“The Spoon Game?”

With theatre of war commissions for Time and Newsweek, Iranian-French photojournalist Reza Deghati was no stranger to the depravations of humankind. From post-genocide Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan, there would hardly be a major conflagration in the latter decades of the 20^th century that did not see him called upon to risk his life. His images shone a light on some of the worst crimes of humanity.

He was the sole Western journalist who evaded Soviet restrictions and slipped into Baku in the wake of Black January in 1990. By 1992, he was back in Azerbaijan, flitting across the front lines of an increasingly bitter war. He was embedded with an Armenian military unit not far from Aghdam when he was introduced to a pastime enjoyed by his hosts. “The Spoon Game?” Deghati enquired again.

The Colonel he spoke with laughed heartedly, his mirth welcomed by the few young conscripts from Yerevan gathered around. With that, he slipped a hand into his uniform and, from inside, plucked a simple tablespoon. Holding it with his thumb and index finger, the Colonel made a gentle motion, almost like slipping a sugar lump into a glass of chai.

“How many eyes can we remove from the Muslims…” grinned the decorated soldier. “We all have a spoon. Who claims most eyes wins.”

In war, violence and fear can revoke a soldier’s humanity. Across his long years covering some of the most brazen and intractable conflicts in the world, Deghati thought he had heard it all. Gouging the eyes of prisoners and the injured was something new. Even to him. [I]

In August 1991, communist hardliners and military elites tried to overthrow Gorbachev and reverse his painful reforms. They failed. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died, and something new was born: a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower, unchecked by any rival. It was a staggering development in modern history. Something not seen since the fall of Rome. There would be seismic repercussions that we continue to feel until the present day. The Soviet Union broke apart, each of its fifteen constituent republics becoming a sovereign state.

For Armenians, this meant that the Soviet-era legal constraints which had blocked their territorial claims against Azerbaijan were no longer in place. The weight of history and international law had represented definitive and final arbiters to a century or more of fabricated claims. Their scheming had been dismissed again and again. Now, however, Karabakh was one of several places in the post-Soviet space defying international law.

Ironically, while people across now former Soviet space rejoiced, including in Azerbaijan, from that moment, it was as if a starting gun had been fired in a desperate race to capture Karabakh. Contemporary international law has many fathers. One of those, Jean Bodin, wrote in his 1576 Les six livres de la Republique (Six Books on the Republic) that sovereignty is absolute, perpetual, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible. [II]

Four centuries later, enshrined in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and recognised as customary international law, territorial integrity is the principle where sovereign states have a right to defend their borders and territory from another.

For longer than a century, ethnic Armenians had attempted to usurp. During the life of the Soviet Union, the Armenian SSR spent decades seeking to persuade Moscow to change its national policy without success. Yerevan had fermented trouble and even launched a low-grade militia war. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan was heading toward independence and a place within the family of nations.

Not so much front and centre; perhaps collateral damage is a better term to describe the fate of an inconsequential rural town that would become a genocide-ridden stepping stone toward Yerevan’s grand plans. Originally a conurbation of approximately 7,000 souls, Khojaly had been shelled sporadically from early 1988. Electricity supplies had become infrequent.

Essential supplies like food, water and medicines became increasingly difficult to obtain. To supply the town with essentials, Baku had resorted to using helicopters but was losing an increasing number of its aircraft to shoulder-held missiles. Within just a few years, the population of Khojaly had thinned to a mere 3,000. Most of those left behind were there simply because they had nowhere else to go. Their fate was to be part of the worst atrocity in a conflict punctuated by atrocities.

Armenian forces patrolled the local road system. Random checkpoints had become associated with murder and rape. The use of violence in war is nothing new. It has been called the oldest weapon of war, used as a tactic to instil fear and humiliate and control civilian populations during the conflict. Although violence against women and young girls in any setting is heinous, it is a particularly potent weapon when inflicted upon a Muslim population, where women are often powerless to speak out and face stigma in their communities. The depraved Armenian forces understood that. Today, Sabina Aliyeva, Baku-based Commissioner for Human Rights, continues to have the odious task of collating evidence and first-hand accounts of systematic violence on a massive scale. [IV]

Gorbachev cast the Soviet Union into the history books by signing the Decree on the resignation of authority on December 26, 1991. It took exactly two months for the shockwaves from that historic moment to reach a small town in Karabakh. It was there that Armenian armed forces would make the extent of their plans known. In the early morning hours of February 26, 1992, several outlying homes were set alight as a precursor to an assault. Most residents sought refuge in their basements, even while the local civil defence force initiated evacuation plans. The weather was exceptionally harsh, with temperatures plummeting to -10 degrees Celsius. Blankets of deep snow-covered forests and mountains create treacherous conditions for those attempting to escape. Many hurriedly fled into the frigid night without adequate protection from the cutting elements. They made for local villages or the apparent protection of the nearby town of Aghdam. Yet, as they passed across open ground, they were fully exposed and easily picked off by strategically positioned guns. It was carnage.

The official death toll from Khojaly is 613 dead, [VI] 132 of which 106 were women and 63 children. On March 3, 1992, Anatol Lieven wrote in The Times after visiting the site: ‘Scattered amid the withered grass and bushes along a small valley and across the hillside beyond are the bodies of last Wednesday’s massacre by Armenian forces of Azerbaijani refugees... Of the 31, we saw… eight women and three small children.

Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women’s arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.’ [VII]

Events in Khojaly triggered international condemnation and investigations from human rights groups like Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch and the Moscow-based Memorial. It is worth hearing a first-hand account from a man on the ground during those events.

Today, Rey Karimoglu leads a support network for veterans and landmine victims. In the early 1990s, he was part of a volunteer defence force and recalled retrieving the bodies of babies and children and older people who had been massacred. “I was a witness,” said Karimoglu.

“They were shooting babies. On the morning of February 26, I took out the babies covered in blood in the snow. We dragged the women out of there. I witnessed this. [VIII]

Despite the eyewitness accounts and reports that appeared in the international media, interest quickly faded. To offer the horrors of those events some context, that same year in the Balkans, a widely reported Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing in Doboj cost some 322 Bosnian and 86 Croat civilian lives. [IX] In its verdicts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Serb forces guilty of torture, cruel treatment, inhumane acts and unlawful detention, along with murder, forced transfer, deportation and use of torture as a crime against humanity. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes and imprisoned for life. Among a string of others, politician, university professor and scientist Biljana Plavšić was sentenced to 11 years and Serb Democratic Party leader Momčilo Krajišnik to 20 years. The ICTY was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that both Plavšić and Krajišnik participated in a plot to permanently remove non-Serbs from the territory of an ethnically pure Serb state.

Back in the South Caucasus, there would be no International Criminal Tribunal. Instead of genocidal masterminds jailed, justice for Khojaly and all the other acts of carnage across Karabakh, events would see their progenitors elected as heads of state, address the United Nations General Assembly and accorded the pomp and respect of state visits to foreign capitals. A question arises of when the international community’s lack of action morphs into indefensible abdication of moral standards.

Although Khojaly was perhaps the bloodiest and largest massacre of occupation, it was far from the only example. Indeed, those scythed down from that small town represented a mere two per cent of the estimated 16,000 Azerbaijani civilians reported in media to have been obliterated during the First Karabakh War. That is in addition to the suffering of hundreds of thousands driven out of the region. Worse, perhaps, is the fate of the thousands captured.

According to a 2023 report released by the Commissioner for Human Rights in Baku, this included 29 children, 98 women and 112 elderly, within a total of 872 hostages. [X] The fate of many of these unfortunates is still unknown, although sworn testimonials paint a dark picture. The Geneva Convention of 1929 provides that prisoners must be treated humanely and that nations must supply information about any prisoners, while all global treaties ban the use of prisoners of war as slave labour. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights creates an obligation that no one is to be held in slavery or servitude—the systematic enslavement of captured civilians, both for sex trafficking and compelled labour, rendered fundamentally illegal. Post-liberation, Azerbaijan’s Commissioner for Human Rights is investigating mass graves and sites of apparent torture in the Khojavend, Kalbajar, Aghdam and Fuzuli regions and around Shusha, among others.[XI]

The painful, heart-wrenching stories that ordinary folk from Karabakh combine to form an account of the disaster in personal and nuanced terms and are more complex than anything that the international community and media have been able to record in more than three decades. Families and communities were ethnically cleansed amid a litany of extrajudicial killings, robbery, and infanticide. Their narratives allow us to view the region from a new, more realistic, if less comfortable, viewpoint. As in Bosnia and all the other gory venues of genocide that emerged across the late 20^th century, listening to Karabakh’s voices would have made them more human. Less able to ignore.

The definition of genocide contained in Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. To constitute genocide, it must be established that victims are deliberately targeted — not randomly — because of their actual or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention. It means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, or even a part of it, but not its members as individuals.

States’ obligation under Article I of the Genocide Convention, as interpreted by the International Court of Justice, is ‘not to commit genocide’. Armenia joined the convention on June 23, 1993. Article 393 of that nation’s criminal code provides for the prosecution or extradition of the perpetrators of genocide.

Even the most ambiguous interpretation of all these voluminous rules and regulations should lead to a succession of men who were battlefield commanders during the First Karabakh War to The Hague. Armenian society, at certain points, supported leaders who were involved in controversial wartime activities, which later helped them rise to significant political roles, including the Presidency and Premiership. That oxymoron aside, what should have happened in the early 1990s? Some military interventions, according to mainstream Western narratives, are justifiable. On March 24, 1999, NATO launched an attack on Serbia. At the time, it was widely portrayed as a humanitarian intervention prompted by the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.

Tragically, for the dead and dispossessed of Karabakh, the same decade as Serbia’s bombing, even the genocide of Khojaly did not meet the West’s floating benchmark for preventative action. Instead, the international community had slowly, meekly, ground into a glacial diplomatic action.

For proof of that, one may choose to meet Shukurov and Manafova. Or visit the newly constructed home of Anar Huseynov in Fuzuli and hear his story of bringing up a family in a converted garage for almost three decades. Or visit the Baku offices of Rovshan Rzayev, Chairman of the State Committee for Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, who tells of the unenviable task of holding together communities of the dispossessed. For good measure, one may also wish to consult with Vugar Suleymanov, who heads the Mine Action Agency of Azerbaijan. In what civilised world is it, where nations must teach their children how to spot landmines, unexploded ordinance and booby-traps, left with the singular intention to maim and kill them? “Part of humanitarian mine action is risk education for local affected communities,” said Suleymanov. “We launched a large-scale risk education programme in Azerbaijan immediately after the Second Karabakh War.” [XII]

Surprisingly, the United Nations has no mandate to enact international law. In recent times, it seems, neither does it desire to apply tangible diplomatic pressure on Armenia to release maps illustrating where these devices are planted. Added Suleymanov: “Azerbaijan is one of the most contaminated countries in the world with land mines... 95 per cent of funding comes from the Azerbaijan state budget. We are very underfunded by the international community.” [XIII]

Back in the early 1990s, the world body endlessly debated ethnic cleansing and, on four occasions, sought to make its angst clear through United Nations Security Council Resolutions — 822 (1993), 853 (1993), 874 (1993) and 884 (1993) — Armenian armed forces pushed on regardless in their campaign of ethnic-territorial bloodlust. Despite this, Baku was certainly not able to help its citizens.

While Armenian forces were slashing their way through Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s feckless political class, led by a disintegrating Azerbaijani Popular Front Party administration, were turning inwards on themselves and increasingly incapable of projecting any form of authority. The central government lost all meaning; the petty power-hungry squabbling of politicians served to weaken leadership structures and, crucially, failed to support the armed forces.

That cesspool created chaos that directly contributed to Armenia’s territorial gains. While Yerevan had managed to pull together and arm a 15,000-strong force, the extra troops Baku had promised its military leaders failed to materialise. There were numerous reports of Azeri forces running out of ammunition mid-battle, not merely due to uncertain supply lines but because the army had run out of stocks of munitions. At other times, servicemen were left to forage for food as they had no battle rations.

A rag-tag force of defenders emerges, failing to hold back a better-financed, armed and marshalled aggressor. In December 1992, Azerbaijan’s forces were exhausted, demoralised and suffering mounting losses. By this point, ordinary Azerbaijanis united in turning on the disgraced Azerbaijani Popular Front Party government in Baku. The inept Azerbaijani Popular Front government had descended into putrid infighting, even as the nation burned around them. Baku was mired in ineptitude and corruption, but none appeared random.

In a letter to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former British Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen had decried: ‘The elites of Yerevan… allowed to enrich themselves and consolidate power through their handling of narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking and more… [XIV] That painted a telling picture.

Yerevan’s elites had become cash-rich. In 1992 and 1993, the nation’s GDP had fallen nearly 60 per cent from its 1989 level. Its currency, the dram, suffered the effects of hyperinflation after its introduction in 1993. The economy crashed, driving a swathe of the population into deep poverty, not least through the impact of a freeze across its borders with Türkiye and Azerbaijan.

However, despite an apparent financial calamity dragging the nation down, Yerevan was able to outmuscle Azerbaijan into a full-blown conflict financially. Facilitating and supplying heroin to reach the streets of Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, this materialised the funds to purchase arms, maintain a bloated standing army, supply the militias and pay for a war of occupation.