(MENAFN- AzerNews) By Aisha Jabbarova
Introduction
The killing of around 700 civilians in an Azerbaijani town of Khojaly over a night during the onslaught of Armenian troops in 1992 marks the bloodiest page in the Nagorn-Karabakh war. The event, which is referred to as Khojaly massacre or Khojaly genocide in Azerbaijan, was a turning point in the Nagonyy 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 took control of Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan proper, which together amounted to 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.
Many believe that the numbers of Khojaly massacre victims were too insignificant to account for genocide. However, others view Khojaly as genocide because it was intentionally carried out by Armenia for strategic purposes. It should be noted that there is no consensus within the UN as to how many deaths equal genocide and little consensus exists even today as to what constitutes genocide.
This paper will analyze Khojaly massacre to see if it fits the genocide category in line with the Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which cites intentional killing members of a group in whole or in part as genocide. It will also look at how Gregor H. Stanton's ten steps of genocide - classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial to apply them in the context of Khojaly massacre.
The paper also looks at the geopolitics of the region and ethnic tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia to help readers make sense of the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict, which is a ticking bomb in the South Caucasus region.
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict
The conflict over Azerbaijan's Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh) region flared up with the rise of ethno nationalism in late 1980s when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. Armenians, who were already amounting to 75 per cent of the Karabakh population by late 1980s, started voicing support for Karabakh's cessation from Azerbaijan in 1988. Things took a violent turn after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1991. 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. (Herzig, 1999) Nagorno-Karabakh region does not have a border with Armenia and seven Azerbaijani-populated districts outside of it that share border with Armenia were also occupied during the war.
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 on both sides. And today, 25 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 USA) that has been mediating the conflict since 1994, there is no prospect of peace between the two Caucasus neighbors. 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. Azerbaijan also accuses former Armenian President and Defence Minister of being war criminals for their involvement in the Nagorno-Karabakh war and in military operations in Khojaly, and the massacre has become one of focal points in Baku's policies towards Armenia. Yerevan has denied its involvement in the massacre. However, the former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan who participated in the military operations in the Karabah war has inadvertently admitted that the massacre was carried out by Armenians and intentionally at that.
Genocide
Khojaly massacre was a planned, systematic extermination of civilians that fits Raphael Lemkin's (1943 or 1944) definition of genocide, the word that he coined by putting together Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin word cide (killing). 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. ( http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html )
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 Khojali, 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. And we should also take into account that amongst those boys were people who had fled from Baku and Sumgait. (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 and 'an act of revenge 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)
By revenge Markarian, meant that Khojaly massacre coincided with the run-up to the anniversary of Armenian pogrom in Azerbaijan's Sumgayit city that took place in February 1988. Twenty-six Armenians as well as six Azerbaijanis were killed during the Sumgayit pogroms that were known to be the worst inter-racial incident in the territory of the Soviet Union. It is worth mentioning that the pogroms in Sumgayit were incited by the killing of two Azerbaijanis in Asgaran town in Nagorno-Karabakh and the mass expulsions of Azerbaijanis from Armenia that was taking place in 1988. It should be mentioned that one of the convicts in controversial Sumgayit case was an Armenian national Eduard Grigoryan whom the victims recognized as an attacker.
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-Karabkah 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 ultimatum by the Armenians get out or die. (Goltz, 1999).
Journalists who were given a temporary access to Khojaly by Armenians, captured the scene of the carnage in a video footage that was later aired in the national TV. The footages shows 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. ( http://justiceforkhojaly.org/content/how-it-happened-0 )
The international community, however, was skeptical about Khojaly. How could Armenians commit atrocities? Could survivors of genocide commit genocide? It took several days even for major news organizations, such as BBC to report the story. The global news reports about Khojaly gave tentative description of the massacre, using the expressions such as the reported or alleged massacre. American journalist and writer Thomas Goltz who was in Karabakh during the incident, has described the difficulties he faced to get his report on Khojaly published in the Western media. He also described how the media organizations were requesting him to give a 'more balanced report that would include the non-existent Armenian casualties. (Goltz, 1999).
By contrast, reports coming from Armenia were being published and reported without much skepticism. Seems the international community trusts Armenians in word, while Azerbaijanis have to go out of their way to prove their point. But to be fair, the Azerbaijani government was also to be blamed, since they delayed the confirmation of the casualties fearing the public outrage and the loss of the power.
Classification and land claim
There are two key factors that were precursor to Khojaly massacre territorial claims and racial hatred. Armenians claims that they have lived in the region for thousands of years and must conquer back their ancient homeland. For this reason, a large number of Armenians do not see a problem expelling or even killing Azerbaijani civilians. It is worth mentioning that 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 against whom they had grievances due to the events that unfolded in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1920. The underlying tension and hatred for Turkic Azerbaijanis reached its peak in 1918 when Armenian Dashank militias, 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)
Classification of Azerbaijanis as 'Turks persisted even during the 70 years under the Soviet rule (between 1920 and 1990) when the two nations were peacefully co-existing. Armenians perceived Azerbaijanis as the Turks due to Azerbaijan's ethnic and language closeness to Turkey. It is a common knowledge that Armenians were referring to Azerbaijanis as Turks and to the Azerbaijani language as the Turkish language. This is in stark contrast to Azerbaijanis who have shorter memory. With the exception of few people, during the Soviet period, Azerbaijanis were not vocal or in some cases unaware of their Turkic heritage and did not believe in the Armenian-Azerbaijani enmity until the war in Nagoro-Karabakha broke out in early 1990s.
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 is 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." ( https://news.az/articles/armenia/41254 )
Since the end of the war in 1994, Azerbaijan has been trying to achieve Khojaly's recognition as genocide and so far five countries and eight US states have recognized Khojaly as genocide. The massacre embodies Azerbaijani people's helplessness during the war and their humiliating military defeat and is fostering the feelings of revanchism in the society.
Conclusion
In conclusion, 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.
Although the number of victims was relatively small, the UN convention on genocide proposed by Lemkin, has not established how many deaths amount to genocide and therefore the author relies on the intentional character of the massacre rather than the number of victims and concludes that the killings in Khojaly amount to genocide.
The magnitude of genocide should not be judged by the number of victims, but rather by the nature of the massacre and by the motivation of the perpetrators. 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 and this should set an example for both Armenia and Azerbaijan that are locked in a conflict that will probably drag on for many more years.
Bibliography:
Books
1. De Waal, T. (2003) Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war. New York University Press.
2. De Waal, T. (2010). The Caucasus: An Introduction (p. 62). Oxford University Press.
3. Goltz, T. (1999). Azerbaijan Diary: A rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic. Armonk, New York, London, England: M. E. Sharpe
4. Melkonian, M. (2005). My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia. New York: I.B. Tauris
5. Herzig, E. (1999). The New Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs.
6. E.Kanet, R. (2007). Russia Re-Emerging Great Power. Palgrave Macmillian
7. Hasanli, J. (2016). Foreign Policy of the Republic of Azerbaijan: The Difficult Road to Western Integration, 1918-1920 (Studies of Central Asia and the Caucasus). Routledge.
Web resources
1. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
2. http://genocidewatch.org
3. http://justiceforkhojaly.org/content/how-it-happened-0
4. http://genocidewatch.org/genocide/tenstagesofgenocide.html
5. http://old.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/karabah/Hojaly/index.htm - Report of Memorial Human Right Center
6. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-11108059
7. http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65055
8. https://www.azatutyun.am/a/1570666.html
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