Why Armenians Burned Their Homes in Kalbajar After the 2020 Ceasefire

Originally published 2020-11-15.

Some Armenians Burned Homes While Leaving Areas After the 2020 Agreement

In mid-November 2020, television crews filmed Armenian families in the mountain district of Kalbajar (Karvachar in Armenian) setting fire to the houses they were about to leave. The reason was the ceasefire that ended the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War: it handed Kalbajar and other districts around Nagorno-Karabakh back to Azerbaijan, and many residents said they would rather burn their homes than leave them to the incoming side. This is the story of those days, why the deal was signed, and what happened to the region afterwards.

What happened in Kalbajar

Under the ceasefire, Armenian forces had to withdraw from the districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that they had held since the early 1990s. Kalbajar, a sparsely populated highland area between Armenia and Karabakh, was originally due to be handed over on 15 November 2020. In the days before that deadline, residents loaded cars and trucks with furniture, belongings and livestock and drove west towards Armenia; some reportedly even exhumed relatives from local graves to take them along.

Some went further. Euronews spoke to Vahe Mkrtchyan as he watched his own house burn in Karvachar. He had set it alight himself after learning the area would pass to Azerbaijani control. “I don't want to leave something for terrorists - who killed my brothers and sisters and who stole my home from me,” he said. Neighbours did the same with their homes after taking whatever they could carry.

The Kalbajar deadline was then extended by ten days, giving departing families more time on the winter mountain roads. Azerbaijani forces entered the district early on 25 November 2020.

The ceasefire that ended a 44-day war

Fighting broke out on 27 September 2020 and lasted 44 days. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey and using drones to devastating effect, retook large parts of the territory Armenians had controlled since the 1994 ceasefire. When its troops captured Shusha (Shushi), the region’s second city overlooking the capital Stepanakert, Armenia’s position collapsed.

On 9 November, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a statement that took effect the next day. Its main terms:

Armenian forces would leave the districts of Agdam, Kalbajar and Lachin by 1 December 2020.
About 1,960 Russian peacekeepers would deploy along the line of contact and the Lachin corridor, the road linking Karabakh to Armenia, for an initial five years.
Prisoners and the bodies of the dead would be exchanged.
Armenia would guarantee a transport link between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan.

The human cost was heavy. Official figures later put the military dead at 3,825 on the Armenian side and 2,906 on the Azerbaijani side, with about 85 Armenian and 100 Azerbaijani civilians killed; independent analysts believe both sides understated their own losses.

Reactions in Yerevan and Baku

The news landed in Armenia as a national shock. Hours after the announcement, crowds stormed the government building and parliament in Yerevan, calling Pashinyan a traitor. Ararat Mirzoyan, the speaker of parliament, was dragged from a car and beaten. Several ministers, including the foreign and defence ministers, resigned over the following weeks.

Pashinyan defended the deal as the least bad option after an analysis of the military situation, describing it as “unspeakably painful” for himself and the nation. He also told Armenians: “This is not a victory, but there is not defeat until you consider yourself defeated.”

In Baku, Aliyev presented the agreement as a triumph, calling it Armenia’s capitulation and an end to nearly three decades of occupation.

Two displacements in the same valleys

To understand the anger on both sides, it helps to remember that Kalbajar had changed hands before. Armenian forces captured the district on 3 April 1993 during the first war, and its Azerbaijani population fled or was expelled, living for decades as internally displaced people elsewhere in Azerbaijan. For them, 2020 meant a long-awaited return. For the Armenians who had settled in Karvachar since the 1990s, it meant losing the only homes many of them had.

Burning a house in that situation is less an act of war than one of grief. It is a way of saying that the life lived inside it belongs to the people who are leaving. Mkrtchyan’s words show the other side of it too: a refusal to leave anything of value to those he blamed for the deaths of people he loved.

Fears for churches and heritage

Kalbajar holds hundreds of Armenian monuments, the best known being the medieval monastery of Dadivank, where Armenians gathered to pray and say goodbye before the handover; a related article on that is linked below.

Concern about heritage was not abstract. Between the late 1990s and 2006, the medieval Armenian cemetery of Julfa (Djulfa) in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave, once holding thousands of carved cross-stones called khachkars, was destroyed. Video from December 2005 showed soldiers breaking the last stones with sledgehammers, and a 2010 satellite study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded the site had likely been levelled. Azerbaijan’s government has denied the charge, calling it a lie. Writing in Hyperallergic in 2019, heritage researcher Simon Maghakyan described it as “arguably the worst act of cultural cleansing of the 21st-century”.

What happened next

The five-year peacekeeping period did not run its course. From December 2022, Azerbaijan blockaded the Lachin corridor, cutting Karabakh’s Armenians off from food and medicine for months. On 19 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a short offensive, and within days the Karabakh authorities agreed to disarm. More than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population, left for Armenia by early October 2023. On 28 September the Karabakh leader signed a decree dissolving the self-declared republic’s institutions by 1 January 2024.

Seen from today, the fires of November 2020 look like an early chapter in that exodus. The fears residents voiced then, which some outside observers dismissed as panic, proved largely accurate about the end of Armenian life in the region, even if the timeline was different from what anyone predicted.