However cynical and inhumane it seems, it is a fact.
Some of them are given below.
On April 14th, 2010 the Armenian website www.ardarutyun.org (created by the Ararat Strategic Research center, Armenia) posted an article by some Armenian journalist Marina Grigoryan. The article is devoted to the so-called "Maraga massacre", the issue so much talked about in the Armenian and pro-Armenian media to divert the attention from the Khojaly genocide.
But due to the lack of evidence to prove the "massacre", the Armenian side passes photos of killed Azerbaijanis for Armenians.
This is one of many examples of such forgeries, using the photos of Azerbaijanis, namely Khojaly residents to present them as Armenians. On the picture there are Azerbaijani refugees who reached Agdam on foot and militiamen trying to help them.
Khojaly 1.png"/>There are photos of exactly these women taken at the same place by a French photographer Frederique Lengaigne
Khojaly 2.png"/>Khojaly 3.png"/>On January 13th 2011, an Armenian news website www.tert.am posted an editorial titled “Today is the 21st anniversary of Armenians’ genocide in Baku (photos)” with pictures attached that had nothing to do with either Baku or Armenians. There was also posted a picture of Azerbaijani children killed at Khojaly but passed for the “murdered Armenian” ones.
Khojaly 4.jpg"/>An Armenian English-speaking website www.asbarez.com doesn’t disdain to use such forgeries, either.
In one of the articles titled «Sumgait, February 1988: A Crime with No Limitation» of March 11th, 2011, they posted a photo of the children killed during Khojaly events, claiming them to be killed Armenian kids.
Khojaly 5.jpg"/>In 2010, the Armenian mass media reported to have designed www.xocali.net website. According to their reports, it was created in order to “Tell the truth about Khodjaly”.
The anti-azerbaijanian style with propaganda cliché so typical of the Armenian mass media is instantly seen at a passing glance at the site. It is worth marking that the website design was backed up under the auspices of the Administration of the President of Armenia. (The current President of Armenia himself took part in the Khojaly operations.)
This website is the product of the official propaganda of Armenia.
Let’s have a look at the contents of the site and the essence of arguments of the Armenian side in 2010.
The most “lurid” and “sensational” section of the site is named “Facts. Forgeries & Falsifications.” This chapter exactly contains, as the website designers believe, the compelling evidence of the Armenian “truth” about Khodjaly.
There is a statement given on the front-page backed up by nothing:
“This incident differs from other ones, first of all, as the Azerbaijani side had a total control over the area, where the Khojaly residents were killed, and had an opportunity to carry out an unimpeded and unlimited video-and photo shooting both the scene and the killed.”
Obviously, this sentence alone contains two figments:
1 – The shooting area was the only place where the Khojaly residents were found killed.
2 – The location was controlled by Azerbaijanis. No references given- it is a “generally accepted fact”; the audience is believed to have no idea of the events without any desire to check the information provided.
Thus, only few dozens of the corpses out of more than 600 victims of the Khojaly massacre were found on the area filmed. That’s evident from the pictures shot, and the report by “Memorial” human rights group, as well.
The bodies discovered at the footage area belonged to those who had managed to escape the carnage by Nakhichevanik and break through to Agdam but overtaken by Armenians in few miles from the destination town.
“The “NKR” officials reported the “Memorial” activists that “they gave a permission to take out near 120-130 corpses to Agdam”.
A part of the dead was seriously wounded upon reaching Agdam but unable to be cured by doctors. The rest of bodies were passed over within several months as they became a business item for Armenians.
An American reporter, Thomas Goltz in his book “Azerbaijan Diary” described the dead Azerbaijanis being exchanged for the gasoline for Armenians.
A part of them was never handed over, including those hit by the artillery fire at Khojaly itself. According to “Memorial”, “the Armenian side, in fact, refused to provide any information on the death toll there”.
The second figment about the video shooting being controlled by the Azerbaijani side can be easily disproved, too.
At the moment, the Armenian troops exercised control of Askeran 5-6 kilometres away from Khodjaly. The Azerbaijani forces controlled Agdam within 10 kilometres from Askeran. Thus, a shooting area was located approximately in the middle, between Askeran and Agdam.
Azerbaijanian helicopters underwent a hard bombardment by Armenians at every turn, and only the courage of the pilots allowed them to take out bodies.
The first attempt to land failed exactly because of the shelling.
Human Rights Watch also testifies the fire:
“Starting from February 27th, the Azerbaijani windmills brought a special staff to remove the corpses and help the wounded. Some rescuers wore in a camo uniform were at the constant fire by Armenians.”
On the video shots made at the first flight, the rescuers ran from one hollow to another, bending down, arms in their hands, trying to collect the dead bodies. However, they were forced to retreat being fired by the Armenian side.
These two coinages that the website creators tried to “invent” obscurely – the sole place of the Khojaly residents’ slaughter and the territory being controlled by Azerbaijanis – play a significant role in their subsequent “reasoning”.
Let’s return to the site. It writes:
“Let’s study the documentary base used by Azerbaijan to prove and demonstrate their own perspective of the events at Khodjaly.”
This sentence could imply the Armenian side to examine the true documentary database,such as the reports by Human Rights Watch and “Memorial”, testimonies of the correspondents of a London “The Times” , an American “The Washington Post”, a Russian “Izvestiya”, and a number of other editions. It could be expected that all the photo- and video footage would be studied properly and the audience would be offered to read the published memoirs by Monte Melkonyan*’s wife and brother.
The evidence by the Khojaly residents recorded by the representatives of the human rights groups straight after the tragedy, should have been analyzed, as well.
The next sentence, however, shows that all these expectations were futile.
“Let’s depart from standard references to “pro” and “contra” resources this time and rely on the factual materials, namely: photos and video footage.”
First of all, it would be really interesting to study independent “contra” resources. The diaspora Armenians themselves, as seen from the book by Monte Melkonyan*’s wife and brother, do not adhere to the “Armenian truth about Khojaly events”.
Secondly, since when the witnesses’ testimony were discarded as a factual material? Moreover, the testimony of the independent journalists and human rights activists. Do the website creators perceive the notion of the word “factual”?
Unfortunately, these questions still remain unanswered.
So, Armenians submitted 17 photos as the “Azerbaijanian documentary base”, appealing, as Armenian mass media promise, to shed the light on the truth about Khodjaly.
7 pictures out of 17 presented as evidence of falsifications, have nothing to do either with the genocide of Azerbaijanis, or the Azerbaijani documentary database.
Where have they been taken from? The Armenian side has given the resources itself: a Bulgarian forum, a Russian forum, an Iranian blog, and some personal Azerbaijani websites and blogs.
A very strange thing- it turns out that if we take a dozen of photos not relating to the Holocaust, and scatter them in the world wide web in the guise of the Holocaust, we can easily create a website proving that there was either no Holocaust, or it was the Jews to have killed the Jews in Germany.
From the other side, it’s surprising that the “loot” of the detectors was so small as a simple search in the Internet allows to find hundreds of such “falsifications” on various blogs, forums, and personal websites relating any tragical event of the 20-30 years old.
Only one photo out of seven was taken from the Azerbaijani mass media website.
It’s difficult to judge the source of this photo and the way it got on the Azerbaijani online editions. It could be explained, perhaps, by the similarity with the pictures and video footage taken at the scene of massacre at Khodjaly, like the one given below.
In spite of resorting to the official resources and documents, the Armenian side decided to use the World Wide Web, namely blogs and forums, hoping to fish out the information that can only show an obvious laziness of the Internet users, bloggers, and web-masters that did not use the materials published on the official Azerbaijani documents.
The real pictures of the Khojaly tragedy are much more dramatic and terrifying.
And again, the same tactics is used. Armenians take into account that an uninformed reader will consider the photos presented as the only evidence at the disposal of the Azerbaijani side.
The rest of pictures relate directly to the genocide of Azerbaijanis committed by the Armenian government.
These two pictures are from another series. They depict Azerbaijani children injured in the result of the act of terrorism conducted by Armenians- the explosion of the bus in 1989.
In the Azerbaijani documentaries (and the official websites, as well), these photos like many others including those of Khojaly victims, are put in the general database, testifying the genocide of Azerbaijanis.
Of course, very often those who weren’t let into the pages of the horrible tragedy of the Azerbaijani people of 1987-1994, can guess all the photos to be related to Khodjaly. And Azerbaijani experts’s task is to give an explanation that Khojaly was just one of a great number of cases when Azerbaijanis were victims of the Armenian militants and terrorists.
There were presented the first and second video footage by Chingiz Mustafayev with a difference of 2 days. The website authors attempt to prove that several bodies “turned out to” be disfigured and scalped within that period of time. An uninformed reader, who has never seen the footage, may conclude that Armenians revealed a “thoroughly hidden fact”.
The Azerbaijani side, however, constantly reminds this fact; Chingiz Mustafayev himself reported that in the video spread all over the world.
Besides, the website owners fail to mention that there were scalped bodies detected during the very first flight, too, straight after the tragic events.
Human Rights Watch reports the rescue team and a French correspondent found the scalped and mutilated corpses at the first flight of Chingiz Mustafayev at the scene of the tragedy.
According to the report by “Memorial”, there was even a case of scalping a living person recorded. A Russian correspondent, Yuriy Romanov also reported a 6-year old girl with cigarette butts sticking out from her eyes.
A journalist Thomas Goltz witnessed a lot of people with stab wounds. But the website creators withhold these facts.
Naturally, an average man can hardly imagine how people could scalp living men, mutilate the dead bodies, and furthermore, return to the carnage area to get more scalps and other “prizes” in the late 1990s.
However, Markar and Seta Melkonyan give us a much more visual representation of the morals reigning among Armenian “heroes”:
`In November 1990, Kechel had kidnapped a young Azerbaijani Popular Front activist from a village across the border. The young Azeri, Syed, spent a month chained to the wall of a cottage near Yerevan. On New Year’s Eve 1991, Kechel and a couple of buddies, including a local police officer and their friend Ardag, dragged their captive to the top of Yeraplur, the burial hill near Yerevan. There they kicked Syed to his knees under a spreading tree next to the grave of a fellow fighter named Haroot. Then Kechel, a father of three children, began cutting Syed’s throat with a dull knife. At first Syed screamed, but after a while the screaming gave way to moaning and gurgling. Finally, when Ardag could no longer listen, he pushed a knife into Syed’s chest, putting an end to it. They drained Syed’s blood on top of Haroot’s grave and then left.`
There were also some thoughts about the picture of a killed girl. By presenting the black and white picture highly contrasted, the creators of the website are trying to prove that a wound on the girl’s leg was inflicted later, as there was no bruise seen, though it was easily revealed on the less contrasted shots.
The Azerbaijani side tried to take out the girl’s body during the first flight, but was prevented by the shelling. Armenians endeavor to expose the blanket pulled off (to demonstrate the wound) as an attempt of Azerbaijanis to charge them with the rape of a 3-year old girl. But there were none either in press or in the official messages.
The photos of decayed bodies bought out a long time later from the Armenian side, are presented as evidence of Azerbaijanis exhuming the corpses to prove the killings.
The Armenian reasoning is remarkably plain and similar. A few dozens of pictures and video footage shattering their arguments has not been shown to the audience, of course.
There is a great deal of other falsifications, distortions and inaccuracies.
For instance, we can see the following “fact” in the section “Azerbaijani evidence”:
«Azerbaijan’s Secretary of State L. Gadjiyeva (From the speech at the meeting with Azerbaijani soldiers in 1992)
“We had been shelling Stepanakert out of various weapons within 100 days, but Armenians never abandoned their homeland. Khojaly was totally stuffed with military hardware, ammunition, and armaments. But apart from being shelled, the settlement was charged with another, an extremely important mission: a total blockage and destruction of the single airport in Karabakh. Damaging the runaway yet in the autumn of 1991 meant the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with the outside world was cut off”.
Obviously, the website authors were so carried away by forgeries to forget that Lala Gadjiyeva arrived in Azerbaijan in 1993 and was appointed the Secretary of State in June 1993.
Therefore, she could not make any speech in front of Azerbaijani soldiers in 1992.
