The thousands of diplomats and environmental activists in Baku for the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) may believe the Azerbaijan they have experienced reflects reality. Azerbaijan’s hotels are luxurious. Grand early 20th century stone buildings, today sporting luxury brands from Bulgari to Bugatti, line Baku’s miles-long corniche. In reality, it is a Potemkin experience. Behind the façade is deep poverty and even deeper corruption. World Bank statistics show that despite billions of dollars in oil income, Azerbaijanis have, on average, a lower per capita income than their Armenian and Georgian neighbors. Azerbaijan not only sought to deceive COP29 delegates with a mirage about Azerbaijan’s development, but President Ilham Aliyev already used his inaugural speech to also sell a fake narrative about recent Azerbaijani history, its war with Armenia, and the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh.
At the core of the Azerbaijani narrative is the myth of the Khojaly massacre when, against the backdrop of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, dozens of Azerbaijanis died in a crossfire outside Khojaly while trying to flee the front line between Armenian and Azerbaijan.
Contemporaneous reports reflect the confusion of the fog of battle. A day after the battle, Reuters cited Azerbaijan’s Interior Minister Tofik Kerimov saying Armenians had killed 100 Azerbaijanis and wounded 250. Armenians do not deny fighting at Khojaly; Azerbaijan had transformed it into a military camp used to launch artillery and rockets at civilians in Stepanakert, a city populated almost entirely by Armenians.
How Many People Died at Khojaly?
Press reports at the time also focused on the fate of the former Soviet 366th Motorized Rifle Regiment, who found themselves caught between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and seemingly abandoned by Moscow as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Interviews with the 366th at the time suggest most soldiers wanted to return to Russia and other newly independent states. “Both sides here are crazy,” one Russian soldier remarked to the Los Angeles Times. “We don’t want to help either. We just want out.” At a higher level, however, the Russians were frustrated with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani shelling launched from Khojaly had killed several dozen Russian soldiers in Stepanakert.
As news of the battle of Khojaly spread, its alleged size and scope kept increasing.
While contemporaries dated the beginning of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War to February 1988, when leaders of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast parliament voted to unite with Armenia, the impending departure of the Soviet forces fueled the February 1992 fighting. Azerbaijani forces, which already had launched pogroms against Armenian Christians in Sumgait, Kirovabad (Ganja), and Baku sought to seize Nagorno Karabakh’s capital and use the 366th’s weaponry to slaughter its Armenians.
As news of the battle of Khojaly spread, its alleged size and scope kept increasing. Initial press accounts relied on Reuters, whose local correspondent was Azerbaijani with ready access to Azerbaijani officials. Many international journalists filed their reports from Moscow, sometimes adding context but relying on Azerbaijani stringers for the core of their articles. Numbers began to rise sharply. First Reuters and then the Washington Post reported an inflated figure of 477 deaths, which their local stringer sourced to Said Sadikov Muan, the imam of a mosque in Agdam, a town six miles away. When investigators arrived, they found not hundreds of bodies, but only seven bodies that refugees had transported from Khojaly, according to the Washington Post. Azerbaijani refugees only named several dozen dead. To the credit of the news outlets, they acknowledged the Azerbaijani numbers were “claims” and “unconfirmed.”
Still, the figures grew, even as Azerbaijan stopped providing registration, identification, or any other evidence to suggest the numbers cited by Azerbaijani sources correlated to real people. Australian press quoted Agdam Mayor Gunduz Akhundov as saying up to 1,000 people had fled Khojaly out of a population of 6,000.
On February 29, 1992, Los Angeles Times correspondent John-Thor Dahlburg arrived in Stepanakert and filed a report on Khojaly and its aftermath. He noted, “The Azerbaijanis claimed that 1,000 of their people were killed and declared three days of mourning.” Subsequent reporting implied that many of those killed had died in heavy fighting. Whereas Akhundov said 1,000 died in Khojaly alone, he appeared to conflate that number with the total dead since Azerbaijan-Armenia intercommunal fighting erupted in 1988. Armenian officials also disputed the numbers. “This is not true at all. There were only about 1,000 people there altogether,” Valery Pogosyan, then Armenia’s security chief, told reporters on March 3, 1992. Nor did the Azerbaijani figures ever acknowledge the firefight and include Armenian dead.
Western reporters who subsequently arrived on the scene said they saw “dozens of bodies” but exponentially fewer than what Azerbaijan had begun to claim. A Reuters photographer counted 70 bodies split between two trucks, all men and most in uniform. Perhaps because eyewitnesses contradicted the early claims, Azerbaijan’s official investigation subsequently estimated the death toll at closer to 600. Tales of mutilations and torture also appear false. Journalists who visited the site of the battle and then returned a day later on an Azerbaijan-organized propaganda tour reported Azerbaijani forces apparently mutilated bodies among their own casualties who had been exclusively under their control for the propaganda benefit.
Did Azerbaijani Soldiers Shoot Civilians?
Whereas Azerbaijani officials and their lobbyists today label events at Khojaly a genocide and lay blame at the hands of Armenians, politicians in Baku, as well as Azerbaijani and Western journalists, confirm a different course of events. Elman Mamedov, Khojaly’s own mayor at the time, put the blame on Russian forces who sought to fight their way out from between Azerbaijanis and Armenians. “Armored personnel carriers of the former Soviet army led the assault, followed by the Armenian irregulars,” Mamedov told reporters in Baku. Azerbaijani eyewitnesses from Khojaly repeated Mamedov’s accusation that Russian armored personnel carriers and Russian forces wielding heavy weapons led the assault, with Armenians close behind. While Russians dispute this, the eyewitness confusion reflects the fog of war and the chaos of the battle.
As news of Khojaly’s loss reached Baku, pressure mounted on Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov, the former Soviet Azerbaijan chief who led Azerbaijan to independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. To protect his own skin as anger mounted at the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh’s second largest town and the site of Nagorno-Karabakh’s only airport, Mutalibov turned rhetorical fire on Armenians. “The tragedy of Khojaly is a crime, another act of genocide by Armenian separatists against the Azerbaijani people,” he declared on March 2, 1992. It was the first official accusation of genocide. Mutalibov omitted Russia from his speech to avoid angering his Moscow patrons.
Azerbaijani officials tried to prevent the evacuation of civilians, fearing that the loss of their human shields might hasten the Armenian advance.
Mutalibov’s turn toward incitement and exaggeration was too little, too late. He was an independent, and the opposition Azerbaijan Popular Front smelled an opportunity. Four days later, they forced him to resign. He made a four-day comeback in May 1992, but the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh remained a lodestone around his neck; he lived in Moscow exile for the next two decades before Aliyev allowed him to return to Azerbaijan upon assurance of his silence.
Mutalibov told the independent Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on April 2, 1992, that Armenians had left a corridor for the evacuation of civilians, a fact that Mamedov confirmed. Azeri journalist Ejnulla Fatullayev recalled interviews with Khojaly residents who said that Armenian forces had warned civilians to leave via loudspeaker before fighting began. Azerbaijani officials tried to prevent the evacuation of civilians, fearing that the loss of their human shields might hasten the Armenian advance.
In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights heard evidence in a case lodged against Azerbaijan by a journalist, Eynulla Emin oglu Fatullayev, whom Azerbaijan imprisoned for reporting that Azerbaijan, not Armenia, was responsible for the Khojaly massacre. After hearing his evidence, the Court found against Azerbaijan. Years later, on March 6, 2001, Mutalibov speculated to Novoye Vremya that Azerbaijani forces may have killed many Azerbaijani civilians in a cynical attempt to justify the coup against him. Such thinking might sound conspiratorial, but he was not necessarily wrong. In April 1992, the Azeri news service Bilik-Dunyasy quoted Heydar Aliyev, president from 1993-2003 and the father of current president Ilham Aliyev, as saying, “The bloodshed will be to our advantage.” Other officials acknowledged the plot. Mukhalifat, an Azerbaijani newspaper, quoted Tamerlan Karayev, first deputy chairman of Azerbaijan’s Supreme Council, on April 28, 1992, after Mutalibov’s ouster as saying, “The tragedy was committed by the [current] authorities of Azerbaijan… someone very high‐ranking.”
Why Does Azerbaijan Promote the Khojaly Massacre Myth?
Today, the “Khojaly Genocide” myth is a central pillar of Azerbaijani policy and the Aliyev family’s legitimacy. Official Azerbaijani websites compare Khojaly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry states, “In violation of all international legal norms, Armenian armed forces attacked the civilian population of the sieged town of Khojaly with heavy military equipment, killing them with unprecedented brutality.” Heydar Aliyev used the massacre to justify Mutalibov’s ouster and his rule. “Our citizens’ cry for help was ignored, and despite possessing real capabilities to rescue Khojaly, the innocent population was knowingly subjected to this massacre.”
As Azerbaijan remains on war footing, [Aliyev] seeks to create moral equivalence between aggressor and victim.
As corruption and mismanagement increased and ordinary Azerbaijani dissent grew, Ilham Aliyev doubled down on the Khojaly myth to justify his rule, often faking photographs, some of which date to the 1983 Erzurum earthquake. Azerbaijan also has depicted photographs of atrocities in Kosovo falsely as originating in Khojaly.
Aliyev’s goal in promoting the Khojaly myth is clear. As Azerbaijan remains on war footing, he seeks to create moral equivalence between aggressor and victim. That he must lie to do so indicates the dishonesty of Baku’s position. As grumbling in Azerbaijan increases, he also seeks to use exaggerated claims of Azerbaijan’s own “Hiroshima” to distract and incite the Azerbaijani public.
Americans Should Be Wary of the Khojaly Myth
At issue is not just the Azerbaijani public, however. Aliyev’s cynical propaganda play now entraps American officials. In 2016, James Warlick, who as co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group was the chief U.S. diplomat dedicated to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, attended a “Justice for Khojaly” event organized in part by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who was subsequently charged with bribery and illegal Azerbaijan lobbying. The Caspian Policy Center, a group whose advisory board includes prominent Washington think tankers, defense scholars, and retired U.S. ambassadors, likewise promoted the Khojaly myth. The Center even cited U.S. Ambassador Robert Cekuta’s statement that “The Khojaly tragedy is one of the most terrible events of the 20th century,” a declaration that suggests ignorance of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, World War II, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, Bosnian civil war, and Rwandan genocide.
By commemorating the “Khojaly Massacre” in 2019 and lying about its perpetrators in the official record, then-Helsinki Commission Chairman Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.) made a mockery of the commission. This past February, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) likewise promoted the myth on the floor of Congress. Mark Libby, the U.S. ambassador in Baku, also commemorated the “genocide,” effectively endorsing Aliyev’s falsehoods. His sycophancy may have smoothed his personal relations with Azerbaijan’s dictator, but it came at the expense of truth, U.S. interests, and the State Department’s own efforts to achieve peace.
President Donald Trump’s greatest successes have come when he challenged conventional wisdom and refused to buy received narratives. As he prepares for his second term, it will be essential that he recognize that America’s adversaries craft myths to confuse and corrupt policy. Ilham Aliyev might embrace the Khojaly myth to justify his family’s rule, but the United States, Russia, Armenia, and ordinary Azerbaijanis should not do so. It is time to calibrate policy to reality, rather than the conceits and ego of an increasingly irrational dictator.
