Remembering The Khojaly Genocide

According to this riveting book, one of the victims of the Khojaly genocide was a woman named Mehriban, who had the misfortune of giving birth in Khojaly right as the town was getting bombarded by the Armenians. When the basement where she was hiding with her newborn baby was taken over, she was taken hostage by the Armenian forces: “She was beaten viciously by the Armenians. She fed her children all they had, snow. The Armenians gave the prisoners no food.  All the prisoners had to eat over a period of ten days was snow. Besides beating Mehriban, the Armenians entertained themselves by culling young women and girls from the hundreds of prisoners and raping them in front of prisoners.  They then tossed them at their fathers, deriding them, ‘You fail as a father.’”

Republic Underground and the Caucasus Journalist Network recently hosted a webinar titled “Khojaly Memories,” where Lowery-Contreras reiterated: “I have to tell you that as an American, in 1992, I had no idea that this had happened. I had very few ideas or views on Azerbaijan as a matter of fact.” He noted that he only learned more as he wrote Murdered in the Mountains. 

Sadly, not much has changed since then in America.  Azerbaijani activist Yasmin Bashirova told San Francisco News that the Khojaly Genocide almost “never gets mentioned in the news” in the United States. Lowery-Contreras claimed that unfortunately, the Armenian Diaspora controls the news coming out of the region, thus prompting Khojaly and other similar atrocities to get covered up.

Arzu Jaeed, an Azerbaijani Youth Diaspora member in the United States, believes that this should change, as 613 people were massacred in one day merely for the crime of being Azerbaijani and the world should never forget that: “Behind every one of those numbers is a real tragedy, a broken life. Kids eyes were scorched with cigarette butts. Legs and other human organs were amputated. Heads were cut off. Underage girls were raped.”

Jaeed emphasized that the victims of the Khojaly Genocide were not just statistics but human beings who suffered immensely, who prior to this crime against humanity were scholars, doctors, teachers, parents and so much more, with full lives.  For this reason, this genocide deserves to be recognized and studied in the West.