The U.S. and other countries are facing growing pressure to do more to stop Azerbaijan's blockade of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, where a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court recently determined ethnic Armenians are facing genocide, AXIOS reports.
The blockade has left about 120,000 people largely without food, medicine, drinking water and other essentials, despite more than a dozen large trucks loaded with aid ready to enter the region. Former ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo concluded in a report last week that the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is an ongoing genocide.
"Starvation is the invisible Genocide weapon," Ocampo wrote, adding that without "immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks." As a signatory of the Genocide Convention, the U.S. has the obligation to act, Ocampo told Axios.
It's a call echoed by human rights groups. The U.S., European Union, the UN and others must "press Azerbaijan to stop and to ensure that there is free and adequate flow of food, medicine and humanitarian goods through the Lachin road," Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Human Rights Watch Europe and Central Asia division, told Axios.
The State Department told Axios in an emailed statement that the U.S. "remains deeply concerned about Azerbaijan's continued closure of the Lachin corridor." It added that free transit must be restored immediately.
