As atrocities mount in the war over Nagorny Karabakh, the Azeris are complinig a grim inventory of massacre victims

From Hugh Pope in Baku

THE GRUESOME extent of February’s killing 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 Prosecutor, Aydin Rasulov, the chief investigator of a 15-man team looking into what Azerbaijan calls the “Hojali Disaster”, said his figure of 600 dead was a minimum based 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.

François Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the lnternational 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 dead here, six policemen there, and in the 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.

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 l 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 towns people 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.

“l 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.”

An Azeri woman whose family was killed in Hojaly massacre (photo unknown)    
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 wash and bury their dead within 24 hours. Photographs: Liu Heung/AP; Frederique Lengaigne/Reuter.

Publication date 06/12/1992

Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform