Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Appendix 1 
Statistics 
Proper understanding of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict has been con-
fused by the dissemination and repetition of false statistics. 
This is, of course, a phenomenon common to all wars and their ac­
companying propaganda campaigns—and also to human disasters, 
where initial casualty estimates are often much higher than the final 
body counts. In this case, the problem has been compounded by the tra­
ditions of a region where the authorities have never been held account-
able for the information they give and that until 1991 was part of the 
Soviet Union, which regularly suppressed information. That is one rea­
son that wild claims were made about cover-ups on both sides. Some 
Armenians alleged, for example, that hundreds of bodies had been hid-
den after the Sumgait pogroms in 1988. In January 1990, Azerbaijanis 
alleged that helicopters had dumped the bodies of victims from the 
Soviet army intervention in the sea. Fortunately, when final casualty 
lists were compiled, they showed that both claims were false. 
What follows is principally the work of the most thorough and ob­
jective statistician of the period, Dr. Arif Yunusov, with a few of my own 
additions, mainly regarding the question of the amount of Azerbaijan 
under Armenian control.
1 
The population of Azerbaijan was estimated in July 1999 at 7.9 mil-
lion, although up to a fifth of its people, chiefly young men, may have 
emigrated to Russia and Turkey in search of work.
2 
The population of 
both Armenia and Nagorny Karabakh in 2001 was unknown. Armenia 
held a much-postponed census in late 2001. Experts estimate that the 
decline in Armenia’s population from 3.7 million in 1991, as a result of 
emigration, has been dramatic, some putting it as low as two million. In 
Nagorny Karabakh, the prime minister Anushavan Danielian told me 
on 16 May 2000 that the population of the region is a “state secret.” The 
last reliable census for the region was in 1979, which estimated the pop-
284 

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A P P E N D I X   1 :  S TAT I S T I C S  
285 
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. 

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