A growing stream of ethnic Armenian refugees are fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh following Azerbaijan’s seizure of the disputed region last week.
More than 13,000 people have so far crossed into Armenia from the enclave, which is home to a majority of some 120,000 ethnic Armenians, reports the BBC.
They left after the government in Yerevan announced plans to move those made homeless by the fighting.
Armenia’s PM has warned that ethnic cleansing is “underway” in the region.
“That’s happening just now, and that is a very unfortunate fact because we were trying to urge the international community to act,” Nikol Pashinyan told reporters.
Azerbaijan has said it wants to re-integrate the ethnic Armenians as “equal citizens”.
Envoys from Armenia and Azerbaijan are due to meet for EU-backed talks in Brussels later on Tuesday – the first such talks since the seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller urged the two sides to reach a lasting peace agreement.
Azerbaijan and Armenia first went to war in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Then in 2020 Azerbaijan recaptured areas in and around Nagorno-Karabakh before a truce was agreed and monitored by Russian peacekeepers.
Source: The BBC
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