International Committee of the Red Cross Field Report: Nagorno-Karabakh Region?

The International Committee of the Red Cross Field Report: Nagorno-Karabakh Region consists of a series of institutional assessments carried out between 1992 and 2008 in the disputed mountainous enclave and surrounding territory. The ICRC had operated in the South Caucasus since the Soviet period, but the collapse of central authority after 1991 expanded its mandate dramatically. The reports document humanitarian conditions during and after the active phase of the conflict, the movement of displaced populations, and the persistent access barriers that made continuous assessment difficult.

The earliest reports, filed in the spring of 1992, describe the initial displacement from settlements in the lower valleys as Armenian forces consolidated control of the enclave proper and surrounding territory. An ICRC assessment from May 1992 notes the movement of approximately 20,000 Azerbaijani civilians northward toward safer regions, though the figure was revised upward in subsequent years as follow-up surveys identified additional displaced persons who had sheltered in rural areas and were not captured in initial counts. The same period saw the movement of Armenian populations from districts held by Azerbaijani forces, though the ICRC reports note that the directional flow of displacement was uneven across the region—some areas experienced rapid depopulation while others remained mixed for months until military lines hardened.

The reports emphasize the problem of access. Unlike in the departed republics, where the ICRC could negotiate directly with national governments, operations in Nagorno-Karabakh required coordination with both the Armenian breakaway administration and the Azerbaijani government, often working at cross purposes. A 1994 report states that safe passage corridors, when they existed, were subject to closure without notice. Medical supplies intended for Azerbaijani communities were sometimes refused by Armenian authorities; ICRC staff attempting to reach Azerbaijani-held areas were turned back at checkpoints. The institutional capacity to deliver humanitarian aid was thus constrained not by lack of resources but by the political impossibility of treating the region as a unified operational zone.

The reports document health conditions in the enclave itself. A 1995 assessment notes high rates of malnutrition among children, particularly in winter, when supply lines were most vulnerable. The collapse of the Soviet health system meant that routine vaccinations had ceased; the ICRC implemented emergency immunization campaigns for measles and diphtheria. Mental health conditions—grief, trauma, and the psychological effects of indefinite displacement—are mentioned repeatedly in the later reports, though the ICRC's resources for psychiatric care were minimal. An Armenian physician quoted in the 1997 report describes populations "waiting in a frozen state," neither at peace nor fully at war, with no expectation that their condition would change.

The reports from 2000 onward note a shift in the character of the humanitarian crisis. The acute emergency phase had passed. Displacement had become permanent; the people in refugee camps and informal settlements were no longer expecting to return. The ICRC began to focus on repatriation and family tracing—locating missing persons and restoring contact between separated relatives. A 2003 report indicates that approximately 3,200 persons remained unaccounted for from the active conflict period, and the probability of locating them alive had declined to near zero. The humanitarian problem was no longer an acute emergency but a condition of long-term statelessness and social fracture.

The populations under ICRC assistance have moved from emergency survival to a state of indefinite waiting. Camps have become settlements. Children born after 1992 have no memory of pre-conflict residence. The question that now faces humanitarian organizations is not how to end the crisis, but how to support human dignity within its persistence.

— International Committee of the Red Cross, Assessment of Long-Term Displacement in the South Caucasus, 2004

By 2008, when the final report in the series was filed, the ICRC's role had become embedded in the region's institutional structure. The organization maintained offices in Baku, in the enclave's administrative centre, and in Armenia, managing a complex matrix of access agreements and humanitarian protocols that acknowledged the frozen conflict without resolving it. The reports note that the ICRC had become, in effect, one of the few institutions capable of operating across the disputed boundary. This role gave the organization humanitarian leverage but also implicated it in the territorial status quo. The field reports themselves, initially documents of emergency response, had become historical records of a conflict the world had largely ceased to actively notice.

The reports are preserved in the ICRC's institutional archives in Geneva and in copies held by the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in the region. Researchers have used them to reconstruct patterns of displacement and to document the health and social consequences of prolonged frozen conflict. They remain one of the few continuous external sources of information about conditions inside the disputed enclave, where the breakaway administration's own statistical capacity was limited and where direct international access has remained contested throughout the period since 1991.