“GEGHARD”
SCIENTIFIC ANALYTICAL
FOUNDATION
2025
2025
On April 10, 1992, detachments of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan carried out a massacre of the Armenian civilian population in the village of Maragha, located in the Martakert district of the Republic of Artsakh. At 5 a.m., Azerbaijani forces began shelling the village. Fighters of the Artsakh Liberation Army, under the command of Leonid Azgaldyan and Vladimir Balayan, managed to repel two assaults. However, the adversary was eventually able to break the defense. With the support of 20 armored vehicles, the Azerbaijani “Gurtulush” battalion—comprising around 1,000 soldiers—succeeded in entering the village. While most of the population managed to flee, many were unable to escape.
Azerbaijani servicemen killed those who remained in Maragha or subjected them to inhuman torture. They looted and set fire to 175 homes. The next day, self-defense forces liberated Maragha and found the brutally murdered bodies of 43 Armenian civilians. The attackers had dismembered the corpses, desecrated and burned them; they had beheaded some, burned others, and gouged out the eyes of several victims.[1] “When we entered Maragha at noon the next day,” writes Zori Balayan, “we were met only by charred houses that were still burning. An exhumation was made. Our video footage captured beheaded and burned bodies. Some of that footage was broadcast on the ‘Vesti’ news program. The world reacted with astonishing calm to the tragedy of Maragha—not because everyone had grown used to such horrors, but because the Azeris and the Turks were conducting a highly active propaganda campaign, spreading disinformation across the globe.”[2]
“The village was completely destroyed. People were burying the victims—or rather, what was left to bury: body parts of those tortured to death, burned alive, mutilated or sawn apart. Some had been buried the previous day, but we exhumed them for documentation, though we understood how painful that was for the Armenians. What was filmed in Maragha during those days clearly shows the horror of the massacre: beheaded and dismembered corpses, children’s bodies, blood-soaked earth and body parts which had been sawn. We saw bloodied sickles that were likely used in the massacre—perhaps we should have taken them with us as evidence, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After killing the residents, the Azerbaijanis looted and burned the village. Civilians came in after the soldiers and continued the looting…” testified Baroness Caroline Cox, a member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom and former Deputy Speaker, as well as a human rights advocate. She visited Maragha shortly after the tragedy with a delegation from the organization Christian Solidarity Worldwide.
According to Baroness Cox, more than 45 residents of the village were killed. Armenian sources list 57 civilians as killed and 45 as taken captive—including 9 children and 29 women.
According to the international human rights organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, war crimes committed by Azerbaijani armed forces in Maragha resulted in the brutal killing of 50 Armenian civilians, including 30 women. Another 50 people were taken captive, among them 29 women and 9 children. The fate of 19 of the captives remains unknown to this day.
British expert on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, Thomas de Waal, wrote: “The massacre in Maragha—an Armenian village—was almost unknown, but extremely brutal...” [3]
On May 11, 1992, Azerbaijani forces launched another attack on Maragha with 16 armored vehicles, but Armenian forces under the command of Ashot Ghulyan (Bekor) successfully repelled the assault. The village residents returned and continued to live there until June 17, when Azerbaijani forces launched a new offensive, once again capturing the village and taking 13 Armenian civilians captive.
In total, 90 Armenian residents were killed in Maragha in 1992, and 37 were severely wounded, including 21 women and 6 children. [4]
The Maragha massacre received almost no coverage and remained largely unknown to the broader public.
Shahin Talib oghlu Tagiyev, the commander of the Azerbaijani armed forces' “Gurtulush” battalion that carried out the massacre of Armenians in Maragha, was awarded the title of national hero of Azerbaijan. This fact places full responsibility for the atrocity on the Azerbaijani authorities. This kind of behavior became systematic. On February 19, 2004, Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov, who murdered Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan in Budapest, was also glorified as a national hero upon his return to Azerbaijan.
The massacre of the Armenian population of Maragha was yet another manifestation of the Azerbaijani authorities’ hatred toward Armenians and part of a consistent policy of ethnic cleansing which had already been implemented between 1988 and 1991 in Sumgait, Baku, and other settlements across Azerbaijan, and later in Northern Artsakh. The impunity for the crimes committed against Armenians by Soviet Azerbaijan and later by the newly independent Republic of Azerbaijan since 1991, as well as the international community’s failure to deliver an adequate political and legal response, created fertile ground for the strengthening of state-sponsored hatred toward Armenians. Azerbaijan employed the same genocidal methods against the Armenian population of Artsakh during the April 2016 escalation and again from September to November 2020. As a result of the Azerbaijani authorities’ persistent policy of ethnic cleansing, the Republic of Artsakh was completely depopulated of Armenians in September 2023.
[1] About Maragha events see Human Rights Watch, Bloodshed in the Caucasus, p. 29; Caroline Cox and John Eibner, Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno-Karabakh, London: Institute for Religious Minorities in the Islamic World, 1993; "The Tragedy of Maragha: Four Years Later" - Voice of Armenia, April 9, 1996, Levon Melik-Shakhnazaryan, War Crimes of Azerbaijan Against the Civilian Population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Yerevan, 1997 /http://armenianhouse.org/mshakhnazaryan/docs-ru/crime/contents.html; Levon Melik-Shakhnazaryan, Azerbaijan's War Crimes Against the Civilian Population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Yerevan, 1998.; «Christianity Today. Baroness Cox: Survivors of the Maraghar Massacre» /https://www.christianitytoday.com/1998/04/survivors-of-maraghar-massacre/։ Bakur Karapetyan, Margushavan - Maragha: A Documentary Story, Shushi, 2013.
[2] Zori Balayan, Between Hell and Paradise: Karabakh, Studies, Moscow, 1995, p. 89.
[3] Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Between Peace and War, Moscow, 2005, Chapter 11, p. 240.
[4] “April 10, 1992. The Maragha Massacre. Azerbaijan's Anti-Armenian Genocidal Behavior” article, published in the Greek Armenian newspaper Azat Or on April 10, 2017.