DAYS OF SORROW
Pakistani DNA news agency`s website and Centreline magazine issue article on Khojaly genocide
![Pakistani DNA news agency`s website and Centreline magazine issue article on Khojaly genocide](/files/2013/1/1200x630/1407144563574553332_1200x630.jpg)
Baku, February 26 (AZERTAC). The Pakistani DNA news agency`s website and Centreline magazine have issued an article titled “The Crime in Khojaly: Perpetrators Should be brought to book”.
The article reads: “At the end of 1987, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia openly laid claim to the territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. Contrary to the Constitution of the USSR, which guaranteed the territorial integrity and inviolability of borders of the Union Republics, both the Armenian SSR and members of the Armenian community of the NKAO adopted a number of decisions to institute the process of unilateral secession of the autonomous region from Azerbaijan.
The logical consequence of the territorial claims against Azerbaijan was the occupation in 1992-1993 of a significant part of its territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts. The war led to the deaths and wounding of thousands of people; hundreds of thousands became refugees and were forcibly displaced and several thousand disappeared without trace.
The capture of Khojaly was particularly tragic. Before the conflict, 7,000 people lived in this town of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan inhabited by the Azerbaijanis. From October 1991, the town was entirely surrounded by the Armenian forces. Over the night from the 25th and 26th of February 1992, following massive artillery bombardment of Khojaly, the assault on the town began from various directions. The infantry regiment of the former Soviet army stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh, participated directly in the capture of Khojaly by the Armenian armed units. The attack and capture of the town involved the extermination of hundreds of Azerbaijanis, including women, children and the elderly with medieval brutality, and thousands of civilians were wounded and taken hostage, many of whom remain missing, while the town was razed to the ground.
The Armenian author Markar Melkonian, who dedicated his book to his brother — Monte Melkonian, who personally took part in the assault on Khojaly, describes in detail how Armenian soldiers butchered the peaceful inhabitants of this town. Thus, as he puts it, “some inhabitants of Khojalyi had almost made it to safety, after fleeing for nearly six miles, when “[Armenian] soldiers had chased them down”. The soldiers, in his words, “unsheathed the knives they had carried on their hips for so long, and began stabbing”.
It should be particularly noted that the Khojaly events took place in a period when the incumbent president Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia served as head of the illegal separatist regime’s “Self-Defence Forces Committee” and, accordingly, his recollections constitute one of the most important sources of evidence.
The following words by Serzh Sargsyan leave no doubts as to the question of the perpetrator of the crimes in Khojaly: “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…”.
In its judgment of 22 April 2010, the European Court of Human Rights qualified the massacre of the Azerbaijani civilian population of the Khojaly town as “acts of particular gravity which may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity”.
Given the gravity of the crime committed against the Azerbaijani civilian population in Khojaly, the question, however, is whether there is a clear evidence of the commission of genocide, as that term has been defined in international law. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which both Armenia and Azerbaijan are parties.”
The full text of the article is available at
http://dnanews.com.pk/the-crime-in-khojaly-perpetrators-should-be-brought-to-book/.