular support following its military victory, Azerbaijan's  strongman ruler Aliyev initiated a new push to solve the question of  Nagorno-Karabakh once and for all. "There will be no trace of them  left on those lands," Aliyev said in an October 2020 wartime address.

In December 2022, after having secured a wide-ranging alliance with  Russia that included military cooperation, Azerbaijan once again  closed the Lachin Corridor, the lifeline of Nagorno-Karabakh and its  only supply route to Armenia and connection with the world at large.  At the time, Azerbaijan said it did this to protect the environment.  Protestors blocked transportation, saying they were acting against  mining operations - but the head of Ecofront, an independent  Azerbaijani environmental group, described the protest as "fake."  People who called themselves "eco-activists" were sent by a state  whose economy is completely dependent on oil and gas, as Azerbaijan  prohibited all traffic through the Russian-patrolled corridor.

Beglaryan, now a refugee in Armenia, said that he first heard  whispers about a mass prison being built in Aghdam for Armenian men  well over a year ago. "Later I received some confirmation from  intelligence services that the Azerbaijani authorities had such an  idea and project, but I couldn't independently verify the  information." Nagorno-Karabakh's authorities did not publicize the  information. "Firstly," Beglaryan explained, "we couldn't make sure  of its full reality, and secondly, we didn't want to contribute to  the Azerbaijani psychological terror against our people. However,  this didn't stop rumors from spreading."

The fear of mass imprisonment in a country devoid of a real justice  system and fostering institutional anti- Armenian hatred  "significantly influenced people's behavior during and after the  September genocidal aggression," Beglaryan said, "deepening the panic  and prompting the decision to flee their homeland." During the later  stages of the blockade and the early hours of Azerbaijan's assault,  he added, "Many current and former military servicemen discarded  their uniforms and destroyed their documents in an attempt to  eliminate any potential evidence and facts that could be used against  them."

In Stepanakert, New Lines witnessed several incidents of people  setting light to military documents and medals, creating large  dumpster fires on the streets. As they fled, some families discarded  photos of fallen soldiers in uniform, leaving behind, burning,  shredding or hiding their visual memories of the men and women who  died on the battlefields. According to at least three conversations  with residents, some buried uniforms in their backyards before they  departed, in the hope that they would one day return.

Following the 2020 war, numerous reports emerged of Azerbaijani  torture against Armenian POWs, both physical and psychological.  Armenia's human rights defender at the time, Arman Tatoyan, the  official ombudsman, reported several cases of religious  discrimination against illegally held Armenian POWs.  Some had their  baptismal pendant crosses confiscated and desecrated; in one  instance, a tattoo of a cross was burned with cigarettes. One  Armenian serviceman was told to convert to Islam. When he refused,  "his leg was burned, and [he] was severely beaten and ridiculed. We  have never recorded anything like this before," Tatoyan wrote in his  report. Mutilations and the rape of female Armenian soldiers have  been documented and publicized by invading Azerbaijani forces on  social media that have been reviewed by New Lines. In the fall of  2022, at least seven Armenian POWs were executed unlawfully,  apparently by Azerbaijani soldiers, Human Rights Watch reported,  calling it "a heinous war crime."

The signs of an impending invasion were visible in early September,  following a high-stakes meeting on Sept. 4 between Turkish President  Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin where they discussed key regional  issues, including Ukrainian grain exports. On Sept. 7, the Armenian  government expressed official concern over Azerbaijan's military  buildup around its sovereign borders, as well as around  Nagorno-Karabakh. A few days prior, the investigative Armenian  publication Hetq reported that there had been an increase in  Azerbaijani cargo flights to the Ovda military base in southern  Israel, where munitions are also stored.

In the past, as documented by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, this had  often been an indication of an impending attack. There have been  Israeli arms sales worth billions of dollars over the years to  Azerbaijan, the newspaper reported, including a diverse range of  weaponry from sophisticated radar systems to a wide range of drones  and antitank missiles.

Utilizing Planet Labs satellite imagery, we have identified a site of  interest that is the likely basis for the "concentration camp" fears.  Nestled directly south of a key archaeological complex, near the  village of Shahbulaq, there is a large, recently built but unfinished  structure. To assess whether the complex was an intended prison, we  applied spatial analysis methods to identify characteristics commonly  associated with correctional facilities in the wider region,  particularly the "medieval torture" facilities analyzed by Crude  Accountability in Turkmenistan and political prisons reported by  Foreign Policy in Turkey, both of which were identified in satellite  imagery as well.

Pattern recognition allowed us to detect recurring elements, while  feature-matching helped us compare these elements with known prison  structures. Deductive reasoning enabled us to infer, from the  presence of these features, the possibility that the facility in  question could be an intended prison. The construction progress of  the Aghdam facility, as seen in a May 2023 satellite image, reveals  gridlike structures, the kind used in prison housing units or  military sleeping quarters. Despite the absence of operational prison  features such as guard towers and perimeter barriers, the incomplete  project's centralized layout in a desolate landscape and substantial  gaps hinting at future recreational yards suggest that the secure  facility is the basis for the prison rumors.

Much of the Aghdam region, where the potential prison is located, was  destroyed and looted in the 1990s after it fell under Armenian  control and became a de facto part of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was seized  by Azerbaijan in the war of 2020; by then, Aghdam had become a ghost  town.

Since late 2020, the Aghdam region has served as a site for military  activities by Azerbaijani forces and retains the trenches, burn scars  and military vehicle tracks of past and recent wars: In early 2021,  the Cornell University-based Caucasus Heritage Watch satellite  monitoring project raised the alarm over likely military  installations near a seventh-century Armenian church. The complex we  have identified is nearby.

A time series of satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's  Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite revealed construction for the  approximately 500,000-square-foot site likely began in July 2022.  High spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery (50  centimeters) from the Planet SkySat Constellation confirmed our  initial findings.

The identified site contains features that could be associated with a  mass incarceration facility: a single entry point, open-air space for  inmates and uniform gridded structures. In places where government  transparency is limited, such as the authoritarian regime in  Azerbaijan, we acknowledge the importance of further corroborating  these findings with various independent sources wherever possible.

That the Aghdam facility is, at the bare minimum, a state building is  corroborated by its proximity to another government structure - a  temporary tent camp: In September, more than 200 oversized tents  could be seen installed in an enclosed area, likely as either  lodgings for the Azerbaijani military or a planned detention center  for Armenians.

Satellite imagery suggests that the complex's construction, which  appears to have started in July 2022, stopped in late August or early  September 2023. It was shortly before this period that Aliyev  described in an interview with Euronews TV that he was seeking an end  to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Referring to the November 2020  cease-fire declaration between the two countries, Aliyev said, "That  was a capitulation act by Armenia. Therefore, we started to put  forward some initiatives in order to find the final solution to our  conflicts with Armenia."

The May 2023 announcement by the U.S. State Department that it  welcomed Azerbaijan's "consideration of amnesty" suggests specific  knowledge by Washington of an incarceration plan. A spokesperson for  the State Department, in emailed comments to New Lines, declined to  comment on a potential prison complex, instead reiterating that  Azerbaijan must "create the conditions for the voluntary, safe,  dignified and sustainable return of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians."

The ongoing incarceration of leaders like the businessman Vardanyan,  argued the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at a  U.N. meeting in early December, is meant to prevent the displaced  population of Nagorno-Karabakh from returning. "It's not just that  the entire Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh is now  displaced. . Its state leaders are incarcerated in Azerbaijan,"  Moreno-Ocampo said. "This incarceration is a message to the  Armenians: If you come back to Nagorno-Karabakh, you will be starved,  humiliated or killed. The captivity of these people is the  culmination of genocide."

If the suspected site is indeed a prison complex, its location  suggests specific psychological considerations given its proximity to  important cultural monuments. The site is located on the edge of the  larger archaeological complex of Tigranakert, which is home to a  2,000-year-old Hellenistic Armenian citadel, a seventh-century  Armenian church and 18th-century Azerbaijani sites including the  Shahbulaq fortress and a mosque. Given Azerbaijan's denial of ancient  Armenian roots in the region, which has extended to the eradication  of the entire known inventory of Armenian Christian heritage in the  region of Nakhichevan in 1997-2006, as well as more recent activity  such as the shelling of the Tigranakert citadel in 2020 and ongoing  destruction as documented by Caucasus Heritage Watch, the site  selection could suggest an intention to maximize psychological  trauma.

Several individuals familiar with the area whom we spoke with said  the secluded site was previously home to Soviet-era barns, describing  the terrain as largely unfit for development. They also noted the  existence of the nearby limestone quarry, wondering if the site was  primarily chosen because of the immediate availability of the key  building material. A former member of Nagorno-Karabakh's military,  speaking on condition of anonymity, told us that the sounds that  Armenian residents of Khramort had been hearing may have been the  quarry's nonstop stone-cutting operations. The absence of any mention  of the structure is conspicuous in Azerbaijani media outlets and on  the president's website, platforms that otherwise extensively  highlight every new construction project in the Aghdam region. It is  also notably missing from any publicized plans. The only references  on Azerbaijani websites to the Armenian fear of a massive prison, as  several Azerbaijani researchers confirmed to New Lines, are stories  that cite Armenian news reports.

A map produced by the "Karabakh Revival Fund," founded by Aliyev in  January 2021, ostensibly to improve living conditions in territories  newly under Baku's control, shows no development plans for the area  of the identified site - except for a planned forest between it and  the rest of the region - underscoring the secretive nature of the  project.

Once under Azerbaijan's control, the archaeological site of  Tigranakert was declared "over," as Hikmet Hajiyev, who serves as  assistant to the office of Aliyev, posted on X (formerly Twitter).  Armenian archaeologists say the site was fortified over 2,000 years  ago by the country's most powerful king - a history that Prime  Minister Pashinyan instrumentalized in early 2020, telling the Munich  Security Conference: "When Armenian King Tigran the Great was  negotiating with Roman general Pompeius, there was no country named  Azerbaijan." If the nearby Aghdam facility is indeed the rumored  "concentration camp," its close proximity to Shahbulaq and  Tigranakert is symbolic of Azerbaijani claims to domination over  Armenia. Such a weaponization of heritage bears a psychological  resemblance to other instances of the regime's approach to the  conflict, including what Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has  described as a theme park of ethnic hatred in the capital Baku,  erected soon after the 2020 war, which publicly celebrates victory  over a caricatured, hook-nosed enemy.

For the ethnic Armenians who once called Nagorno-Karabakh home, these  tactics mattered, and fears of imprisonment were one of the factors  spurring them toward evacuation. As Beglaryan, the region's former  ombudsman, said: The enclave's indigenous population fled "for the  sake of safety and dignity."