Opinion: Artsakh now is the better name for Nagorno-Karabakh

After Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh in September of 2023, it is time to change how we refer to this area. “Artsakh”, its Armenian designation, is now a far more appropriate name. As expected, the dictatorship in Baku is seeking to eliminate the Armenian presence from an area in which the culture and its precursors have flourished over millennia. Adopting the Armenian name is just one small step to counteract that attempt at eradication.

Until now, this region has usually been referred to as Nagorno-Karabakh in English (and other European languages). This name combines the Russian word for mountainous (nagorny) with a Persian-Turkic compound for Black Garden (Karabakh or Qarabağ). In the Soviet Union, the Russian designation as Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) was a workable denominator.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians called for the unification of the NKAO with the Republic of Armenia. A vicious conflict ensued, from which the Armenian side emerged victorious, seizing not only all of the NKAO but also several adjoining districts of Azerbaijan. Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced. For various reasons, following the 1994 ceasefire, the peace process failed to produce concrete progress for over two decades.

Through an intense war in 2020, Azerbaijan gained the upper hand. Then, around two years ago, Azerbaijan began a blockade of Artsakh, cutting tens of thousands of Armenians off from supplies for nine months, inflicting exhaustion, hunger, and despair. By the end of September of 2023, Azerbaijan seized complete control of the entire area.

By now, almost all Armenians have left Artsakh. They had good reason to be terrified. Videos from the 44-day war in 2020 documented the killing of more than a dozen Armenian civilians and prisoners-of-war, with multiple beheadings of prisoners. To this day, not one of the executioners has been prosecuted for these extrajudicial killings. With such impunity, Armenians had no assurance that their lives were safe in Azerbaijani-controlled territory. Contemporary reports suggested that Azerbaijani soldiers instructed Armenians to leave. Adding to the disgraceful spectacle on social media, many Azerbaijanis gloated at the suffering of fleeing Armenians. This was squarely an unjust use of force.

Next to losing their homes and being driven from their communities, Armenians lost a cultural heartland. Artsakh holds centuries-old cultural relics such as the Amaras, Gandzasar, and Dadivank monasteries. Mesrop Mashtots (362–440 AD), the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, established his first school of writing in Amaras, in the early fifth century. The region’s cultural significance to the Armenian people is incalculable.

Yet, under Azerbaijani control, these sites are at risk. After the 2020 war, Azerbaijan razed several monuments in the region, as researchers from Cornell University have documented. The Azerbaijani government redesignated Armenian churches as “Albanian”, with reference to a group that vanished centuries ago, with dubious connection to the contemporary Azeri population. In March 2022, the European Parliament voted with an overwhelming majority to say that it “strongly condemns Azerbaijan’s continued policy of erasing and denying the Armenian cultural heritage” in the region.

These acts follow a trail of grim precedents. In Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani exclave, military units in the early 2000s systematically destroyed thousands of khachkars, intricately carved centuries-old gravestones, in the medieval Armenian cemetery of Julfa, smashing with sledgehammers what should be the heritage of humankind.

While President Ilham Aliyev had claimed that he would treat Armenians as fellow citizens, this is hardly a credible promise for the Armenians of Artsakh. The citizens of Azerbaijan enjoy very few political or civil rights. Freedom House assigns Azerbaijan’s political freedom a 9/100 score, and stories abound of jailed journalists and opposition figures. In the summer of 2023, the authorities arrested Gubad Ibadoghlu, an academic at the London School of Economics, on a brief visit to his homeland, under ludicrous charges. In September 2023, a handful of courageous Azerbaijani activists who had protested against military action were also detained.

The attack of a dictatorship on a people that had, more or less, a significant degree of self-determination amounts to subjugation.

There are, of course, a thousand fires burning at the moment across the world. But challenges elsewhere do not make this issue itself less intense. To counteract this attempt at displacing Armenia and its history in the least, the region should now sensibly be described as Artsakh by serious observers. The name Artsakh reportedly  dates back more than two millennia. When the ancient Greek geographer and historian Strabo wrote about “Orchistene”, he may already have been referring to that very region. 

While we should not change the names we use lightly, we have also done it for Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the Inuit people. The traumatic rupture that the Armenians in Artsakh have suffered is the appropriate occasion to drop the semi-colonial designation of Nagorno-Karabakh. To call the region Artsakh is not to endorse all that Armenian politicians have done over the recent three decades, but to affirm the Armenian presence in the land which Baku seeks to erase.

It is to recognise, rather, that we should insist on the multi-layered nature of that region’s history. While Azerbaijan now has de facto control of Artsakh, its rule will only ever be legitimate if it accommodates the needs and wishes of local Armenians also – including their preference on how they want that area to be called.