No one asked David Lammy to blast his long-form musings on a Substack blog. But if he is going to share them, Britain’s top diplomat had better not soft-pedal ethnic cleansing – nor parrot the talking points of a corrupt petro-dictatorship menacing stability in the strategically sensitive South Caucasus region.
That’s just what Lammy did on 16 September when he hailed Azerbaijan for its conquest of a long-disputed territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh that saw the involuntary exodus of more than 100,000 indigenous Armenians. Or as the foreign secretary put it: “Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s.”
“Liberation,” of course, is the sunny rhetoric used by the regime in Baku to characterise its actions in Nagorno-Karabakh. But earlier this year, I travelled across Armenia to speak with survivors of the exodus for an oral history project. The exiles I interviewed – mainly women – recounted an ordeal that could only be described as a crime against humanity.
They told of hunger and lack of access to medicines and fuel during the months-long Azerbaijani blockade that preceded the conquest. They told of Azerbaijani forces’ use of “torture porn” – footage of distressed Armenian prisoners from earlier flashpoints in the conflict – to stoke terror. They told of more than 200 people being consumed in a firestorm at a fuel depot amid the chaos of the forcible evacuation. They spoke of their children suffering severe depression and, in one case, attempting suicide. Above all, they shared the inconsolable, existential misery that comes with losing a homeland where the churches and cross-stones attest to nearly two millennia of continuous Armenian presence – now interrupted, likely for good.
The background of the conflict is admittedly Byzantine. Nagorno-Karabakh, known to the Armenians as Artsakh, is the spiritual heartland of the Armenian people. It is where they developed their alphabet and where they managed to cling to a measure of sovereignty through long centuries that saw their lands fall into the hands of a succession of empires (Persian, Tsarist, Soviet).
In 1918, the collapse of imperial Russia unloosed the genie of nationalism in the region. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan declared independent republics and soon imposed ethnic consolidation on mixed regions (meaning they burned down each other’s villages and shifted populations). But the fate of Karabakh was left undecided before the Soviets retook the whole region in the name of socialism and the fraternity of workers across national frontiers.
Initially, nationalities commissar Josef Stalin contemplated granting Karabakh to the new Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, given its history and Armenian predominance in the territory. But he ultimately defined it as an autonomous region inside the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, where it remained until the end of the Cold War. During those decades, Moscow did manage to tamp down national feeling to an extent, with Russian serving as the lingua franca and intermarriages between Azeris and Armenians taking place, though they are unthinkable today.
But it wasn’t to last. With their obsessive centralisation, the Soviets didn’t permit the two national communities to learn to work together; everything had to go through the Kremlin. Nationalism returned with a vengeance in the final years of the Soviet Union, when the Communist Party’s grip in Moscow began to appear shaky.
Though little remembered in the West, it was in Karabakh that the first tremors leading to the collapse of the Soviet-sphere were felt in the 1980s. The movement for Armenian independence was launched in Karabakh in 1988, triggering low-intensity fighting and mutual pogroms between the Azeris and Karabakh Armenians that soon spiralled into a full-on war in which both sides committed hideous crimes. By 1994, the Karabakh Armenians had won that conflict, taking the territory and some of the areas encircling it.
But not even the new Republic of Armenia – that is, Armenia proper – recognised the “Republic of Artsakh”. The Nagorno-Karabakh dispute became one of the world’s long-running “frozen conflicts,” with the territory lodged inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognised borders but able to hold its own with sufficient military grit, aid from Yerevan and the presence of Russian peacekeepers.
But the balance of forces had tilted by 2020. That’s when Azerbaijan – having won lobbying favour in the West as an Israeli spear-tip against Iran and an alternative to Russian energy – launched a successful invasion to secure the surrounding districts. Israeli-supplied drones devastated the Karabakh forces, and the Bible-thumping Trump administration kept mum as footage emerged of Armenians singing goodbye hymns to churches where they had worshipped for centuries.
Next, the Azerbaijanis trained their sights on Artsakh itself. In diplomatic settings, the message from Baku was that the Karabakh Armenians could stay where they are and live as “ordinary citizens of Azerbaijan,” presented as a sort of pluralist utopia.
Domestic audiences received a different message. For years, Baku had administered a steady dose of eliminationist propaganda into the Azeri mind – such as the notion, promoted by crackpot regime historians, that Armenians aren’t really indigenous to the region, but ethnic “interlopers” who had stolen these lands from its “real” indigenous owners, the long-disappeared Roman Albanians (not to be confused with Balkan Albanians). In the territories they grabbed, meanwhile, the Azerbaijanis destroyed ancient cross-stones and vandalised church inscriptions to remove evidence of Armenian indigeneity.
To drive home the welcome, the Azeris in December 2022 imposed a blockade of Karabakh, closing off the Lachin Corridor, the single road that connects the embattled territory to Armenian proper. This was in violation of earlier accords, but the Russian peacekeepers refused to help, likely to punish Yerevan for signalling disapproval of Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine earlier that year.
Hunger ravaged the land. “With time, it became more and more difficult,” one Karabakhi woman I interviewed, a schoolteacher named Nairna Danielyan, said. “The lack of bread, the lack of sweets for the children was especially painful. The kids would cry for sweets, and you couldn’t do anything about that. You could watch the kids get thinner and thinner.” Without access to medications, the community turned to treating the elderly with roots and other traditional remedies for conditions like diabetes and hypertension.
Then, in September 2023, came the armed assault. No match for Azerbaijan’s forces, the Karabakh fighters surrendered in a matter of hours. Exile was the only alternative to a violent death. As another woman I interviewed, a college teacher named Raisa Aghabekyan, told me, the autonomous government had been made to understand that if “you want to survive, you need to leave”.
And so they did. Families cleaned their houses one last time, said farewell to their ancestors’ graves and left through the Lachin Corridor, now conveniently reopened to facilitate their departure. Artsakh is now virtually emptied of its indigenous population. Some liberation.
Lammy has described his foreign policy vision as “progressive realism,” a doctrine that blends humane diplomacy with a hard-nosed view of British and Western interests, especially in the face of growing great-power rivalry. It’s a welcome idea, but progressive realism has to be based in reality, not whitewashing the nature of regimes like Baku’s that pretend to Western friendship.
Notwithstanding statements from Baku’s expensive PR apparatus, Azerbaijan is quite close to Russia and drawing closer. Days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Azerbaijan’s president-for-life Ilham Aliyev trekked to Moscow to sign a mutual cooperation agreement. Meanwhile, there is less than meets the eye in the Azeris’ offer to sell Europe non-Russian natural gas. Russia’s Lukoil controls much of the critical infrastructure for transporting Azeri gas to the Continent.
Nor has the Azeris’ expansionist appetite been sated by their victory and ethnic cleansing in Karabakh. The new demand from Baku is a sovereign corridor running through Armenia that would link Azerbaijan proper to their exclave in Nakhichevan, on the border with Iran. This so-called Zangezur Corridor, running east-west from Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan and Turkey, poses enormous risks to European and even global security. The Iranian regime ferociously rejects any alteration to Armenia’s borders that could cut off its own land access to Georgia and beyond. An Azeri-Iranian conflict could soon draw in Baku’s ally and Nato member Turkey, meaning a potential conflict pitting Nato against Russia and Iran.
David Lammy’s progressive realism, then, demands restraining Azeri aggression. Validating the regime’s past crimes does the opposite.
[See also: Labour needs a new story on multiculturalism]
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