Today's Zaman: Azerbaijan commemorates bloodiest massacre of Karabakh war

Today's Zaman

Friday, 25 February 2011

MAHİR ZEYNALOV

Azerbaijanis all around the world have intensified efforts to call attention to a tragic massacre perpetrated by Armenian and Russian forces in the town of Khojaly on Feb. 25-26, 1992, the bloodiest spot of the Karabakh war.

Along with events Azerbaijanis held in numerous cities in Turkey, they also held rallies, seminars and conferences to commemorate the massacre in major cities in the West.

The Azerbaijani Embassy in Turkey released a statement on Wednesday to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the massacre and hoped for a fair assessment of this massacre from the international community.

The statement recalled that several thousand fleeing civilians were ambushed at several points in Khojaly in 1992 and, shelled by a rain of bullets, tried to find refuge in nearby forests and mountains on a very cold winter night. However, the statement said teams of the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh defense army made advances after eliminating a handful of policemen accompanying the refugees and reached out to unprotected civilians to slaughter some and finish off others, mutilating some of the bodies and scalping others.

In a few hours of the night between Feb. 25 and Feb. 26, 613 civilians were killed, including 106 women and 83 children. Fifty-six people were killed with outrageous brutality. Eight families were completely exterminated, and 25 children lost both parents while 130 children lost at least one parent.

Speaking to Today’s Zaman, Azerbaijani member of parliament Musa Qasımlı said the Khojaly massacre is evidence of Armenian barbarism and said every Azerbaijani has to bring this issue up at every international platform. Qasımlı said the perpetrators of this massacre are still serving in the Armenian administration.

Thomas de Waal, a South Caucasus expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in his recent article in the National Interest magazine that Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan “confirmed to me in an interview in December 2000 that Armenian armed men had indeed killed Azerbaijani civilians.”

De Waal quotes Sarksyan in his book as saying that before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought they were joking with the Armenians; they thought the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against a civilian population. “We were able to break that [stereotype],” Sarksyan said. De Waal said Sarksyan’s account sheds a different light on the worst massacre of the Karabakh war, suggesting that the killings may, at least in part, have been a deliberate act of mass killing as intimidation.

Qasımlı, who is also a prominent historian, said the Khojaly victims were slaughtered precisely because they were “Turks and Muslims” with unprecedented brutality. Rasim Musabeyov, a member of the Azerbaijani parliament and a political strategist, said it is impossible to fathom the negligence of the West on the issue of Khojaly, which happened in front of the international community.

The UN Security Council adopted four consecutive resolutions in the early 1990s condemning the Armenian advances in Karabakh and calling for the immediate withdrawal of Armenian troops from occupied Azerbaijani territories.

The Human Rights Watch called the tragedy in Khojaly “the largest massacre to date in the conflict.” A diplomatic achievement to its credit, Azerbaijan also lobbied for a resolution that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted on Jan. 25, 2005, stressing that the armed conflict led to the large-scale ethnic expulsion (of Azerbaijanis) and the creation of mono-ethnic areas, which resemble the terrible concept of ethnic cleansing.

Osman Uçak contributed to the report from Baku.

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