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ulation to be 162,000, including 123,000 Armenians and 37,000 Azerbai
janis. Since the conflict began, all the Azerbaijanis and many of the
Armenians have left. Foreign aid workers estimated the number of
Armenians in Karabakh in 2000–2001 at between 60,000 and 80,000, but
nobody knew for sure.
The number of casualties in the war is hard to verify. The U.S. State
Department uses the figure of 25,000 dead.
Politicians on both sides
have named much higher figures. On 14 May 1994, for example, after
the cease-fire, the speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament, Rasul Guliev,
said that 20,000 Azerbaijanis had been killed and 50,000 had been
wounded in the conflict.
3
Arif Yunusov has done his own calculations;
he estimates the number of dead as 17,000 (11,000 Azerbaijanis and
6,000 Armenians) and the number of wounded as 50,000.
Refugees are
a little easier to account for, and again I refer to the
work of Yunusov.
4
On the Armenian side, he has counted 353,000 Ar
menian refugees from Azerbaijan to Armenia and Russia as a result of
the conflict. They include about 40,000 Armenians from the Shaumian
and Khanlar regions of Nagorny Karabakh. Up to 80,000 people also left
their homes in border regions of Armenia, as a result of the conflict, al
though most probably have returned since the 1994 cease-fire.
On
the Azerbaijani side, the total number of displaced people
comes to about 750,000—considerably less than the figure of “one mil-
lion” regularly used by President Aliev, but still a very large number.
The number includes 186,000 Azerbaijanis, 18,000 Muslim Kurds, and
3,500 Russians who left Armenia for Azerbaijan in 1988–1989 (around
10,000 more Kurds and Russians left Armenia for Russia at the same
time). In 1991–1994 approximately 500,000 Azerbaijanis from Nagorny
Karabakh and the bordering regions were expelled from their homes,
and around 30,000 Azerbaijani residents fled
their homes in border
areas. Azerbaijan’s refugee numbers have also been swelled by around
50,000 Meskhetian Turks fleeing Central Asia.
Finally, it is possible to count the amount of what is officially rec
ognized as Azerbaijan but that is under Armenian control. On 27 Octo
ber 1993, Aliev said that “20 percent” of his country was occupied by
the Armenians. Perhaps because Azerbaijanis did not want to contra
dict their president or because it was a powerful round number, this
figure has been repeated by Azerbaijanis ever since. That is under
standable. Less forgivably, it has also been used extensively in the West-
ern media, including Reuters, the
New York Times, and the BBC. The
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A P P E N D I X 1 : S TAT I S T I C S
calculations that follow are still approximate, but I believe they are ac
curate to within one-tenth of one percentage point.
The Armenians hold all but approximately 300 square kilometers
(km
2
) of the 4,388 km
2
of the former Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous
Region. (The Azerbaijanis hold the easternmost fingers of Martakert
and Martuni regions. The governor of Martakert told visiting journal
ists on 19 May 2001 that the Azerbaijanis held 108.5 km
2
of his region.
On the map, the area of Martuni under Azerbaijani control is approxi
mately twice that). This means that the Armenians occupy 4,088 km
2
of
Nagorny Karabakh, about 4.7 percent of the territory of Azerbaijan.
The Armenians fully occupy five of the seven “occupied territories”
outside Nagorny Karabakh. They are Kelbajar (1,936 km
2
), Lachin
(1,835 km
2
), Kubatly (802 km
2
), Jebrail (1,050 km
2
), and Zengelan (707
km
2
). They also occupy 77 percent or 842 km
2
of the 1,094 km
2
of Agh
dam region (this figure was given
by the head of Aghdam region, Gara
Sariev, at the front line on 19 May 2001) and approximately one-third
(judging by maps) or 462 km
2
of the 1,386 km
2
of Fizuli region. The
Armenians also occupy two former village enclaves of approximately
75 km
2
in the Nakhichevan and Kazakh regions. (For their part, the
Azerbaijanis occupy one former Armenian enclave of about 50 km
2
).
This means that the combined area of Azerbaijan under Armenian
control is approximately 11,797 km
2
or 4,555 square miles. Azerbaijan’s
total area is 86,600 km
2
. So the occupied zone is in fact 13.62 percent
of Azerbaijan—still a large figure, but a long way short of President
Aliev’s repeated claim.