Author: Rose Khoyetsian

 

 

 

This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the Khojalu events. In the course of the 25 years Azerbaijan has been distorting the events of February 26-28, 1992, using them for its propaganda purposes.

A new video uploaded on YouTube on February 12 comes to shed light on and disperse the Azeri lies.

It is noted in the video that Commission of the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan completed the investigation into the events in Khojalu, but  failed to reveal anything. It says all witnesses died under different circumstances, “but the accusations of military journalist Chingiz Mustafayev are still there.”

“As we know, Mustafayev has blamed and will continue to blame certain people for the tragedy,” the narrator says in the film.

Chingiz Mustafayev also features in the video. “I have one goal – to do my best to have this program reach the public. I have to tell the truth about Khojalu,” he says.

The reporter recalls the shootings at the site of the tragedy. Mustafayev was banned from the site under the excuse that the territory was under Armenian fire. However, he managed to reach there in a helicopter meant to transport the bodies.

Mustafayev filmed the scene twice. When he arrived at the place for the first time, he saw corpses on the ground, with armed people freely walking between the bodies and lugging them. They escaped, when they saw the camera.

“Definitely, they were not Armenian. Where were they taking the corpses?” the reporter asks.

When shooting the scene a day later, Mustafayev saw the corpses were mutilated. “Who has done all this in one day? I shot the scene yesterday, there was nothing of a kind here,” the journalist is heard saying in the film.

“As you see the corpses were initially not mutilated, but the second shooting was organized for the “international community.” Look what has happened to the bodies,” one can hear in a voiceover commentary. The narrator comments on the pictures of the corpses, where the same people are pictured twice; the corpses are seen mutilated in the second ones).

“Question: who did this in one day? There are many questions, but the time is short,” the narrator concludes.

Commenting on the video, Spokesman for the NKR President David Babayan said “Chingiz Mustafayev was one of the first to visit the site.

“He actually proved that the massacre had been organized by representatives of the Azerbaijani authorities, the so-called Popular Front, representatives of the Azerbaijani army who supported the Popular Front against the then President Araz Mutalibov,” David Babayan told Public Radio of Armenia.

Military journalist Chingiz Mustafayev died under unknown circumstances on June 15, 1992. According to the official Azerbaijani version, he was felled by mortar fire while filming an exchange of fire between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces near the village of Nakhichevanik.

It’s clear, however, that the new authorities of Azerbaijan silenced this source of true information about the crimes against their own people. “Naturally, the Azerbaijani authorities had their plans concerning such people. Mustafayev exclusively filmed the scene a few hours after the tragedy and a few days later. The differences between the two shootings are obvious,” he said.

David Babayan reminds that Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov also confessed that the massacre had been organized by Azerbaijan within the framework of domestic political struggle. According to the Spokesman, the video should supplement the large package of documentary materials on Khojalu events “in order to reveal the Azeri lies and prevent similar inhumane crimes in the future.”

Photo: AP

 

Volunteers in New Zealand are racing to rescue survivors after more than 400 pilot whales beached themselves, the BBC reports.

About 300 stranded whales died overnight at Farewell Spit, on the South Island, in one of the worst such cases the country has seen.

Hundreds of locals and conservation officers have been trying to rescue the survivors since early Friday and formed a human chain to refloat the whales.

Scientists do not know what exactly causes whales to beach themselves.

But it sometimes happens because the whales are old and sick, injured, or make navigational errors particularly along gentle sloping beaches.

Sometimes when one whale is beached, it will send out a distress signal attracting other members of its pod, who then also get stranded by a receding tide.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s decisive run and finish in the Emirates FA Cup fourth-round win over Wigan Athletic has been voted Manchester United’s Goal of the Month for January – the second successive month he has topped the poll, accordig to the club’sofficial website.

Mkhitaryan’s driving run kick-started a brilliant counter-attack that the Armenian finished following good work by Anthony Martial, putting the Reds three goals to the good in the 4-0 triumph over the Latics.

The breakaway goal received 52 per cent of fans’ votes in the poll to take the prize ahead of Wayne Rooney’s landmark free-kick against Stoke City, which attracted 43 per cent of the vote, and Bastian Schweinsteiger’s instinctive hooked finish in the tie against Wigan (3 per cent).

Mkhitaryan also for his outrageous ‘scorpion kick’ against Middlesbrough. And while, by his own admission, that Boxing Day strike was the best goal he’d ever scored, the swift move against Wigan is another addition to his growing list of eye-catching efforts for the Reds.

Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan attended an event at the Government’s Reception House in Yerevan dedicated to the 38th anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Congratulating Ambassador Seyed Kazem Sadjadi and the friendly people of Iran on the Islamic Revolution anniversary, the Prime Minister of Armenia expressed the desire to further strengthen the Armenian-Iranian relations.

 

Reuters – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko plans a referendum on whether Ukraine should join the NATO alliance given polls that show 54 percent of Ukrainians now favor such a move, Germany’s Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain reported Thursday.

“Four years ago, only 16 percent (of the Ukrainian people) favored Ukraine’s entry into NATO. Now it’s 54 percent,” the media group quoted Poroshenko as saying in an interview. “As president, I am guided by the views of my people, and I will hold a referendum on the issue of NATO membership.”

He vowed to “do all I can to achieve membership in the transatlantic alliance” if the people voted in favor.

President Donald Trump has nominated Colorado federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch for the US Supreme Court, the BBC reports.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 49-year-old would replace the vacancy left on the court by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The upper chamber’s Democratic leader has already said he has “very serious doubts” about the nominee.

The court has the last legal word on many of the most sensitive US issues, from abortion to gender to gun control.

Contract serviceman Arayik Igor Sargsyan (born in 1995), was fatally wounded under unknown circumstances at one of the military units located in the southeastern direction of the NKR Defense Army at about 12:35 today, the NKR Defense Ministry reports.

Investigation into the circumstances of the incident is under way.

The NKR Defense Ministry shares the sorrow of the heavy loss and expresses condolences to the serviceman’s family and friends.

Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) lodged a complaint at an Istanbul prosecutor’s office, accusing Kurtulmus of breaching the universal human rights declaration to which Ankara is a party, as well as the Turkish penal code, AFP reports. 

The use by a senior Turkish official of a pejorative word meaning “infidel,” widely used in Ottoman times to describe non-Muslims, has sparked accusations of hate speech and fears of discrimination against minorities.

In a speech earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus used the word “gavur” (“infidel”), prompting an outcry from Turkey’s Armenian minority.

Kurtulmus on December 3 boasted of “new Turkey” being shaped under the wings of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) which he said stood against imperialism or exploitation.

“We need to take the issue of independence seriously. To us, independence is to stand tall and call an infidel ‘an infidel’,” he told a meeting in the northern Turkish city of Kastamonu.

Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) lodged a complaint at an Istanbul prosecutor’s office, accusing Kurtulmus of breaching the universal human rights declaration to which Ankara is a party, as well as the Turkish penal code.

Ahmet Hakan, a columnist in the Hurriyet newspaper, wrote that Kurtulmus’s comments constituted “hate crime.”

“Even the Ottoman (empire) that you like so much banned the use of expressions like ‘infidel’ in order to put an end to discrimination against non-Muslim citizens,” he said, referring to the government.

In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire banned the use by officials or private persons of inflammatory epithets based on religion, language or race, as part of a series of reforms heavily influenced by European ideas.

Garo Paylan, Istanbul MP of Armenian origin from the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said Kurtulmus’ comments were hate speech that required an apology.

“He should have apologised,” he told AFP. “I am an MP who was chased and stoned in his childhood and was labelled an infidel.”

Kurtulmus later clarified his comments, saying they were “not meant to offend our non Muslim citizens” but to take a firm stand against imperialism, in a statement to the official news agency Anadolu.

He also made a personal call to Hakan, saying: “There’s an epithet in my wife’s hometown that says “infidel haji’. Even a man who went to hajj (Muslim pilgrimage) is called infidel. Why? Because he is a tyrant.”

Paylan said the term “infidel” was a “contaminated word” and added: “When you ask people on the street who an infidel is, at least 50 percent would say he’s an Armenian.”

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian had a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting in Hamburg.

The interlocutors discussed a wide range of issues on bilateral agenda.

The Armenian and Russian Foreign Ministers discussed the steps towards furthering the process of peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

The parties stressed the importance of implementation of the agreements reached a the Vienna and St. Petersburg summits.

The  tunnel that will cross the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, is set to be named after a perpetrator of the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides, or someone responsible for the death of thousands of Armenians and Bulgarians.

The competing names according toare between Kemal Ataturk, the first President of the Turkish Republic, and Abdul Hamid, the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire,  reports.

CNN Turk have also revealed that Ataturk is winning the poll so far.

Ataturk was partially responsible for the genocide of millions of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians that began during the First World War.

Abdul Hamid, who struggled to maintain a fracturing empire, saw a pogrom against thousands of Armenians and Bulgarians.