Remembering the victims of the Khojaly genocide

I am sure that for the majority of the Korean public the name “Khojaly” is unfamiliar. Khojaly is the name of a town in the Daghlyq Garabagh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region of Azerbaijan which has been under occupation by neighboring Armenia for more than 20 years. Khojaly is also a place that witnessed one of the most terrible massacres of the 20th century.

It was Feb. 26, 1992, when the ethnic Azerbaijanis of Khojaly town faced the armed forces of Armenia and the Motorized-Infantry Battalion No.366 of the former Soviet Union. Those troops would then commit ethnic cleansing against the Azerbaijani citizens of Khojaly, killing 613 civilians, of which 106 were women and 83 were children; 56 people were also purported to have been killed with extreme cruelty and torture. Additionally, 1,275 people were taken hostage, 150 went missing and 487 people ended up disabled, 76 of whom were teenagers. As a result of the mass killing, eight families were totally exterminated, 25 children lost both parents while 130 children lost at least one parent. This became the most brutal punishment of civilians during the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.

As it was a crime against humanity, the Khojaly tragedy was widely covered by the international media, including the Boston Globe, Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, and many other Western news agencies. At the time, Newsweek magazine reported: ``Azerbaijan was a charnel house again last week: a place of mourning refugees and dozens of mangled corpses dragged to a makeshift morgue behind a mosque. They were ordinary Azerbaijani men, women and children of Khojaly, a small village in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh overrun by Armenian forces on 25-26 February. Many were killed at close range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others were scalped.''

Although the Armenian officials deny responsibility for the crime, the current president of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who served as head of the illegal separatist regime's "Self-Defence Forces Committee" in 1992, was quoted in the book “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War” (by Thomas de Waal, NYU Press, 2003, page 85) saying: “Before Khojaly, Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that stereotype.”

Azerbaijan has taken decisive steps in pursuing political and legal assessment of this crime. Its calls to the international community were echoed by legislative bodies of many countries and international organizations. Most recently the President of Israel, H.E. Reuven Rivlin, mentioned the Khojaly genocide as he addressed the UN General Assembly marking the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

In May 2008, Leyla Aliyeva, Coordinator of the Youth Forum of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, initiated an international awareness campaign “Justice for Khojaly” with a view to raising awareness and drawing the attention of the international community to this horrible tragedy. The “Justice for Khojaly” campaign involves peaceful action, protests, conferences, seminars, presentations and publications across many countries with the goal of spreading information about what happened in Khojaly.

Azerbaijanis residing throughout the world remember the Khojaly genocide and victims of this horrific tragedy when the calendar shows the date of Feb. 26. While grieving with my fellow citizens who live in the Republic of Korea and conveying our feelings to the friendly Korean people, I strongly believe that the international community should play a more proactive role in ending impunity for the crimes committed against the civilian population of Azerbaijan during the conflict. I am confident that consistent measures taken at the national and international levels, as well as the existing international legal framework, will serve to bring those responsible to justice.