Now that the dust settled over the war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, Amnesty International announced war crimes on both sides of the conflict, showing that Azerbaijan and Armenia play dirty. Human rights groups revealed videos of civilians in the Southern Caucasus mountains getting beheaded, bodies of dead civilians desecrated and prisoners of war abused. Despite the Nov. 9 Russian-brokered ceasefire, Azerbaijan and Armenia sustained serious losses in less than two months of fighting, reprising the 1988-1994 war where Armenia lost 5.856 soliders compared to 11,557 for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan spent the last 25 years preparing for revenge, after Armenia prevailed in the six-year-conflict. When fighting resumed Sept. 27, Azerbainjan worked closely with Turkey to assure that things would be different this time around, with Azerbaijan retaking territory.
What tipped this year’s war to Azerbaijan were Turkish-backed mercenary fighters fresh off the Syrian battlefield, now battling Turkey’s age-old enemy. It was the Ottoman Turks in 1915-1917 that marched some 1.5 million Armenians to their deaths in the 20th Century’s first genocide. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuses to acknowledge Turkey’s genocide, insisting there’s no continuity with the Ottoman Empire. Every Western nation, including the U.S., has asked Turkey to acknowledge for the historical record the Ottoman genocide on Armenians. Turkey’s Sultan Mehmed Resad presided over the expulsion and systematic slaughter of Armenians AKA “death marches” all because Sultan Mehmed thought Armenians conspired with the Russian Bolsheviks to topple the Sultan’s regime. Watching the Turks stick to Armenia for a second time was unfathomable.
Amnesty’s post-mortem of the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict showed that both sides committed egregious abuses of the rules of war specified by the 1949 Geneva Convention. “Members of the military on both sides have behaved horrendously, displaying a complete disregard for the rules of war,” said Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty International’s Research Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. After reviewing videos of the war scene, Krivosheev said both sides violated the Geneva Convention. “The depravity and lack of humanity captured in these videos shows the deliberate intention to cause ultimate harm and humiliation to victims, in clear violation of international humanitarian law. Because the previous 1994 war, Azerbaijan was out for blood this time around. Erdogan made certain that Armenia would pay a serious price for occupying Azerbaijan land.
No one can discount the amount of payback Turkey against Armenia, lingering from before WW I. Videos portrayed Azerbaijan military decapitating a shirtless Armenian civilian before a cheering crowd. Another video showed the man’s head placed on the end of a butchered pig. “This is how we get revenge—by cutting heads,” said an Azerbaijani man, calling the civilian murder an act of revenge for “the blood of our martyrs.” In another video, an Armenian man stuck a knife into the neck of a bound-and-gagged Azerbaijani man. Amnesty said it had at least 20 videos documenting atrocities that happened in the seven-week long war. Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general said Dec. 8 his office would investigate war crimes committed on both sides of the conflict. Azerbaijan and Armenia were both guilty of war crimes, attesting to the longstanding nature to the Nogorno-Karabakh conflict.
London-based Human Rights Watch verified Armenia’s use of banned cluster bombs on the Azerbaijan city of Barada, killing at least 21 civilians. Human Rights Watch confirmed that Azerbaijan also supplied its soldiers cluster bombs used on Armenian towns. Cluster-bombs were a common banned munition used by Turkish-backed fighters in Syria. Armenia, Russia and France accused Turkey of sending mercenaries to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, something denied by Erdogan. Yet any look at the Nargorno-Karabakh conflict shows that both sides resorted to banned munitions and tactics to gain advantage over the other. Despite Turkey’s denials of supplying mercenaries to the Nagorno-Karabakh, convincing video evidence proves that they supplied foreign fighters to the region. When warring parties meet in Minsk, Belarus in the spring, all issues will be on the table.
United Nations Human Rights Office has called on all foreign forces to vacate the Nagorno-Karabakh region, letting both sides settle before their delegation heads to Minsk for negotiations. Armenians were outraged that Prime Minister Nikol Pashnyan let Azerbaijan drive ethnic Armenians out of their ancestral lands. Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and Erdogan celebrated today in Bakiu, vowing to not let Armenians return to their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh. Russian President Vladimir Putin was committed to seeing Russian peacekeepers stay between the warring factions before they head to the peace table in Minsk. Putin hopes his peacekeepers can keep Turkish mercenaries out of the area. Age-old conflicts spiral into revenge killings based on intractable conflicts. When it comes to Nagorna-Karabakh, it’s a modern version of the age-old conflict between Muslims and Christians.
