I bow to Khojaly victims with a sense of shame

“Khojaly continues … no matter whether it is a genocide or a war crime or tragedy,” Armenian expert, Chairman of the Caucasus Center for Peacekeeping Initiatives Georgi Vanyan said.

“Khojaly continues, remaining closed issue, and being in a continuous of process of political speculation and generation of war,” he said.

“Khojaly could be threshold of a humanitarian catastrophe, the line near which a person was supposed to stop. We crossed this threshold and to this day we avoid thinking that it is time to stop,” Vanyan said.

“Khojaly is a shame and a scourge for everyone let it be Armenian or Azerbaijani, for anyone who has preserved dignity and by chance survived and continues to remain alive in this undeclared but de facto ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani war,” he noted.

“Are not deaths on both sides of the front where under mysterious circumstances a sniper bullet or a mine explosion takes lives of people with impunity continuation of the Khojaly tragedy? Transformation of human tragedies and human lives into vulgar statistics of losses on either side is a guided by a criminal logic of what happened in Khojaly.”

The mechanism here is the same – the terror, in which the value of a man is his death and the political dividends that ensure future of a war and provide an eternity of this process of barbarous sacrifice. I bow to the victims of Khojaly, before their relatives and all who lived through the pain of loss with a sense of shame and helplessness,” said the expert.

“Very often we have to repeat the well-known truth. Authorities, in particular, representatives of a power, whether it was constitutional or a shadow, is responsible for killing people – whether it is ethnic cleansing, an act of intimidation or a to war. Neither the people nor its individual members bear responsibility directly. Authorities are responsible for the crime once they take no action or encourage it,” the Armenian expert said asked whether Armenia will plead guilty for Khojaly genocide.

“Do you really think it is appropriate to demand Yerevan to plead guilty? Do you think we can seriously talk about any confession or truth at current circumstances?”

ToDay.Az