From: F. H. Miandoab <farid@mem.odu.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: A grusome tale of Murder. [sci-poster]
Date: 17 Nov 1992 07:40:47 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA
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Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
Status: RO

"PAINFUL SEARCH ..."

THE GRUESOME extent of February's killings of Azeris by Armenians
in the town of Hojali is at last emerging in Azerbaijan - about
600 men, women and children dead in the worst outrage of the
four-year war over Nagorny Karabakh.

The figure is drawn from Azeri investigators, Hojali officials
and casualty lists published in the Baku press. Diplomats and aid
workers say the death toll is in line with their own estimates.

The 25 February attack on Hojali by Armenian forces was one of
the last moves in their four-year campaign to take full control
of Nagorny Karabakh, the subject of a new round of negotiations
in Rome on Monday. The bloodshed was something between a fighting
retreat and a massacre, but investigators say that most of the
dead were civilians. The awful number of people killed was first
suppressed by the fearful former Communist government in Baku.
Later it was blurred by Armenian denials and grief-stricken
Azerbaijan's wild and contradictory allegations of up to 2,000
dead.

The State Prosecuter, Aydin Rasulov, the cheif investigator of a
15-man team looking into what Azerbaijan calls the "Hojali
Disaster", said his figure of 600 people dead was a minimum on
preliminary findings. A similar estimate was given by Elman
Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali. An even higher one was printed in
the Baku newspaper Ordu in May - 479 dead people named and more
than 200 bodies reported unidentified. This figure of nearly 700
dead is quoted as official by Leila Yunusova, the new spokeswoman
of the Azeri Ministry of Defence.

FranCois Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the International
Red Cross in Baku, said the Muslim imam of the nearby city of
Agdam had reported a figure of 580 bodies received at his mosque
bodies. But the figure seems reasonable. It is no fantasy," Mr
Zen Ruffinen said. "We have some idea since we gave the body bags
and products to wash the dead."

Mr Rasulov endeavours to give an unemotional estimate of the
number of dead in the massacre. "Don't get worked up. It will
take several months to get a final figure," the 43-year-old
lawyer said at his small office.

Mr Rasulov knows about these things. It took him two years to
reach a firm conclusion that 131 people were killed and 714
wounded when Soviet troops and tanks crushed a nationalist
uprising in Baku in January 1990.

Those nationalists, the Popular Front, finally came to power
three weeks ago and are applying pressure to find out exactly
what happened when Hojali, an Azeri town which lies about 70
miles from the border with Armenia, fell to the Armenians.

Officially, 184 people have so far been certified as dead, being
the number of people that could be medically examined by the
republic's forensic department. "This is just a small percentage
of the dead," said Rafiq Youssifov, the republic's chief forensic
scientist. "They were the only bodies brought to us. Remember the
chaos and the fact that we are Muslims and have to wash and bury
our dead within 24 hours."

Of these 184 people, 51 were women, and 13 were children under 14
years old. Gunshots killed 151 people, shrapnel killed 20 and
axes or blunt instruments killed 10. Exposure in the highland
snows killed the last three. Thirty-three people showed signs of
deliberate mutilation, including ears, noses, breasts or penises
cut off and eyes gouged out, according to Professor Youssifov's
report. Those 184 bodies examined were less than a third of those
believed to have been killed, Mr Rasulov said.

Files from Mr Rasulov's investigative commission are still
disorganised - lists of 44 Azeri militiamen are dead here, six
policemen there, and in handwriting of a mosque attendant, the
names of 111 corpses brought to be washed in just one day. The
most heartbreaking account from 850 witnesses interviewed so far
comes from Towfiq Manafov, an Azeri investigator who took a
helicopter flight over the escape route from Hojali on 27
February.

"There were too many bodies of dead and wounded on the ground to
count properly: 470-500 in Hojali, 650-700 people by the stream
and the road and 85-100 visible around Nakhchivanik village," Mr
Manafov wrote in a statement countersigned by the helicopter
pilot.

"People waved up to us for help. We saw three dead children and
one two-year-old alive by one dead woman. The live one was
pulling at her arm for the mother to get up. We tried to land but
Armenians started a barrage against our helicopter and we had to
return."

There has been no consolidation of the lists and figures in
circulation because of the political upheavals of the last few
months and the fact that nobody knows exactly who was in Hojali
at the time - many inhabitants were displaced from other villages
taken over by Armenian forces.

THE INDEPENDENT, London, 12/6/'92

HEROES WHO FOUGHT ON AMID THE BODIES

AREF SADIKOV sat quietly in the shade of a cafe-bar on the
Caspian Sea esplanade of Baku and showed a line of stitches in
his trousers, torn by an Armenian bullet as he fled the town of
Hojali just over three months ago, writes Hugh Pope.

"I'm still wearing the same clothes, I don't have any others,"
the 51-year-old carpenter said, beginning his account of the
Hojali disaster. "I was wounded in five places, but I am lucky to
be alive."

Mr Sadikov and his wife were short of food, without electricity
for more than a month, and cut off from helicopter flights for 12
days. They sensed the Armenian noose was tightening around the
2,000 to 3,000 people left in the straggling Azeri town on the
edge of Karabakh.

"At about 11pm a bombardment started such as we had never heard
before, eight or nine kinds of weapons, artillery, heavy
machine-guns, the lot," Mr Sadikov said.

Soon neighbours were pouring down the street from the direction
of the attack. Some huddled in shelters but others started
fleeing the town, down a hill, through a stream and through the
snow into a forest on the other side.

To escape, the townspeople had to reach the Azeri town of Agdam
about 15 miles away. They thought they were going to make it,
until at about dawn they reached a bottleneck between the two
Armenian villages of Nakhchivanik and Saderak.

"None of my group was hurt up to then ... Then we were spotted by
a car on the road, and the Armenian outposts started opening
fire," Mr Sadikov said.

Azeri militiamen fighting their way out of Hojali rushed forward
to force open a corridor for the civilians, but their efforts
were mostly in vain. Mr Sadikov said only 10 people from his
group of 80 made it through, including his wife and militiaman
son. Seven of his immediate relations died, including his
67-year-old elder brother.

"I only had time to reach down and cover his face with his hat,"
he said, pulling his own big flat Turkish cap over his eyes. "We
have never got any of the bodies back."

The first groups were lucky to have the benefit of covering fire.
One hero of the evacuation, Alif Hajief, was shot dead as he
struggled to change a magazine while covering the third group's
crossing, Mr Sadikov said.

Another hero, Elman Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali, said he and
several others spent the whole day of 26 February in the bushy
hillside, surrounded by dead bodies as they tried to keep three
Armenian armoured personnel carriers at bay.

As the survivors staggered the last mile into Agdam, there was
little comfort in a town from which most of the population was
soon to flee.

"The night after we reached the town there was a big Armenian
rocket attack. Some people just kept going," Mr Sadikov said. "I
had to get to the hospital for treatment. I was in a bad way.
They even found a bullet in my sock."

Victims of war: An Azeri woman mourns her son, killed in the
Hojali massacre in February (left). Nurses struggle in primitive
conditions (centre) to save a wounded man in a makeshift
operating theatre set up in a train carriage. Grief-stricken
relatives in the town of Agdam (right) weep over the coffin of
another of the massacre victims. Calculating the final death toll
has been complicated because Muslims bury their dead within 24
hours.

Photographs: Liu Heung / AP
Frederique Lengaigne / Reuter

THE INDEPENDENT, London, 12/6/'92
_
|-| /- |_ |_| |< "I killed Turks (Azeris) by every means possible. Yet
it is sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The
best way is to gather all of these dogs and throw
them into wells and then fill the wells with big &
heavy stones, as I did. I gathered all of the women,
men and children, threw big stones down on top of
them. They must never live on this earth." One of the
prominent Dashnaks' leaders reporting in 1918.
SOURCE: A. Lalayan, Revolutsionniy Vostok
(Revolutionary East), No: 2-3, Moscow, 1936
 
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