A TRAGEDY NOT YET HISTORY

History does not say when people first settled here - all we know is from a Stone Age settlement discovered nearby by archaeologists. This was a crossroads in history, eventful and troubled, witnessing the rise and fall of many empires and dozens of declared and undeclared wars.

The town does not exist any more. Only figures remain: 613 killed, 487 disabled, 1,275 taken hostage and 150 still missing. Among those killed were 106 women and 83 children. Several families were totally wiped out. And this happened on 26 February 1992.

Today, the annihilation of Xocali is compared with the tragedies in Guernica, Katyn and Lidice. A decision of the US Congress declared the destruction of Xocali to be the greatest tragedy of 1992. The world could not believe that such brutality could exist on the threshold of the third millennium, when the population of an entire town, not just men, but also women, children and old people, was exterminated in cold blood…

Initially, Armenian strategists did not try to disguise the fact that they had planned this "operation" in advance. Indeed, Xocali occupied an extremely important strategic position: an airport, highway… It was from here that Armenian "strategists" claimed some Azerbaijanis had fired on Stepanakert from installations for Alazan meteorological rockets (they remained silent about Susa being fired upon with real, Grad missiles, and Russian television even showed pictures of houses burning in Susa to illustrate its "horror stories" about air strikes on Xankandi).

But the situation changed later, because the world found out about how the town of Xocali was destroyed and the terrible fate of its residents. Their only guilt was that they had lived on land claimed by Armenian expansionists.

There was no dramatic street fighting here. Xocali was not an "unassailable fortified castle" and was attacked only by the armoured hardware of the 336th motorized infantry regiment - tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

V. Savelyev, the counter-intelligence chief of a Russian military unit which took part in the attack on Xocali, acknowledged later: "I could not but write about all that. I cannot forget the dead bodies of people: children and women, pregnant women and brides. Let the Azerbaijanis forgive me for not being able to do anything about all these events with such a bloody and merciless outcome. I just sent a secret note to the Kremlin and the generals of the Main Intelligence Department of the Soviet Defence Ministry. Read it, I said. See how we discredited the honour of a Russian officer" (from the book "The Secret Note").

But the most terrible event took place later - when they started shooting people in cold blood outside the town. Perhaps we need to digress from the subject a little here. According to international humanitarian law, when seizing populated areas during hostilities, a corridor should be established, through which the civilian population can leave the town. In the same way, civilians are informed about a pending attack in advance - remember that before launching air strikes on Afghanistan, the US air force dropped radio receivers, which were used to notify the civilian population.

When the world community focused its attention on the Xocali tragedy, Armenian representatives had to answer inconvenient questions - did you open a corridor for the evacuation of the civilian population? They claimed that they had opened a corridor and notified the population of Xocali. But there were different versions about how this was done. First, Xankandi assured representatives of Memorial that they had dropped fliers on the town, but could not show any. Nor did refugees know anything about the fliers. Then they came up with another version: the population was notified through loudspeakers installed on armoured personnel carriers. Whether it was possible to hear this "notification" in the rumbling of the fighting is a moot point, especially as no-one had heard these announcements. The simplest way to find your bearings on that February evening was to run to where there was no shooting. No-one was shooting on the eastern outskirts of the town, where you would logically head for to get to Agdam, the nearest Azerbaijani district centre.

It was just here that a correspondent of Moskovskiye Novosti, Viktoria Ivleva, noticed something that "looked like a cloud". She wrote this in her report, admitting that she was travelling with the second echelon of attackers. This is was a crowd of half-naked people who rushed outside on hearing the sounds of fighting. "In the last group of Azerbaijanis, there was a woman with three children. She was walking barefoot on the snow. She could hardly move and often fell over. It seemed that the youngest of her children was only two days old."

They still had to make it to Agdam, and this was quite a long way to go though a territory controlled by Armenian militants, through the woods and mountains, in winter, through the snow and frost… There were wounded and elderly people, and women with children in the crowd.

Here comes the most terrible moment, because this corridor was actually a trap stretching for miles: Armenian riflemen chased and ambushed people in cold blood. The crowd of refugees first came under fire near the village of Katuk, following established military technique - from three sides. Several hundred people were killed or taken prisoner, but this was not yet the end of the tragedy. The nadir was reached near the village of Naxcivanik. People arrived there at dawn. That was where they emerged from the woods. That was where the main carnage began: women, children and old people were shot carefully and cold-bloodedly by armoured personnel carriers, machine guns and assault rifles. And then they were finished off.

The next ambush was mounted near the villages of Gulabli and Selli.

Then Cingiz Mustafayev's film, made near the village of Naxcivanik, was shown throughout the world. Mustafayev himself said:

"We first arrived at the site of the killings on two military helicopters on 28 February. From the air, we saw an area of about 500 metres which was almost totally covered by dead bodies. The pilots were afraid to land because the territory was controlled by Armenian militants. But when we landed and got off the helicopter, shooting started. The policemen who accompanied us had to load the bodies to take them to their relatives. They managed to load only four bodies onto the helicopter. And we were all really shocked. Two guys fainted on seeing such a huge number of dead and mutilated people. Many were sick… The same thing happened on 2 March when we arrived together with foreign journalists. Many bodies were even more mutilated. They had been desecrated for several days…"

Yuriy Romanov, a Russian military cameraman, described the horrific picture in his book later: "I look through the round porthole and literally start at the indescribably terrible picture. On the yellow grass of the foothill, where grey cakes of snow are still melting and where there are the remnants of winter snowdrifts, dead people lie. The whole huge area towards the near horizon is covered with the bodies of women, old men, old women, and boys and girls of all ages from baby to teenager… Two figures catch the eye - of a grandmother and a little girl. The grandmother with grey, uncovered head lies with her face to the ground near a little girl in a blue coat with a hood. Their legs are tied with barbed wire for some reason, and the grandmother also has her hands tied. Both were shot in the head. As a last gesture, the little four-year-old girl extends her hand to her dead grandmother."

Peter Lukimson, an Israeli journalist, wrote in the Courier newspaper: "No-one even bothered to bury the bodies of Xocali residents in order to hide this monstrous crime - their bodies were simply scattered all over the place in the mountains, and from a bird's eye view, journalists saw a terrible picture, a really surrealistic picture."

This monstrous massacre had no military purpose. But there was a different purpose - a political one. Xocali was a brutal and well-calculated action of deterrence.

The well-known British journalist, Thomas de Waal, wrote in his book "The Black Garden" about the amazingly cynical and brazen interview by the current prime minister of Armenia, Serzh Sarkisyan: "Before Xocali, Azerbaijanis thought that they could joke with us, they thought that Armenians would not be able to raise their hand against the civilian population. We managed to break this (stereotype)."

According to de Waal, "Sarkisyan's assessment compels us to cast a different eye on the bloodiest carnage of the Karabakh war. It cannot be ruled out that these mass killings were, although partly, a deliberate act of deterrence."

But there is no doubt that the 366th regiment had a score to settle as well. The official version is that the regiment was so demoralized that the soldiers were simply "rented out" together with their weapons and hardware to local Armenian bosses. This is true, of course. But alas, this is not the whole truth. It must be remembered that decisions were being made in those days as to whether the former allied republics, which had become independent, would be setting up their own armed forces or whether they would be relying on some "armed force of the CIS", i.e. the same Soviet army, but under a different name. Amid these disputes, the complicity of the 366th regiment in the Xocali massacre was to convince Azerbaijan that first, its own armed forces, established, or to be more precise, restored in October 1991, were not able to defend its own citizens, and second, Moscow was no joke. The most important point is that they were sure that by carrying out the massacre of Xocali on the anniversary of the Sumqayit provocation, they would secure some indulgence for themselves: the world would recognize the right of "the long-suffering Armenians" to exact "revenge for Sumqayit", including on that little girl in a blue coat with a hood, her grandmother and the youngest child of the woman that Viktoria Ivleva saw in the crowd of refugees…

But the tragedy of Xocali turned out to be a watershed, after which the world realized: here in the South Caucasus, not everything fits with the image of "self-determination". The French journalist Jean-Yves Younet acknowledged: "…We all witnessed the Xocali tragedy; we saw the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians - women, children, old people and defenders of Xocali. We were given a helicopter and we filmed from above everything we saw around Xocali. However, the Armenians started firing at our helicopter, and we could not finish filming. This is a terrible picture. I have heard a lot about wars and about the brutality of German fascists, but the Armenians surpassed them by killing five or six-year-old children and civilians. We saw many wounded people in hospitals and carriages, even in kindergartens and schools."

Rory Peck, a journalist from the British TV company Frontline Television News, passed his own verdict: "The evil deed in Xocali cannot be justified in any way in the eyes of the world community."

His countryman Anatol Lieven wrote: "When we arrived on the snow-covered hills of Nagornyy Karabakh, we saw corpses all over the place. It is absolutely clear that these were refugees who were killed as they escaped."

V. Belykh, a correspondent with Izvestiya, said: "From time to time, they bring the bodies of their dead exchanged for living hostages. But you would not see something like this in a nightmare: eyes put out, ears cut off, scalps taken and heads chopped off… There is no limit to the torture."

But perhaps, the most terrible outcome of the Xocali tragedy is something different. None of the culprits who destroyed this town and its residents has been held to account. "Fat cats" like Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sarkisyan have made good political careers in Armenia, reaching the highest positions in the state. The military personnel of that same 366th regiment also escaped responsibility. The question of holding the culprits to account is not even raised in the talks brokered by the Minsk Group.

Ogonek magazine journalists took a long time to get over the shock of arriving to "make a report" in Xankandi when one of their guides showed them a house in Xocali, where refurbishment was about to be completed and where he was planning to move. The journalists could not understand how that person could live in a house where he had recently used a gun, fired and killed…

This is what it is like in reality - Armenian-style "self-determination".