Maragha Massacre

10 April, 2016

April 10 marks the 24th anniversary of the Maragha massacre, one of the most tragic and least known pages of the aggressive war, unleashed by Azerbaijan against Nagorno-Karabakh. Maragha was one of the largest villages of Nagorno-Karabakh with a population of about six thousand people, including dozens of Armenian refugees who had escaped pogroms in Sumgait, Baku and elsewhere in Soviet Azerbaijan.

In the early morning of April 10, 1992, Azerbaijani armed forces launched an offensive against the sleeping village. Those who had not been able or did not manage to escape, including women, children and elderly, were killed indiscriminately, their houses were pillaged and burnt; the village was basically destroyed and was subsequently occupied by Azerbaijani forces.

The facts on the mass murder of civilian population in Maragha have been confirmed by various human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. As reported by Amnesty International, over 50 residents of the village were slain, while their bodies were profaned and disfigured. Forty-five residents of the village were taken hostage including 9 children and 29 women. Two weeks later the village was again attacked and the population was deported. Houses were pillaged and then most of them were burnt down. The fate of many of the hostages still remains unknown.

The Azerbaijani policy of intolerance, xenophobia, racism and incitement of hatred against Armenia and Armenians continues to remain one of the key obstacles for the progress in the negotiation process of peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Impunity of those responsible for that heinous crime and glorification of murderers of Armenians at the state level created fertile ground for committing atrocity in another Armenian settlement of Talish during the recent large-scale military offensive of Azerbaijan, unleashed against NK on April 2 (see the Note Verbale D-027 of the Permanent Delegation of Armenia, dated April 6, 2016).

We pay tribute to the innocent victims of the Maragha massacre and hope that calling to responsibility of the perpetrators and masterminds of that war crime will pave way to prevent other crimes against humanity.

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