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Apart from the spring songs of birds, it is quiet in front of the small house in the village of Taghavard. Ruzanna and her children have laid out a cake they spent the morning baking. It is March, and the sun is warm enough to move the gathering outdoors.
As the children play, Ruzanna, an Armenian woman, recalls her escape from the pogroms in Baku over 30 years ago. Her father roused the family in the middle of the night, and under the cover of darkness, they drove until reaching the high mountain peaks—the foothills of the Armenian Highlands.
A few days later, their Azerbaijani neighbor—a close family friend—arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh with their belongings. He believed that what happened was wrong, the pogroms were wrong. Though he had planned to stay just a day or two, the intensifying war forced him to hide at Ruzanna’s family’s home for longer than anticipated. When the opportunity finally came, Ruzanna’s father escorted his friend to the front line, where connections allowed him to cross safely back to Baku.
Ruzanna shared this story during my visit to Nagorno-Karabakh in 2021. The ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan had been signed just months earlier, on November 9, 2020. I asked her if she could imagine following her father’s example—could she have such a relationship with an Azerbaijani family now?
“No,” she replied. “Too much has happened. It’s not possible.”
It has been nearly four years since I met Ruzanna, yet it feels like a lifetime. Ruzanna and her family, like all other Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, fled to Armenia during the fateful days of September 2023 when ethnic cleansing became a reality.
This was the culmination of 35 years of conflict that never seems to end. By 2025, it has become clear that Azerbaijan alone issues threats to escalate the conflict, while those few Western diplomats who still cling to the illusion that Armenia is the aggressor find themselves increasingly isolated.
Peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan continue to show limited progress. Although it has been reported that only two issues remain unresolved, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev seems to be constantly expanding the list of demands.
One of the most prominent recent demands is the issue of the right to return for Azerbaijanis who left Armenian territory during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While this was a fringe argument until recently, it has gained momentum in Azerbaijan over the past few years.
The argument was formalized in August 2022 when Azerbaijan created an organization called the “Western Azerbaijan Community.” On Christmas Eve—just 12 days after the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh began at the Lachin Corridor—Ilham Aliyev delivered a speech.
The region remained completely sealed off, with not even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) able to enter or leave. In his speech, Aliyev demanded that Azerbaijanis be allowed to return to Western Azerbaijan. He emphasized that this message would be conveyed to the entire world and described the mission as “results-oriented.”
On the same day, Azerbaijan established an administrative unit dedicated to the revival of Western Azerbaijan. The leadership of this initiative was assigned to Aziz Alekberli, a parliamentarian and newly appointed chairman of the Western Azerbaijan Community. With authority to represent the issue at most European institutions (including the OSCE) he elevated the topic to one that demanded diplomatic attention.
To legitimize itself, the organization launched a PR campaign. A few weeks later, it created an account on the social networking platform X which quickly amassed 12,000 followers. Analysis shows these followers are mostly generic accounts with numerical usernames—typical of the Azerbaijani state’s troll factories. The account’s content is dominated by praise for Ilham Aliyev and condemning critics of the concept of Western Azerbaijan.
Since its inception, the organization has also organized several state-sponsored conferences, inviting foreign academics to lend legitimacy to its efforts.
There is little doubt that this is a coordinated state-backed campaign to elevate the significance of Western Azerbaijan. The real question remains: how does Azerbaijan plan to use this tool?
To understand this fully, we should first examine the concept itself.
Anyone traveling along the eastern shore of Lake Sevan can find traces of Azerbaijanis who once lived in almost every settlement. The most visible remnants are in the cemeteries, where tombstones bear death dates ending in the 1980s. Most of them remain untouched, though time has faded the names, and toppled the tombstones. They stand as relics of a bygone era.
During my travels in Armenia, I have made it a habit to visit at least a few Azerbaijani cemeteries. It is an attempt to remind myself of the consequences of the war on the Azerbaijani side. Meanwhile, reports from Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, and more recently from Nagorno-Karabakh, document Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian burial sites. Cultural heritage researchers Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman have described the erasure of Armenian traces in Nakchivan as “the greatest cultural genocide” of our time.
Local Armenian residents in the villages around Lake Sevan often share stories of fleeing the pogroms or being forced to leave Azerbaijan by Soviet authorities. Some recount purchasing their homes from former Azerbaijani owners, while others tell of moving into available spaces assigned by Soviet authorities. I learned that houses with animal barns directly attached were typically built by Azerbaijani families.
There is no doubt that a significant Azerbaijani population once lived in Armenia. Their departure from their homes during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the late 1980s must have been devastating.
The Western Azerbaijan Community builds on the premise of a right to return. However, in Azerbaijani rhetoric, this is presented as a one-sided obligation. Once the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh was carried out, Azerbaijani leadership abandoned its rhetoric about Armenians being able to stay.
Instead, it has taken the opposite stance. In Armenia’s ongoing case against Azerbaijan at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, provisional measures were adopted in November 2023 that affirmed Armenians’ right to return. The ICJ tasked Azerbaijan with presenting a plan to guarantee the safety of Armenians. To date, no such plan has been presented.
A key sticking point in peace negotiations with Armenia is Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia withdraw its “hostile lawsuits” against the country. In other words, Azerbaijan wants Armenia to retract its ICJ claims regarding Armenians’ right to return to Nagorno-Karabakh, offering to drop its own mirror lawsuits in return. However, the ICJ’s ruling in November 2024 reduced Azerbaijan’s counter-claims, giving Armenia an advantage.
The Azerbaijani narrative around the Western Azerbaijan Community extends beyond the right of return—it serves as a tool for maintaining legal pressure on Armenia.
In an interview earlier this year with Azerbaijani state media—presumably prepared by the presidential office—Azerbaijan outlined two primary goals from recent years: to “liberate” Nagorno-Karabakh and to “rebuild and repopulate” the region. The interviewer then noted a third goal has now been added: ensuring the Western Azerbaijan Community can return to Armenia.
The Azerbaijani president emphasized that Armenia can only demonstrate it is not fascist by allowing Azerbaijanis to return. He then launched into an extended diatribe, labeling Armenia a “fascist state” and warning that Azerbaijan would intervene if the Armenian government failed to address this alleged “fascism.”
”We live as neighbors to such a fascist state, and the threat of fascism persists. Therefore, fascism must be eradicated. Either the Armenian leadership will destroy it, or we will. We have no other choice,” Ilham Aliyev said on January 7.
Observers immediately drew parallels to Russia’s accusations of Ukraine “harboring Nazism” as justification for its invasion. This similarity between Azerbaijani and Russian narratives is supported by a recent DFRLab analysis from Georgia, which shows through quantifiable media research to demonstrate the growing convergence of Russian and Azerbaijani rhetoric.
Azerbaijan’s use of the Western Azerbaijan narrative to pressure Armenia now combines with explicit threats of war. While Azerbaijan’s war rhetoric focused on the “liberation” of Nagorno-Karabakh until 2023, the regime has since shifted to portraying Armenia as the “external enemy”.
“Western Azerbaijan” has also served as a tool for Azerbaijan to make claims that the international community views as irredentist. During his Christmas Eve 2022 speech, Ilham Aliyev argued at length that Armenia sits on historic Azerbaijani land and criticized the Soviet Union for allowing Armenia to annex “Zangezur” (Syunik). Azerbaijan has repeatedly threatened to attack the region to achieve its goal of establishing a connection with its Nakhchivan exclave.
While this is not news to regional security analysts, it’s important to note how the “right of return” for Western Azerbaijan has become embedded in war rhetoric.
The notion of the right of return, in contrast to Ilham Aliyev’s rhetoric, rests on peaceful and democratic principles. Unfortunately, this contradiction makes it difficult to believe that Azerbaijan will open the door for Armenians to return to Nagorno-Karabakh or to cities where pogroms against Armenians took place 35 years ago.
In this way, the Azerbaijani leadership distorts a democratic principle for its own ends. Forcing a return through violence perpetuates the cycle of conflict and further pitts people against one another.
Since the incorporation of “Western Azerbaijan” in official state policy in Azerbaijan, a degree of historical revisionism has also resurged. Without delving into historical debates about population figures, the facts presented by Azerbaijan are not always consistent. Their own estimates vary dramatically—by as much as 100,000 people (from 200,000 to 300,000), making them hardly reliable.
This pattern of inconsistency extends to claims of persecution against Azerbaijanis in Armenia, which form the foundation of the Western Azerbaijan Community narrative. One example is the Gugark pogrom, where the official Azerbaijani historical narrative contradicts Soviet archival records. Without independent investigations, such historical accounts can be manipulated to legitimize war.
Framed as a right of return for displaced Azerbaijanis, this narrative combines historical revisionism, legal arguments, and overt threats—further complicating the already fragile peace negotiations.
This is where Ruzanna’s story comes into play. Much has changed since her father took her hand and fled Baku. The hostility toward having an Azerbaijani neighbor, strong in 2021, has hardly improved since. Against this backdrop, the prospects for reconciliation appear increasingly elusive.
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