In article <1993May15.021746.9527@seas.smu.edu> pts@seas.smu.edu (Paul Thompson Schreiber) writes:  >                          By Nancy Najarian >huddled around one measly candle or kerosene lamp in the cold?  How to >make others feel the isolation of living in a country of 3.5 million >people completely blockaded by hostile neighbors, prevented from >receiving adequate supplies of fuel to keep the electric plants >running, hospitals open, schools in operation?  Will anybody  A typical Armenian revisionist. As in the past in x-Soviet Armenia,  and today in Azerbaijan, for utopic and idiotic causes the Armenians brought havoc to their neighbors. A short-sighted and misplaced nationalistic fervor with a wrong agenda and anachronistic methods the Armenians continue to become pernicious for the region. As usual, they will be treated accordingly by their neighbors. Nagorno-Karabag  is a mountainous enclave that lies completely within Azerbaijan with  no border or history whatsoever connected to x-Soviet Armenia. Besides  the geographical aspect, Nagorno-Karabag is the historic homeland and  the 'cradle' of the artistic and literary heritage of Azerbaijan, which  renders the Armenian claims preposterous, even lunatic. No one in his or  her mind could have imagined that one day such a devious turn of event  could have plagued the Azeris. One cannot even imagine the reverse case  to occur, for the Armenians either would have slaughtered the Azerbaijanis,  or put them to forced exile to maintain their own majority. Where was she?                   An Appeal to Mankind  During the last three years Azerbaijan and its multinational population are vainly fighting for justice within the limits of the Soviet Union. All humanitarian, constitutional human rights guaranteed by the UN Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Helsinki Agreements, Human Problems International Forums, documents signed by the Soviet Union - all of them are violated.  The USSR's President, government bodies do not defend Azerbaijan though they are all empowered to take necessary measures to guarantee life and peace.  The 140,000 strong army of Armenian terrorists with Moscow's tacit consent wages an undeclared war of annihilation against Azerbaijan. As a result, a part of Azerbaijan has been occupied and annexed, hundreds of people killed, thousands wounded.  Some 200,000 Azerbaijanis have been brutally and inhumanly deported from the Armenian SSR, their historical homeland. Together with them 64,000 Russians and 22,000 Kurds have also been driven out, a part of them now settled in Azerbaijan. Some 40,000 Turkish-Meskhetians, Lezghins and representatives  of other Caucasian nationalities who escaped from the Central Asia where the President and government bodies did not guarantee them the life and peace also suffered from these deportations.  One of the scandalous vandalisms directed not only against Azerbaijan science but the world civilization as well is the Armenian extremists' destruction of the Karabakh scientific experimental base of The Institute of Genetics and Selection  of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR.  We beg you for humanitarian help and political assistance, for the honour and dignity of 7 million Azerbaijanis are violated, its territory, culture  and history are trampled, its people are shot. There is persistent negative image of Azerbaijanians abroad, and this defamation is spread over  the whole world by Soviet mass media, Armenian lobby in the USSR and the United States.   One of the myths is that all events allegedly involves and generated by interethnic collisions and religious intolerance while the truth is that all these shootings and recent  events stem from the territorial claims of Armenia on Azerbaijan.  It is a well documented fact that before the conflict there were no frictions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis on the issue of Karabakh. Hundreds and thousands Armenians placidly and calmly lived and worked in Azerbaijan land, had their representatives in all government bodies of the Azerbaijan SSR.  We are for a united, indivisible, sovereign Azerbaijan, we  are for a common Caucasian home proclaimed in 1918 by one of the founding fathers of the Azerbaijan Democratic  Republic - Muhammed Emin Rasulzade.  But all these goals and expectations are trampled upon the Soviet leadership in favour of the Armenian expansionists encouraged by Moscow and intended to create a new '1,000 Year Reich' - the 'Great Armenia' - by annexing the  neighboring lands.  The world public opinion shed tears to save the whales, suffers for penguins dying out in the Antarctic Continent.  But what about the lives of seven million human beings? If these people are Muslims, does it mean that they are less valuable? Can people be discriminated by their  colour of skin or religion, by their residence or other attributes?  All people are brothers, and we appeal to our brothers for help and understanding. This is not the first appeal of Azerbaijan to the world public opinion. Our previous appeals were unheard. However, we still carry the hope that the truth beyond the Russian and Armenian propaganda will one day reveal the extent of our suffering and stimulate at least as much help and compassion for Azerbaijan as tendered to whales and penguins.  		THE COMMITTEE FOR PEOPLE'S HELP TO                  KARABAKH (OF THE) ACADEMY OF SCIENCES                  OF THE AZERBAIJAN SSR   "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 from  Hojali, most  of  them  civilians. "We  did  not count  the 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  Serdar Argic