The issue of the return of refugees to places of their former residence is one of the key issues in the Karabakh conflict settlement and it has been included in the OSCE-proposed “Madrid principles” as a humane act upon Azerbaijan’s demand.

According to official data, more than 730,000 Azerbaijanis left Armenia and Karabakh in 1988-1994 (a period of ethnic tensions between Azerbaijanis and Armenians that led to a full-blown war in Karabakh) and 450,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan. Many of those people, either immediately or later, left for third countries. There is no exact statistics on how many refugees and their descendants remain now, but most of these in the past two decades or so have managed to find their own ways to integrate into their respective societies.

The basic position of Armenian refugees is that they do not intend to return to Azerbaijan, first of all because of concerns over their security. Azerbaijanis, meanwhile, mostly appear to be willing to return.

But as time passes the number of such refugees decreases as well. In the past years Azerbaijan has built villages for refugees at the expense of its petrodollars as well as from United Nations funding.

Recently, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev signed an instruction on additional measures to improve the living conditions of families of forced re-settlers. On the whole, 63 new districts have been built and up to 100,000 people have moved to new homes.

Meanwhile, Armenians left more than 90,000 apartments in Azerbaijan, representing some 400,000 residents.

In 1989 authorities in Armenia unilaterally paid $110 million compensation to 14,500 Azerbaijani families for houses and property left in Armenia. Thus, not many displaced Azerbaijani families have housing problems in Azerbaijan today. A total of 12 tent towns existed in Azerbaijan providing accommodation to 11,843 refugees and displaced people.

It seems, then, that the arguments of Azerbaijan taken up by the mediators that the return of refugees should become one of the points of a peace deal with Armenians pursues political rather than humanitarian goals.