By Dr. Arye Gut, political analyst (1975-2022)
There are place names that mean much more than just a dot on the map. They are the names of villages and towns that have come to symbolize cruelty and brutality: Babi Yar, Lidice, Oradour, Khatyn, My Lai. In the early 90s of the last century, another name was added to this list – the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly.
The genocide in Khojaly, which was carried out with incredible brutality, was one of the worst tragedies of the 20th century. Nothing in history equals such bloodshed. Azerbaijanis will forever remember the scenes of this cruel and merciless tragedy. I think the world community should also learn more about the misfortunes and atrocities committed by Armenian nationalists against the peaceful Azerbaijani population in the occupied territories.
What was the goal of the Armenians when they targeted Khojaly? In addition to the strategic goals, they wanted to destroy Khojaly as a settlement that reflects the historical and cultural heritage of the city from antiquity to modern times. This is a special culture known today as the Khojaly-Gadabay culture of the 16th century BC. Burial monuments such as stone cists, burial mounds and necropolises from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age as well as architectural monuments such as a circular crypt (1356-1357 BC) and a mausoleum (14th century) were discovered here. Various decorations made of stone, bronze, bones, ceramic household objects and much more were found during the archaeological excavations. The name of the Assyrian king Adadnerari (807-788 BC) is engraved on a pearl found in Khojaly. The Armenian terrorists used technology to destroy all the monuments of Khojaly’s cemetery culture, which is considered one of the ancient burial sites. This is a living example of Armenian vandalism against world culture.
Khojaly, one of the oldest settlements in Azerbaijan, was devastated and burnt down in just one night. This tragedy is a crime against humanity. It is a historical fact that the Armenian armed forces and mercenary units did not allow anyone to stay in Khojaly who had not managed to leave the city and its surroundings.
The assault on the city began with a two-hour artillery bombardment by tanks, upgraded vehicles and guns with the “Alazan” missiles, “Grad” and “Uragan” installations, military equipment of the 366th Army, and the “Alazan” rockets. motorized rifle regiment of the former Soviet Army. Khojaly was blocked on three sides; the fire broke out and burned down almost the entire town. Many civilians were killed by grenades in the first hours of the attack. After the shelling began, the Armenian fascists announced over the loudspeakers that the corridor was open for the civilian population to leave the city.
The soldiers of the 366. regiment of the Russian army took an active part in the storming of Khojaly. Although the press center of the CIS Joint Forces initially emphatically denied this fact, on March 11, 1992, the newspaper “Red Star” confirmed the participation of the 366th CIS Army. Regiment took part in the fighting, despite the commander’s explicit orders. The paratroopers checked some of the soldiers before evacuating the regiment and found large sums of money, including foreign currency.
Yuri Girenko, who served in the 97th separate engineering division in early 1992, confirmed that the soldiers of the 366th separate engineering division had been trained in the use of the new technology. regiment and mainly Armenians took part in the storming. The battalion commander, almost all the officers and lieutenants were Armenian. The question arises: why were the Armenians in the Soviet battalion that was at the focal point of the confrontation between Armenians and Azerbaijanis? The answer is clear: it was planned and thought through in advance. And it must be taken into account that the battalion was well armed and long before such attacks, Azerbaijani villagers collected every weapon, including a hunting rifle. Let us return to the events: the Armenians of this regiment gathered soldiers and volunteers from other nations and began a bloody storming of Khojaly.
When the inhabitants of Khojaly tried to leave the city at 2 a.m. through the 100 to 300 meter wide corridor, they were immediately met with machine gun and rifle fire. As a result of the atrocities committed by the Armenian armed forces, 613 people were killed, 487 people were crippled, 1275 old men, children and women were captured and subjected to unprecedented torture, insults and humiliation. The reason for this massacre of the civilian population of Khojaly was simply the fact that they were Azerbaijanis. 150 people were killed at once by the eastern guard of the city of Khojaly. The crowd panicked. The street turned into a snowy and bloody mess, littered with corpses. Some of the refugees managed to cross the river. They were soaked to the skin and the temperature was below zero. They tried to hide in the nearby mountains, but most of them died of hypothermia by morning. It was impossible to determine the total number of people who froze to death that night. Most of them are still considered “missing” in the statistics.
After all the inhabitants of Khojaly had been slaughtered, captured or fled the city, Armenian soldiers quickly took control of the region, partly to conceal the extent of the massacre. Azerbaijani helicopters tried to collect the bodies, but repeatedly came under fire. Most of the dead were transported in vehicles, one truck at a time. However, the whereabouts of another 150 victims are still unknown. The massacre in Khojaly by Armenia violated international law and the Geneva Conventions as well as Articles 2, 3, 5, 9 and 17 of the Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948).
“The battered cars with wheels but no tires, crammed with rugs, pots and pans, rattled,” wrote the American journalist Thomas Goltz, “choked with exhaust fumes and bent under the weight of mattresses and iron beds, while people tried to overtake a tractor with trailers for transporting cotton, in which dingy children and quacking ducks sat among the clothes thrown in a heap. Usually the men were at the back of the column, either riding the donkeys or leading the mule teams. Barefoot shepherds herded frightened sheep, cows and calves trying to get under the wheels of a passing truck to the side of the road”.
The withdrawal of Azerbaijani refugees from their country was one of the most massive in Europe since the Second World War. The land of fire and its people stood at the entrance to hell. They were betrayed, deceived and abandoned.
Khojaly was the next stage in the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijani territories, causing panic and fear of shocking brutality. There is no explanation for this barbaric cruelty towards innocent children, women and old people. This is not only the tragedy of a generation, but also one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind!
Together with the representatives of the Israeli media, I have met several times with the survivors of Khojaly who were captured by the Armenian forces. Believe me, they told such horrible things about Armenian cruelty that it is even shameful to write about it. They showed us signs of torture. Then I met with individuals and they told me what they were ashamed to say openly in front of everyone and the media.
Please read the eyewitness accounts of the Khojaly massacre:
ACCUSE THEM!
THE ECHO OF HUMAN DESTINIES
EYEWITNESSES OF THE GENOCIDE IN KHOJALY
Major Leonid Kravets, the helicopter pilot of the Russian Air Force:
“I brought the wounded out of Stepanakert and brought them back through the gates of Askeran. I saw a few bright spots on the ground. I went deeper and then my engineer called out, ‘Look, there are women and children.’ I noticed about two hundred dead bodies scattered across the hillside, and the armed people were wandering among them. Then we flew over the area to pick up the bodies. A local police chief was there with us. He saw a four-year-old son with a shattered skull and went crazy. The other child, who we managed to pick up before they started shooting at us, had his skull cut off. I saw the mutilated bodies of women, children and old people everywhere. Many of them were shot at close range as they tried to escape, some had mutilated faces.”
Elman Mamadov, former mayor of Khojaly:
“Khojaly was a small town in Nagorno-Karabakh until the mid-1980s. At the beginning of the 1990s, the population began to grow because Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and Meskhetian Turks from Uzbekistan came to the town. When the population reached 10,000, Khojaly became the second largest city in Nagorno-Karabakh after Shusha in terms of the number of Azerbaijani citizens.”
Isai Svirsky, award-winning master builder of Azerbaijan, citizen of Israel:
“I am one of the builders of Khojaly. Peaceful and happy people lived here. They were very hospitable and knew no national animosity. They raised their children, dreamed of a good future, built houses, roads, schools, kindergartens and crèches. I would never have thought that something like this could ever happen there.”
Ramin Hasanov, a refugee from Khojaly:
“I spent my childhood there, in Khankendi. We went to kindergarten together with the Russian and Armenian children, then to school, were friends with many children and played various games together. I never thought that in a few years the Armenians would cut us off and kill us. It was such a nice get-together. What a pity…”
Airan Aliyev, a refugee from Khojaly:
“After the capture of our city, the Armenians set up a concentration camp in a pig farm in the village of Darzhaz. It was a camp of death. The prisoners were given nothing to eat… sometimes we were given 50 grams of stale bread every few days. They spat on the bread in front of us and then forced us to eat like dogs.”
Asiya Abdullayeva, a refugee from Armenia:
“Part of Khojaly’s population consists of Azerbaijanis who were expelled from their Armenian homeland. They fled from Armenia, from where they were brutally expelled. And what about the poor Meskhetian Turks, how many countries have they changed? Are they guilty of having found a new homeland? Are they guilty of being born in a different faith and becoming part of Azerbaijan?”
Dourdane Agayeva, cockpit communicator in Khojaly:
“I have no right to remain silent. I survived captivity. What I experienced passed by those who had fled from Khojaly through the forest and managed to escape. They saw the war, but they didn’t see the Armenians. When the war started and Khojaly was blockaded, my brother was fighting in the trenches and I was in the cockpit communicator. Our whole family fought.
The shooting went on every night and we had gotten used to it, but this time it was particularly intense. Even the houses shook. Around half past eleven our neighbor, Aunt Shargiya, together with her daughter Irada, said that the shooting had calmed down and we could go home. However, it turned out to be a tactical ploy by the Armenians to reassure the people. They suddenly launched an offensive to conquer the airfield.
The door opened and the frightened neighbor Uncle Abdullah, whose family was also with us, appeared. ‘What are you still doing here? People are fleeing through the forest! When we came out of the cellar, everything around us was covered in blood: That was the red tracer. It was frightening. We crawled into the forest. As we crawled through the forest, I put all the ammunition I found in a bag so that we wouldn’t be empty-handed when we reached our people… We jumped when we could, and when there was heavy shooting, we crawled through the snow. At that moment, a bullet hit me in the ankle. Now I could no longer run and crawling became difficult. And what happened next… I don’t remember. When I woke up, there was blood everywhere in the bushes and trees, scraps of clothes covered in blood: People must have undressed as they fled to make it easier to move… All around me were countless corpses of children and men… I lost consciousness during the night and woke up in the morning. We crawled to the place from where the Aghdam village of Shelley was about ten minutes’ walk away.
I looked around. The villager Valeh was walking with his wife Saadet. They had recently married and Saadet was pregnant. I saw the bullet go straight into her stomach and then a few more bullets into different parts of her body. Valeh, who hit his head under the gunshots, screamed, ‘Saadet! Saadet!!!’ like a madman…. Saadet was a year younger than me. She was 19 and Valeh was about three years older. I crawled closer and said, ‘Valeh, don’t worry, she’ll be fine’, but he didn’t listen and just repeated, ‘Saadat was killed, she’s gone!”, hitting his head in despair…. I started looking in different directions, but there was no mother, brothers or grandmother. The bullets were flying thick and fast.
I crawled sideways into a pothole I had dug in an attempt to escape from the death fugitives. I looked around and noticed my brother hiding in a small hole. He leaned against the slope. He was covered in blood and his face was smeared with dirt. The bullet had hit him in the right side. Valeh was no longer able to protect his wife’s body and crawled after me into the same furrow. There was also Gamboi, a refugee from Khankendi. He crawled towards us with his 5-year-old son. We lay in a row in the potholes: my brother, me, Valeh and then Gamboi and his son. That’s how we were captured by the Armenians.”
Malahat Huseynova, a resident of Khojaly:
“According to the victims, the Armenian soldiers, who included many Syrians, took my seven-year-old daughter hostage. She had only started school a week earlier. They killed her right in front of my mother, in front of her mother. In Karabakh, the women were not afraid of death. They were afraid of becoming hostages, because these savage thugs abused girls and young women in a cruel way, without fearing God. My other three children were lost. I was wounded and helpless. I lay in the bushes all night until the Azerbaijani guards came for me.”
Suleyman Abbasov, a resident of Khojaly:
“Almost all the men who could hold a weapon in their hands took the first hit from the enemy. But we were powerless against the armored vehicles. Most of the town’s defenders were killed. The rest, including me, retreated and fought on, but the forces were unevenly distributed. I still can’t forget that horrible bloody scene. The bodies of women, children and old people lay in the streets. Houses were burning all around. The wounded were moaning. We stopped and looked around to see if anyone was still alive. And we saw the Armenians, who were just behind us, shooting down the wounded and the armored cars driving along the streets, crushing the bodies of the dead and wounded.”
The refugee Almas Khasiyeva:
“I remember the humanitarian corridor. About a thousand of my compatriots, women and children, were looted/robbed by the Armenian soldiers. The only thing we had was our lives, and they robbed us of that in this ‘free corridor’. They killed our children and grandchildren and shot at us near the village of Nakhichevanik. Everything was taken from us, even our motherland!”
The refugee Rimma Hatileva:
“When I see the butchered bodies of my father, my mother and my relatives in the newsreels of those years, my hatred knows no bounds. What are they guilty of? Where is the justice in the world? So many years have passed, and still the murderers and perpetrators of the Khojaly massacre are not punished!!! Today, people like Serj Sarkissyan (the current president), Seyran Ohanian (former defense minister), Robert Kocharian (former president) and dozens of these government members who are directly involved in the extermination and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis in the mountains of Karabagh, the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, are sitting in the administration of Armenia.
The emergence of a new international legal doctrine, “crimes against humanity”, is intended to serve as a safeguard against the repetition of similar genocides by replacing impunity with institutionalized redistributive justice. The successors of the Armenian fascists Dro and Nzhdeh are the incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan and Minister Seyran Ohanyan, who both carried out a bloody massacre in the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly at the end of the 20th century. There are many photo and video materials as well as testimonies of witnesses of the tragedy that confirm the involvement of the above-mentioned high-ranking officials of the Republic of Armenia in the Khojaly massacre. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide their crimes, some of these people gave interviews to foreign media.
In these interviews, they justified and praised their barbaric crimes against Azerbaijanis in Khojaly. Serzh Sargsyan’s words say it all: ‘Before Khojaly, Azerbaijanis thought that Armenians were people who could not raise their hands against the civilian population. We have succeeded in breaking this stereotype. The bloody act of genocide committed with incredible brutality and barbarity in Khojaly is one of the most horrific tragedies of the late 20th century. The cruel and merciless scenes of this massacre will forever leave a scar in the hearts of Azerbaijanis that will never heal.
This is a pain for innocent Azerbaijanis who had their own history, their families, their childhood, their dreams and their future ended by this bloody massacre by the Armenian forces. The relatives of the victims share a common pain: those who committed this terrible crime against humanity were not prosecuted by an international court and remained unpunished. In contrast to the aftermath of the Second World War, when most of the Nazis were brought before the international court at the Nuremberg Trial, the ideologues and executors of the mass murder of peaceful Azerbaijani citizens in Khojaly live freely in the modern Republic of Armenia.