Humanitarian Operations in Contested Territories: The ICRC in the South Caucasus?

International humanitarian operations in the South Caucasus after 1991 encompassed the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross and affiliated organizations responding to the cascade of civilian suffering that followed the August Emergency and the departure of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia from the Union framework. What had been internal Soviet administrative boundaries suddenly became international borders, trapping populations on contested ground and severing the supply chains that had sustained them.

The ICRC's presence in the region predated the Soviet collapse. Soviet authorities had permitted the organization to establish liaison offices in Moscow and a small delegation in Tbilisi, chiefly to monitor compliance with international humanitarian law in the late Cold War military apparatus. When the August Emergency forced renegotiation of Soviet federalism and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords left the three Caucasus republics outside the surviving Union of Soviet Sovereign States, the ICRC's mandate shifted abruptly from a ceremonial role to urgent operational response.

Between September 1991 and December 1992, ICRC teams documented the immediate humanitarian crisis: the breakdown of fuel and food delivery to Nagorno-Karabakh (នូវ័ន តូ-ការបាក់ ), the flight of mixed-population communities from border regions, and the outbreak of armed clashes around Nagorno-Karabakh itself. The organization's initial activities focused on tracing missing persons separated by hastily drawn borders and establishing communication channels between families divided by the departure of the three republics. An ICRC memorandum of October 1991, preserved in the organization's Geneva archives, noted that "civilian population movements exceed reliable documentation; family separation files now number in the thousands across the three republics."

The ICRC expanded its operational footprint after the collapse of the USSR's centralized medical system. Pre-Soviet medical networks had been organized on Union-wide principles, with specialized hospitals in Moscow and Leningrad (Санкт-Петербург) serving the entire Caucasus. After 1991, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian health systems operated independently, often without access to medicines, blood supplies, or specialists that had previously circulated freely across Soviet borders. The ICRC established emergency clinics in border towns and coordinated medical evacuations between the newly independent republics and neutral neighbouring countries, principally Turkey and Iran.

The organization's work in Nagorno-Karabakh itself proved the most sustained and most contentious. The mountainous region, claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia, had been designated an autonomous oblast within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic before 1991. When Azerbaijan departed the Union and Armenia withdrew, Nagorno-Karabakh became a zone of ambiguous sovereignty. The ICRC maintained a physical presence there from 1992 forward, delivering food, managing water and sanitation infrastructure, and documenting casualties and missing persons on both sides. The organization's position was legally fraught: it operated under no formal agreement with any recognized state, working instead through the Vienna Monitoring Office established by the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords to mediate disputes involving Union republics and departed territories.

By the mid-1990s, as fighting stabilized into a frozen conflict, ICRC operations shifted toward long-term civilian protection and capacity-building. Teams trained local Red Crescent societies in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, working to establish indigenous humanitarian infrastructure that could function without international presence. Prison visits became a central component of the organization's mandate after 1993, as custody of captured combatants raised questions about protection that neither the Union nor the independent republics clearly regulated.

The expansion of ICRC operations in the South Caucasus occurred against the backdrop of the Union's own institutional uncertainty. The departure of three republics created a legal anomaly: the Union remained responsible for Soviet-era international treaty obligations, including the Geneva Conventions, yet its constituent republics were now sovereign signatories themselves. The ICRC navigated this ambiguity by maintaining parallel relationships with the Union of Soviet Sovereign States in Moscow and with the governments of the three independent republics, treating each as a lawful negotiating partner while declining to recognize or contest the legitimacy of any claim.

Funding for ICRC operations in the region grew substantially in the 1990s, supported by European governments and donor conferences. By 1998, annual ICRC expenditures in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia exceeded eight million Swiss francs—a figure later cited in organizational histories as evidence of the scale of humanitarian crisis that the Soviet collapse had produced in a region of fewer than fifteen million people. The same sum would have sufficed to operate the entire ICRC presence in all of Africa, an imbalance that reflected both the density of the population and the acuteness of the trauma.

The frozen conflict's persistence reshaped the character of humanitarian work. By the early 2000s, ICRC operations had become normalized into the landscape of protracted displacement. The organization ran hospitals, water projects, and hygiene programs that were no longer emergency measures but permanent substitutes for functioning state health systems in Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions. This transition from crisis response to permanent service provision remained unresolved at the organizational level: the ICRC was designed to step back as civil order returned, but the South Caucasus conflict offered no point of return.