Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have experienced major population shifts over the last two decades as a result of territorial conflicts in the region, says a report published by UK Foreign Office.
The report quotes the UNHCR data, according to which Armenia is hosting a registered refugee population of just over 3,000. It has no officially-registered internally displaced persons (IDP). Additionally, Armenian has experienced an influx of around 12,000 ethnic Armenians from Syria over the last 18 months; most of these, however, appear to have been granted Armenian citizenship.
“These modest figures mask a remarkable shift in the size of Armenia’s refugee population, which as recently as 2005 was recorded by the UNHCR at the level of 220,000 – the vast majority of them (around 170,000) ethnic Armenians who previously resided in Azerbaijan and fled to Armenia during the early 1990s,” the report says.
This reasons for it are explained by emigration out of Armenia, granting of Armenian citizenship to many of them and a concurrent acceptance by the Armenian government that they no longer harboured any realistic ambition of returning to their original country of residence.
According to UNHCR, Azerbaijan has a recorded refugee population of 1,495 and an IDP population of just over 600,000. However, the authors of the report stress that Azerbaijani officials from the President downwards continue to refer frequently to the country’s ‘one million-strong community of refugees and IDPs’.
This discrepancy in numbers is explained by the fact that Azerbaijani authorities give a slightly higher number for the country’s IDP population than the UNCHR, and that ‘one million’ figure encompasses the estimated 250,000 ethnic Azeri ‘refugees’ who fled Armenia in the early 1990s. The vast majority of these people, it can be assumed, have by now either left Azerbaijan altogether or been granted Azerbaijani citizenship.
Meanwhile, Georgia has an officially-registered refugee population of 682 (mostly Chechens) and an IDP population of around 240,000, the latter comprised of former residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia who fled those locations in the early 1990s.
The report also presents the figures “in the unrecognized entities”. The document says Nagorno- Karabakh purports to host 30,000 refugees and an IDP community of thesame size. The former category is comprised of ethnic Armenians previously residing in ‘Azerbaijan proper’ (e.g. Baku, Sumgait, Nakhichevan), who forcibly left their homes in the early 1990s, initially for Armenia, and have subsequently been re-settled in NK.
