NKR MFA: Baku tries to distract attention from Armenian massacre in Sumgait

February 15, 2012 - 10:27 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Khojalu population became hostage of Baku authorities’ dirty tricks who turned this tragedy into speculative political capital, the Foreign Ministry of Nagorno Karabakh Republic said, commenting on the discussion of Khojalu issue in OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

“Baku is trying to present the betrayal of Khojalu population by Azerbaijan’s authorities as the Armenians’ revenge for the bloody carnage in Sumgait. Meanwhile, the propaganda is carried out with obvious insinuation and escalation of ethnic intolerance and enmity towards Armenians. Regularly playing on Khojalu, the official Baku is trying to distract the attention of the international community from the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, Khanlar and other Azerbaijani settlements the whole territory of which saw in fact barefaced extermination of Armenians. The same happened also in frontier regions of Karabakh, in particular, in the village of Maragha where intervention of Azerbaijan's regular army perpetrated a bloody massacre of about 100 locals in April 1992,” says the statement disseminated by the press service of NKR Foreign Ministry.

Earlier, representative of Azerbaijan in OSCE PA voiced Azerbaijani delegation’s readiness to raise the issue of the alleged “Khojalu massacre” during Assembly’s winter session.

Military operation in Khojalu

The events in Khojalu, which led to the deaths of civilians, were the result solely of political intrigues and power struggle in Azerbaijan. The real reasons are most convincingly reflected in the accounts of Azerbaijanis themselves — as participants in and eyewitnesses of what happened — as well as of those who know the whole inside story of the events in Baku. Khojalu, along with Shushi and Agdam, was one of the main strongholds from which Stepanakert, the capital of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, was shelled continuously and mercilessly for the three winter months of 1991/92 with artillery, missiles and launchers used for targeting cities. Knocking out the weapon emplacements in Khojalu and thus freeing the airport were the only way for the Nagorno Karabakh Republic to ensure the physical survival of its population condemned by Azerbaijan to complete annihilation. The daily shelling of Stepanakert from nearby Khojalu took the lives of hundreds of peaceful inhabitants — women, children and old people.

Then-President of Azerbaijan, Ayaz Mutalibov, has stated that “the assault on Khojaly was not a surprise attack”. In an interview in 1992 with the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta he emphasized that “a corridor was kept open by the Armenians for people to leave”. However, a column of civilians was fired on by armed units of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan on the approaches to the Agdam district border, a fact later confirmed by Ayaz Mutalibov, who linked this criminal act to attempts by the opposition to remove him from power, and blamed it entirely for what happened. In his interview with the Russian magazine, Novoye Vremya, Mutalibov stated that “the shooting of the Khojalu residents was obviously organized by someone to take control in Azerbaijan”.

According to Azerbaijani journalist M. Safarogly, “Khojalu occupied an important strategic position. The loss of Khojalu was a political fiasco for Mutalibov”.

Furthermore, there is a statement by an Azerbaijani journalist, Arif Yunusov, which clearly states: “The town and its inhabitants were deliberately sacrificed for a political purpose — to prevent the Popular Front of Azerbaijan from coming to power”. In this case, though, the Azerbaijanis themselves are named as the perpetrators of the tragedy.

It is already obvious for everybody that the «genocide» of Azerbaijanis in Khojalu is a myth created still by Heydar Aliyev and taken up by his throne-successor, Aliyev-junior, in order to draw the international community's attention away from the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, and many other populated-by-Armenians settlements, as well as to conceal the political, humanitarian, military, economic, and other penal offences of the Azerbaijani leadership against Armenian civilians and against its own people.