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Of: TT
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Photo: Emrah Gurel / AP / TT
Azerbaijani Army in Nagorno-Karabakh. Stock Photography.
The Azeri army cuts the throat of an Armenian civilian.
An Azerbaijani border guard is stabbed in the throat and killed.
Both parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict committed war crimes, according to Amnesty International.
Testimonies and video evidence through video recordings begin to tell the hell that followed the advance of the army and armed groups in the Azerbaijani separatist republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The fighting began on September 27 between the Azerbaijani military and Armenian fighters. The reports of the asymmetric fronts were scarce by independent actors. Only now organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are beginning to have access to verifiable statements.
Amnesty has accessed and analyzed 22 video clips showing how prisoners of war are beaten and mutilated. Besides pure murder.
Denis Krivosheev, who is leading the investigations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, notes that both parties to the conflict “showed complete disregard for the laws of war.”
Contempt for martial law
“The moral decay, the lack of compassion captured in these recordings shows the conscious will to inflict complete harm and humiliation on the victims,” he wrote in his report.
HRW reaches the same conclusion in a report published on December 2, where the organization interviewed family members and verified information on the many disappeared as prisoners of war, with an uncertain fate.
“There is no defense for the violence and inhumanity that prisoners of war have received,” writes Hugh Williamson, who leads the organization’s work in Central Asia.
But the evidence of war crimes reaches another terrible level in several of the video images reviewed by Amnesty. One of them shows how a victim is beheaded. The military uniforms, with the Azeri flag on the shoulder and the blood type noted on the sleeve of the coat, show that the men belong to the Azeri army. In the recording, a man is forced to lie on the ground, he does not have a shirt and he only wears boxers and pants. They cut off his head, then the watching group watches.
Pig carcass head
In another sequence of the same incident, the man’s head has been placed on the carcass of a pig. “This is how we get revenge, cutting off their heads,” says one of them in the group.
Sources confirm that the victim was a civilian, according to Amnesty.
In another incident, also filmed, a man lies on the ground, bound and gagged. He wears an Azeri border guard uniform.
The man filming speaks Armenian, then walks up to the victim and stabs him in the throat.
The two organizations Amnesty and HRW demand that the parties comply with international law and protect the civilian population, and that they investigate and convict those responsible for the crime.
Fighting ceased in Nagorno-Karabakh after the ceasefire ended on 9 November. Both Russia and Turkey were indirectly involved in the conflict.
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