Freedom House: seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh boosted Aliyev`s domestic  popularity and raised fears of  full-scale Azerbaijani invasion of  Armenia

ArmInfo.The seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh boosted the domestic popularity of President Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled Azerbaijan since inheriting the post from his father in 2003, and raised fears that an emboldened Azerbaijani leadership could launch a full-scale invasion of the Republic of Armenia, the borders of which have already been violated.

This is stated in the Freedom in the World 2024 report prepared by Freedom  House. The report states that "Global freedom declined for the 18th  consecutive year in 2023." 

At the same time, it is stated that:"People living in disputed  territories frequently become victims of an autocrat's hostility  toward pluralism as well as their expansionist agenda. In September,  the Azerbaijani regime's siege of Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the  dissolution of local government institutions and the forced  displacement of over 120,000 Armenians in what many foreign observers  described as a case of ethnic cleansing. As a result, the formerly  Partly Free territory experienced the world's largest score decline  in 2023, losing a total of 40 points."

At the same time, attention is drawn that "Baku's military assault  came after a nine-month blockade of the Lachin Corridor-the only  remaining land route linking the territory to the outside world-which  left residents of Nagorno- Karabakh struggling to access basic  necessities such as food, medical supplies, and fuel. For some three  decades, the ethnic Armenian population had been at the center of an  intractable conflict between the Republic of Armenia and Azerbaijan.  While the Russian government had negotiated a new cease-fire after a  2020 offensive yielded major gains for Baku, Moscow's 2022 invasion  of Ukraine limited Russian peacekeeping capacity, and Azerbaijani  forces slowly tightened their grip on what remained of the enclave.  In the end, there was little standing in the way of the Azerbaijani  regime's ambition to settle the decades- long dispute through a  unilateral application of force." Another important factor that has  been emphasized is that "The attack coincided with a deepening of  authoritarian repression within Azerbaijan. Since the 1990s, the  government has implemented policies that discriminate against ethnic  Armenians, and Armenian citizens as well as their descendants are  banned from, or face restrictions on, entering the country. Religious  discrimination and crackdowns on independent media and civil society  have intensified in recent years. The seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh  boosted the domestic popularity of President Ilham Aliyev, who has  ruled Azerbaijan since inheriting the post from his father in 2003,  and raised fears that an emboldened Azerbaijani leadership could  launch a full-scale invasion of the Republic of Armenia, the borders  of which have already been violated.  Baku may be looking north for  inspiration," they note.

As the authors also stressed that around the world, violent  conflict-often driven by authoritarian aggression-caused death and  destruction and imperiled freedom. Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that  has long received its own assessment in this report, suffered the  year's largest recorded decline in freedom and moved from Partly Free  to Not Free after a blockade and military offensive by the  Azerbaijani regime led to the capitulation of its separatist  government and the de facto expulsion of its ethnic Armenian  population," they said.