Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

naya Zvezda, 19 February 1992. 
14.  Interview with Shabad. 
15.  Interview with Horton, 2 January 2001. Ashot Manucharian said that 
“we often paid the Stepanakert Regiment and they fired at Shusha” (from his 
interview of 15 October 2000). Arif Yunusov even gives prices, although with-
out sources. He says that twenty liters of alcohol were paid for firing at Shusha; 
five thousand rubles for the use of an APC in an operation; one thousand for it 
firing a shot. Arif Yunusov, “Tragediya Khodjaly” [The tragedy of Khodjaly], 
Zerkalo No. 26, 20–26 June 1992. Alexander Kasatov (in “Sama ne Svoya” [Not 
its own]) estimates that of an original number of 1,200 soldiers in the 366th Reg­
iment, 350 remained when it was withdrawn. 
16.  “Voennye v Karabakhe—Posredniki ili zalozhniki?” [Soldiers in Kara­
bakh—mediators or hostages?], Argumenty i Fakty No. 7, February 1992. 
17.  Interview with Danielian, 14 October 2000. 
18.  Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 150; interview with Ali; Human Rights Watch, 
Azerbaijan, Seven Years of Conflict, 51–57. 
19.  Interview with Melkonian, 7 May 2000. 
20.  Agajanov, Svetlaya Storona Voiny [The bright side of the war], 57. 
21.  Arif Yunusov, “Tragediya Khodjaly” [The tragedy of Khodjaly], Zerkalo 
No. 25, 13–19 June 1992. 
22.  Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 119; Elman Mamedov, head of the Khojali town 
administration, interviewed in Aghdam by ANS television, February 1992; 
Yunusov, “Tragediya Khodjaly” [The tragedy of Khodjaly], Zerkalo  No. 25, 
13–19 June 1992. Goltz says that Hajiev had 60 OMON policemen under his 
command; Yunusov puts the total number of defenders at 160. 
23.  Human Rights Watch, Bloodshed in the Caucasus, 22. 
24.  Anatol Lieven, “Bodies Mark Site of Karabakh Massacre,” The Times, 3 
March 1992; interview with Agayev, 25 November 2000. 
25.  Many different statistics have emerged from the Khojali tragedy. This 
is not surprising, considering the circumstances. Access to the killing grounds 
near Nakhichevanik was difficult; hundreds of people were taken prisoner and 

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for many days were unaccounted for. A general phenomenon of these trage­
dies—true also of the pogroms in Sumgait and Baku—also has to be taken into 
account: lists of dead are compiled that include people who are missing and 
later turn up alive, or who were seen lying motionless but were in fact wounded 
rather than dead. In ascending order of magnitude, the following figures have 
variously been given: Namig Aliev, one of the parliamentary investigators, told 
Helsinki Watch in April 1992 that 213 victims had been buried in Aghdam. An-
other Azerbaijani official, Aiden Rasulov, told the same team of researchers that 
more than 300 bodies showing evidence of a violent death—and presumably not 
including those who had died of cold—had been submitted for forensic exami­
nation. (The two foregoing figures come from Human Rights Watch, Bloodshed 
in the Caucasus, 23.) The newspaper Karabakh reported that the Commission for 
Aid to Refugees from Khojaly had distributed benefits to 476 families of those 
who had been killed (letter to the author from Arif Yunusov, April 2001.) The 
imam in Aghdam showed Thomas Goltz an incomplete list of 477 reported dead 
by their families (Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 122–123). The Azerbaijani newspaper 
Ordu (issues 9, 16, and 20, 1992) printed a list of 636 victims (Yunusov letter). 
26. Reporting from Aghdam, Thomas Goltz had considerable problems 
persuading editors to take his story seriously. The Mutalibov interview was on 
2 April 1991 in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 
27.  Paul Quinn-Judge, “Armenians, Azerbaijanis tell of terror; Behind an 
alleged massacre, a long trail of personal revenge,” Boston Globe, 15 March 1992. 
28.  Khodjaly, Khronika Genotsida [Khojali, a chronicle of genocide] (Baku 
1992), 32. 
29.  Quinn-Judge, op. cit. 
30.  Interview with Avsharian, 18 May 2000. 
31.  The former Azerbaijani president Ayaz Mutalibov says that he learned 
that Gaziev had acquired Grads only when the bombardment of Stepanakert 
began: “One day someone reports to me that this Rahim Gaziev is attacking 
Stepanakert with Grads. I rang and said, ‘Have you gone mad?’ He says, ‘What 
else can I do?’ I say, ‘What do you think, the Armenians won’t get Grads, do you 
understand what you’re doing?’” Interview with Mutalibov, 30 May 2000. 
32.  Interview with Kerimov, 13 November 2000. 
33.  Interview with Byrkin, 1 June 2000. 
34.  Bennett, Crying Wolf, 65. 
35.  On Maraga, see Human Rights Watch, Bloodshed in the Caucasus, 29; 
Caroline Cox and John Eibner, Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno-