After the exodus: an OSCE mission enters Nagorno-Karabakh to find an empty land
Stepanakert — An OSCE needs-assessment mission crossed into Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday, the organisation’s first visit to the region in some thirty years — and found almost nobody left to assess. In the week since Azerbaijan’s military operation of 19 September, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians, effectively the entire population of the enclave, have fled to Armenia.
The exodus followed a capitulation that took less than 24 hours. Azerbaijan’s ‘anti-terrorist operation’, launched on 19 September, forced the self-declared Karabakh authorities to agree to disarm and dissolve within a day; by the end of the following week, the road through the Lachin corridor had carried a whole society westward — cars stacked with furniture, fuel queues that turned deadly when a depot exploded, families leaving graves behind.
The OSCE mission, drawn from the organisation’s secretariat rather than from any political body, is mandated to assess humanitarian needs and report back. Its members travelled through a region whose separatist institutions had announced their own dissolution days earlier, effective 1 January. What remains — homes, churches, monasteries, empty villages — now sits under Azerbaijani control, and what happens to it will shape whether any return is ever possible.
Yerevan, overwhelmed by the arrival of more than a hundred thousand people in a country of under three million, has asked for international assistance. The EU and several member states have mobilised aid; the UN has also sent a mission. Armenia’s government has accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing — a charge Baku rejects, insisting Armenians were urged to stay and integrate as citizens.
The OSCE’s own peace format for this conflict, the Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States, was not invited and was not consulted. Its three co-chairs have barely met since 2022. The organisation that spent three decades failing to settle this conflict now arrives, clipboards in hand, to count what the failure cost.
There is a grim symmetry in the dates. Thirty years ago the OSCE created a process to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh; this weekend it returned for the first time, after the process was resolved by force in a single day. The needs-assessment report, when it comes, will describe an emptied land. The harder report — how the international community let it come to this — nobody has been mandated to write.
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