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,” a refugee woman, Raisa 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. Now, the only sound was the wind whistling through dry grass, a wind that was too early yet to blow away the stench of corpses.
Monte crunched over the grass where women and girls lay scattered like broken dolls. “No discipline”, he muttered. He knew the significance of the day’s date: it was the run-up to the fourth anniversary of the anti-Armenian pogrom in the city of Sumgait. Khojalu had been a strategic goal, but it had also been an act of revenge.
In his book “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war”, the British journalist Thomas de Waal makes references to words of the Armenian militaries. Thus, “[a]n Armenian police officer, Major Valery Babayan, suggested revenge as a motive. He told the American reporter Paul Quinn-Judge that many of the fighters who had taken part in the Khojaly attack “originally came from Sumgait and places like that”. But the most important was that the recently elected President of Armenia Serzh Sarkisian said of what had had happened: 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.
As Thomas de Waal sums up, “Sarkisian’s account throws a different light on the worst massacre of the Karabakh war, suggesting that the killings may, at least in part, have been a deliberate act o mass killing as intimidation”.
The facts mentioned above confirm that the intentional slaughter of the Khojaly town civilians on 25-26 February 1992, including children, elderly and women, was directed to their mass extermination only because they were Azerbaijanis. The Khojaly town was chosen as a stage for further occupation and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijani territories, striking terror into the hearts of people and creating panic and fear before the horrifying massacre.
In May 1992, Shusha, the Azerbaijani-populated administrative centre of the region within Nagorno-Karabakh, and Lachyn, the region situated between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, were occupied. In 1993, the armed forces of Armenia captured another six regions of Azerbaijan around Nagorno-Karabakh: Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadly and Zangilan.
Contrary to the numerous statements of the official Yerevan that Armenia is not directly involved into the conflict with Azerbaijan, there are indisputable proofs, which testify against such allegations and argue for the direct military aggression of the Republic of Armenia against a sovereign state.
There are ample evidences proving participation of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia in the hostile actions against Azerbaijan. Since, the scope of this report prevents from providing complete list of available evidences, below are just a few well-documented facts of direct military actions of Armenia.
Thus, in January 1994 the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan defeated the sub-divisions of the separate motor-rifle regiment â„–. 555 (Army unit No. 59016) of the Republic of Armenia in the combat and captured several Armenian soldiers. According to the documents seized in the wake of the combat operation, one of the units of this regiment made a dash in April 1993 from the town of Vardenis in the Republic of Armenia to the Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan with the purpose of backing-up the group of Armenia’s occupation forces in this part of Azerbaijan.
Among the trophy captured during the combat operations in the Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan there were combat maps with battle-orders addressed to the commander of the separate motor-rifle regiment â„– 555 and to the head of the operational group, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia, lieutenant-general G.Andresian, as well as working combat maps of the officers of the 3rd motor-rifle battalion of the 3rd separate motor-rifle brigade of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia. These maps are marked on with hand-written decision to launch an assault and seize the Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan on 1 April 1993. The Azerbaijani troops seized also many personal documents of the citizens of the Republic of Armenia drafted into the military and sent to Azerbaijan to participate in the combat operations. Among them are national passports, military ID’s issued by the different drafting bodies of the Republic of Armenia (“military commissariats”), call-up papers for joining military service and participation in the military musters issued by drafting bodies of the different districts of the Republic of Armenia, official ID’s of the employees of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, special contracts for the service in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia, travel warrants, petitions for conferring military ranks, drafting warrants, leave warrants and vocation passes. In 1992-1994, Armenian Armed Forces occupied administrative districts of the Republic of Azerbaijan as follows:
May,1992– the Shusha district;
May, 1992 – the Lachyn district situated between the former NKAO and the Republic of Armenia;
April, 1993 – the Kalbajar district (between the former NKAO and Armenia, to the north of Lachyn);
July, 1993 – the Aghdam district;
August, 1993 – the Fuzuli district;
August, 1993 – the Jabrayil district;
August, 1993 – the Gubadly district;
October, 1993 – the Zangilan district.
Gulara - 01:23, 26/07/2009 - 0 คำตอบ
