Comment by Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharyan on the 25th anniversary of Maragha tragedy
April 10 marks one of the darkest, yet not widely known pages of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, when 25 years ago Azerbaijan committed gross violation of the International Humanitarian Law.
On April 10, 1992, the Azerbaijani “OMON” – Special Purpose Mobility Unit, destroyed and set on fire Maragha village of the self-determined Artsakh Republic, burned alive and tortured to death through inhuman cruelty its peaceful population. A part of the villagers was taken as a hostage – the fate of some of them is still unknown.
In several hours of Azerbaijan’s control over the village its inhabitants went through the atrocities and barbarism, which fully meet all the criteria of a crime against humanity.
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The impunity for atrocities committed in Maragha encouraged the continuation of perpetration of new crimes in an atmosphere of complete permissiveness. The barbarism committed by the Azerbaijani armed forces during last April aggression against Artsakh undeniably prove that.