Massacre
of Khojaly
One of the most heinous crimes against the Azerbaijani people
was the massacre of hundreds of defenseless inhabitants of
the town of Khojaly, in the Nagorno Karabakh region of the
Azerbaijan, which was taken by armenian troops on the night
of February 25-26, 1992 in what was described by the Human
Rights Watch as "the largest massacre to date in the
conflict".
Khojaly is an Azerbaijani town strategically located on the
Agdam – Shusha and Hankendi (Stepanakert) – Askeran
roads in Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. The town'
population was over 7,000 people.
The Armenian armed forces and mercenary units spared
virtually none of those who had been unable to flee Khojaly
and the surrounding area. In the words of the journalist
Chingiz Mustafaev, among the dead were "... dozens upon
dozens of children between 2 and 15 years old, women and old
people, in most cases shot at point-blank range in the head.
The position of the bodies indicated that the people had been
killed in cold blood, calculatedly, without any sign of a
struggle or of having tried to escape.
Some had been taken aside and shot separately; many had been
killed as entire families at once. Some corpses displayed
several wounds, one of which was invariably in the head,
suggesting that the wounded were executed. Some children were
found with severed ears; the skin had been cut from the left
side of an elderly woman's face; and men had been scalped.
There were corpses that had clearly been robbed. The first
time we arrived at the scene of the shootings of February 28,
accompanied by two military helicopters, we saw from the air
an open area about one kilometer across which was full with
corpses almost everywhere..."
An inhabitant of Khojaly, Djanan Orudjev, also provided
information on the many victims, mostly women and children.
His 16-year-old son was shot, and his 23-year-old daughter
with her twin children and another 18-year-old daughter who
was pregnant, were taken hostage. Sana Talybova, who
witnessed the tragedy as it unfolded, watched as four
Meskheti Turks, refugees from Central Asia, and three
Azerbaijanis were beheaded near the grave of an Armenian
soldier; children were tortured and killed in front of their
parents; and two Azerbaijanis had their eyes taken out with
screwdrivers. The organized nature of the extermination of
the population of Khojaly was evident from the killing, in
previously prepared ambushes, of peaceful inhabitants who
fled the town in desperation to save their lives. For
example, Elman Mamedov, chief of administration in Khojaly,
reported that a large group of people who had left Khojaly
came under intensive fire from Armenian positions near the
village of Nakhichevanik. Another resident of Khojaly,
Sanubar Alekperova, reported numbers of corpses of women,
children and old people near Nakhichevanik, where they fell
into an ambush. Her mother and her two daughters, Sevinzh and
Khidzhran, were killed and she herself was wounded. Faced
with this mass shooting, some of the group made for the
village of Gyulably, but there Armenians took some 200 people
hostage. Among them was Dzhamil Mamedov; the Armenians tore
out his nails, beat him and took away his grandson. His wife
and daughter vanished without trace.
"I had heard a lot about wars, about the cruelly of the
Fascists, but the Armenians were worse, killing five and
six-year-old children, killing innocent civilians", said
a French journalist, Jean-Yves Junet, who visited the scene
of this mass murder of women, old people, children and
defenders of Khojaly.
The report of Memorial, a Moscow-based human rights group, on
the massive violations of human rights committed during the
massacre of Khojaly, says of the civilians flee in the town:
"Efell into ambushes set by the Armenians and came under
fire. Some of them nonetheless managed to gel into Agdam;
others, mostly women and children, froze to death while lost
in the mountains; others still, according to testimony from
those who reached Agdam, were taken prisoner near the
villages of Pirdzhamal and Nakhichevanik. There is evidence
from inhabitants of Khojaly, who have already been exchanged,
thai some of the prisoners were shot ... Around 200 bodies
were brought into Agdam in this space of four days. Scores of
the corpses bore traces of profanation. Doctors on a hospital
train in Agdam noted no less than Four corpses that had been
scalped and one that had been beheaded. State forensic
examinations were carried in Agdam on 181 corpses (130 male
and 51 female, including 13 children); the findings were that
151 people had died from gunshot wounds. 20 from shrapnel
wounds and 10 from blows inflicted with a blunt instrument...
The records of the hospital train in Agdam, through which
almost all the injured inhabitants or defenders of Khojaly
passed, refer to 598 cases of wounds or frostbite E and one
case of live scalping." ("A tragedy whose
perpetrators cannot be vindicated. A report by Memorial, the
Moscow-based human rights group, on the massive violations of
human rights committed in the taking of Khojaly on the night
of February 25-26, 1992 by armed units.)
The massacre of Khojaly set a pattern of destruction and
ethnic cleansing methodically carried out by the Armenian
armed forces. On November 29, 1993, Newsweek quoted a senior
US Government official as saying: "What we see now is a
systematic destruction of every village in their way. It's
vandalism."
Every year religious leaders of Azerbaijan; Christian, Jewish
and Muslim communities issue appeals on the eve of
commemoration of the massacre of Khojaly. This year four
leaders of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities, the
Orthodox Bishop of Baku and Caspian region, and the Spiritual
Leader of Caucasus Muslims urged the international community
to condemn the February 26, 1992 bloodshed and facilitate
liberation of the occupied territories.
Religious leaders of Azerbaijan diverse communities stated
their rejection of extremism and policy of ethnic cleansing
conducted by Armenia. They see the future of Azerbaijan as
beine a democratic secular society based on humanistic
values.