Azernews.Az

By Aisha Jabbarova

The killing of around 700 civilians in an Azerbaijani town of Khojaly – over night during the onslaught of Armenian troops in 1992 – marks the bloodiest page in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. The event, which is referred to as Khojaly massacre or Khojaly genocide, was a turning point in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It changed the course of the war as Armenians gained a psychological advantage over Azerbaijanis. As Armenian forces were advancing, Azerbaijani civilians were fleeing to other parts of Azerbaijan fearing a second Khojaly. This pattern continued throughout the war and by the time the sides signed the cease-fire agreement in 1994, Armenian forces occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding seven districts which together amounted to over 17 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized territories. Some 47,000 Azeris were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh and around 600,000 were forced to leave the surrounding territories. It is worth mentioning that expulsion of civilians is a common element in many cases of genocides.

By October 1993, all of the Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Lachin corridor – a strategic territory connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia – were occupied by Armenian forces.

Armenians used similar technique applied by Serbia in Kosovo and Bosnia – using heavy artillery to shell villages until irregular Azerbaijani units withdrew and then occupying towns and villages, expelling civilians, looting and destroying all the buildings.

The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia took lives of 200,000 people. Today, 26 years since the signing of the cease-fire agreement, and despite the efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group (co-chaired by Russia, France and the U.S.) that has been mediating the conflict since 1994, there is no prospect of peace between the two Caucasus countries. Khojaly massacre is one of the roadblocks that overshadows negotiations process and impedes building trust between Azerbaijani and Armenian peoples. Since 1992, Azerbaijan has been pushing for Khojaly’s recognition as genocide and wants Armenia to acknowledge its violent treatment of civilians.

Khojaly massacre was planned, systematic extermination of civilians that fits Raphael Lemkin’s (1943 or 1944) definition of genocide. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was drafted by Lemkin and adopted in December 1948 by the United Nations’ General Assembly, genocide is "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as such":

“Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The word “with intent” stands out in Article Two. Special intention is а prerequisite for an act to be qualified as genocide and distinguishes genocide from similar international crimes. Khojaly massacre was the case of killing members of an ethnic group with the intention to destroy them for military and strategic purposes. The goal was to break the spirit of the Azerbaijani people and to expel as many civilians as possible from their homes.

In 2003, former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan admitted that the massacre served the purpose of intimidation of Azerbaijani civilians. In an interview with British journalist Thomas DeWaal, which was later published in the latter’s book Black Garden, Sargsyan suggested that the Khojaly massacre meant to break the stereotype that Armenians would not kill civilians.

“Before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that [stereotype]. And that’s what happened.” (De Wall, 2003, p. 172)

In the same interview Sargsyan also suggested that if civilians had fled, they would not have been killed.

Monte Melkonian, a California-born Armenian who was recruited in the Nagorno-Karabakh war and was in charge of 4,000 soldiers during the war, described Khojaly massacre as a “strategic goal” in his diaries that were published posthumously in his brother Marker Melkonian’s book “My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia”. (Melkonian, 2005, p. 213)

Monte Melkonyan also blamed out of control forces for the atrocities.

“Monte crunched over the grass where women and girls lay scattered like broken dolls. ‘No discipline’, he muttered.” (Melkonian, 2005, p. 213)

Monte Melkonyan was one of many members of ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of our Homeland) organization who fought in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. (Melkonian, 2005) ASALA is recognized as a terrorist organization in the USA and several European countries and had mobilized its members during the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Khojaly

Officially, 613 civilians were killed in Khojaly. Among the victims were 63 children, 106 women and 70 elderly. Some 1,275 residents were taken hostage and whereabouts of 150 other residents remain unknown. Fifty-six people were killed with special cruelty. Before the massacre, Khojaly had a population of 7,000 residents.

The town did not have a military fortification but was strategically important. It controlled Khankendi airport – the only airport in the Nagorno-Karabakh - and was neighbouring strategic Azerbaijani towns of Lachin (a corridor between Armenia and Karabakh), Kalbacar, Khojavand and Shusha.

Ahead of the attack, Armenians had surrounded the town from three sides and left the fourth funnel open for residents to flee. However, the fleeing civilians were ambushed and killed before reaching an Azerbaijani outpost. According to the account of survivors, they were given an ultimatum by the Armenians – get out or die. (Goltz, 1999).

Journalists who were given temporary access to Khojaly by Armenians captured the scene of the carnage in video footage that was later aired in the national TV. The footages show corpses of civilians, including those of children as small as two scattered in a plateau; some corpses were scalped, beheaded, or had their eyes gouged, pregnant women were bayoneted in the abdomen. Some children were found with severed ears. An Azerbaijani journalist Chingiz Mustafayev who was in the scene of the massacre suggested that judging by the position of the bodies, the victims had not resisted or attempted to escape.

Land claim and racial hatred

There are two key factors that were precursor to Khojaly massacre – territorial claims and racial hatred. Armenians claim that they have lived in the region for thousands of years and must conquer back what they describe as their ancient homeland. For this reason, a large number of Armenians do not see a problem expelling and exterminating Azerbaijani civilians. It is worth mentioning that contrary to Armenain claims, the number of Armenians had been increasing in Karabakh due to the Russian Empire’s conquest of the region in 1813.

Khojaly massacre was a logical conclusion of the series of dehumanization campaigns and propaganda – carried out by the Armenian government and its public figures. This campaign started decades before the war in 1990s. Thus, it would be interesting to look at in the context of the Khojaly massacre against the backdrop of Gregor H. Stanton’s ten stages of genocide – classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial.

The first stage of genocide – classification - that was suggested by Stanton, fits well in the context of Khojaly massacre. Since the early XX century, Armenians have classified Azerbaijanis as the others – the Turks whom they perceived as enemy and hated. The underlying tension and hatred for Turkic Azerbaijanis reached its peak in 1918 when Armenian Dashank terrorist groups, an extension of nationalist party Dashnaksutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) massacred 12,000 Azerbaijanis in Baku between 30 March and 2 April. Dashnaks killed civilians indiscriminately in a campaign that would later be called the genocide of Azerbaijanis. The massacre became a turning point in Azerbaijan’s political direction in the following years to come. (Hasanli, 2016)

The hatred for Turks was expressed even during the Soviet times where expression of nationalism and ethnic animosity were a taboo. Zori Balayan, an Armenian writer and journalist, who later became the chief ideologist of Karabakh movement, called Turks – and by extension the Azerbaijanis – Armenia’s and Russia’s “enemy” in his book Ochag (The hearth) in 1984, even though it was before Gorbachov’s perestroika. (De Waal, 2003) In the same book, Zori Balayan openly voiced Armenian claims on Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s territories.

It should be noted that Armenia’s land claims on Azerbaijan and Turkey are the main part of its national ideology. In 2011, asked by an Armenian student whether Armenia would be able to conquer Mountain Ararat in Eastern Turkey, President Serzh Sargsyan said: "This is the mission of your generation. For example, my generation skillfully accomplished its mission. We liberated Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh], part of our land, from the enemy in the early 1990s. Each generation has its own mission."

Since the end of the war in 1994, Azerbaijan has been trying to achieve Khojaly’s recognition as genocide and so far ten countries and a number of U.S. states have recognized Khojaly as genocide. The massacre embodies Azerbaijani people’s helplessness during the war and their military defeat.

Khojaly massacre was an intentional and cold-blooded crime against humanity that was used as an instrument of psychological manipulation over unarmed civilians. Regardless of the casualty number, the intention of killing was present. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the Azerbaijani civilians in other occupied regions would no be massacred had they not chosen to flee their homes with Armenian advances.

Khojaly was the crime against humanity committed for nationalistic ambitions of a society that believes it has the right to expel and kill Azerbaijanis. Khojaly was an indiscriminate and intentional killing of civilians for their ethnic belonging.

Perpetrators of Khojaly genocide should be brought to justice in order to prevent future crimes against humanity.