Khojaly Massacre

The Khojaly Massacre was the killing of hundreds of ethnic Azerbaijani civilians by Armenians from the town of Khojaly on 25 February 1992 during the Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Sourced

• About 1,000 of Khojaly`s 10,000 people were massacred by the Armenian Army in Tuesdays attack. Azerbaijani television showed truckloads of corpses being evacuated from the Khocaly area.
  • Washington Times. — 2 March 1992

• Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women’s arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.
  • Anatol Lieven. Bodies Mark Site of Karabagh Massacre. // The Times, London, 3 March 1992.

• At about 11:00 p.m. the night before, some 2,000 Armenian fighters had advanced through the high grass on three sides of Khojalu, forcing the residents out through the open side to the east. By the morning of February 26, the refugees had made it to the eastern cusp of Mountainous Karabagh and had begun working their way downhill, toward safety in the Azeri city of Agdam, about six miles away. There, in the hillocks and within sight of safety, Mountainous Karabagh soldiers had chased them down. "They just shot and shot and shot, " a refugee woman, Raisha Aslanova, testified to a Human Rights Watch investigator. The Arabo fighters had then unsheathed the knives they had carried on their hips for so long, and began stabbing.
  • Markar Melkonian. My Brother’s Road: An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia. Pages 213—214. I. B. Tauris, London, 2005 ISBN 1-85043-635-5.

• 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.
  • Current president of Armenia and 1992 war lord Serzh Sarkisian's interview (Thomas de Waal, "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war", New York & London: New York University Press, 2003, pp. 169-172)

• The event in Khojaly was organized by the political opponents to force my resignation. I found it doubtful that the Armenians would have allowed the Azerbaijanis to collect the bodies had the allegations of a massacre been true.
  • Ayaz Mutallibov, Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh

• The city and its inhabitants were deliberately sacrificed to the political goal – to prevent the People Front of Azerbaijan from coming to power.
  • Arif Yunusov, Azerbaijani human rights advocate. Azerbaijani newspaper “Zerkalo”, July 1992

• I am well aware of who had the Khojaly tragedy on their conscience. And it was not the Armenian side.
  • Yakup Mammadov, chairman of the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan. Newspaper “Ogonjok”, N 14-15, 1992

• The tragedy was realized by the authorities of Azerbaijan, and concretely – somebody of those high standing.
  • Tamerlan Karaev, former Chairman of the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan. Newspaper “Moukhalifat”, April 28, 1992

• January events of 1990 in Baku and events in Khojalu were the handwork of the same people.
  • Vagif Huseynov, former Minister of National Security of Azerbaijan. V. B. Haruthunyan, Events in Nagorno-Karabakh, Chronics, part 4, Yerevan, 1994, p. 120

• In reality, the Khojali tragedy is one of the greatest human atrocities of the 20th century. Every effort must be made to seek the world community's unbiased and resolute position regarding this genocide.
  • Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan International (7.1) Spring 1999.