XOCALI THROUGH THE EYES OF WITNESSES

Russian journalist Viktoria IVLEVA:

Together with the doctors, I was in the second echelon of attackers. A few kilometres from Xocali [Khojaly] we suddenly saw something moving towards us and resembling a cloud in the dark. We heard moans and cries in Azeri and Armenian, obscenities. The "cloud" turned out to be a crowd. Half-dressed people, many children...

"It is Meskhetian Turks, we took them prisoner," said the Armenian soldiers who escorted them.

The last person in the crowd of Turks was a woman with three children. Barefoot in the snow. She barely moved and often fell. It turned out that the youngest of her children was two days old. Two days!

I took the child in my arms and walked together with the Turks. We both smeared our tears - me and this woman. Night, confusion ... Although my clothes carried signs by which those storming distinguished each other, they hit me with a butt and scolded me a couple of times, hurrying me. I knew I was not in danger, but at some point I felt captured. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Source: Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 1992, March

Russian TV reporter Yuriy ROMANOV:

"I look out of the round window of the helicopter and literally shudder from the incredibly horrible picture. On yellow grass foothills, where gray cakes of snow are still melting in the shade and where there are remnants of winter snow, people lie dead. All this vast area close to the horizon is littered with corpses of women, old men and women, boys and girls of all ages, from nursing infants to teenagers ... The eye pulls two figures out of the mash of bodies - a grandmother and a little girl. The grandmother, with a gray head uncovered, is lying face down next to the tiny girl in a blue jacket with a hood. Their legs are connected with barbed wire for some reason, and the grandmother also had her hands tied up. Both are shot in the head. With her last gesture, the small girl, about four years old, reaches out to her dead grandmother. Stunned, I did not even think of the camcorder."

Regular contributor to Vestnik Kavkaza, Petr LYUKIMSON:

"At the end of winter, the 'non-existent' Armenian army launched an offensive in Karabakh and other regions of Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani army was forced to retreat, leaving a number of settlements, including Xocali. The militants celebrated their success in full accordance with their ideas of Christian compassion - hundreds of people were slaughtered during the day, and cut off women's breasts served as trophies.

The surviving witnesses said that before the eyes of a four-year-old Azerbaijani girl, her mother and sisters were raped and shot, and then the winners stood in line to rape her too. When it was over, the girl was also shot.

No one even bothered to bury the corpses of Xocali residents to conceal this monstrous crime - their bodies were simply scattered on the mountains, and from a bird's eye view journalists saw a terrible, truly surreal picture. The Armenians were quick to say that all these bodies are a "product" (great word, isn't it?) of the exchange of the dead between the two opposing sides."

Source: Petr Lyukimson, "Courier" (Israel), 1992, June, № 28-32

French journalist Jean-Yves JUNET:

"... We witnessed the Xocali tragedy and saw the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians - women, children, old people and defenders of Xocali. We were provided with a helicopter, we filmed everything we saw around Xocali from above. However, the Armenians started firing at our helicopter and we could not finish filming. This is a terrible picture. I've heard a lot about wars and the cruelty of the German fascists, but Armenians surpassed them by killing 5-6 year-old children and civilians. We saw many wounded people in hospitals, in carriages, even at kindergartens and schools."

British Front Line News journalist Rory PATRICK:

"The crime in Xocali cannot be justified in the eyes of the world community.

... Not far from the Armenian village of Naxcivanik where journalists were transferred by helicopter with difficulty, I saw dozens of mutilated corpses. These were not defenders of Xocali, but civilian residents of the Azerbaijani town - children, women and old men shot by killers point-blank as they tried to make their way to Agdam under massive fire from Armenian armed formations."

Source: Vyshka, 5 March 1992

A journalist from the UK Anatol LIEVEN:

"... The civilian helicopter took four corpses. This time, as in the previous flights to this area, the Azerbaijani operator filmed the bodies of several hundred dead people lying along the hills. Then we hurried back to the Azerbaijani side ... When we returned to Agdam, we looked at the dead bodies once again: it was two old men and a little girl covered in blood. Their bodies were twisted from the cold and rigor mortis. They had been shot and killed."

British journalist Helen WOMACK:

The exact number of victims is still unclear, but there can be little doubt that Azerbaijani civilians were massacred by the Armenian army in the snowy mountains of Nagornyy Karabakh.

Yesterday I saw 75 freshly dug graves in one cemetery in addition to four mutilated corpses we were shown in the mosque when we arrived in Agdam.  I also saw women and children with bullet wounds, in a makeshift hospital in a string of railway carriages at the station, from Xocali, an Azerbaijani town with a population of 6,000 people.

Rasid Mammadov, chief of Agdam police, reported that about 500 people sought refuge in his city. And where are the others? "Some were probably captured or escaped," he said. Many of the bodies are still lying in the mountains, as Azerbaijanis do not have enough helicopters to search for them. He suggests that more than 1,000 people were killed, some from the frost that reaches 10 degrees below zero.

When Azerbaijanis saw armed Armenians moving in a convoy of trucks, they realized that they could not defend themselves and tried to escape in the woods. Soon the mass extermination of refugees began.

Source: Age (Melbourne), 1992, 6 March

American journalist Thomas GOLTZ:

Surviving Azerbaijanis say that the Armenian military shot and bayoneted more than 459 Azerbaijanis, many of whom were women and children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were missing or feared dead. The attackers killed most of the soldiers and volunteers defending the women and children. Then they turned their guns on the terrified civilians. One of the boys who arrived in Agdam had an ear sliced off. The survivors said 2,000 others, some of whom had fled separately, were still missing; manu could perish from their wounds or the cold. 

Source: Sunday Times, 1992, 1 March