A non-governmental organization in Yerevan has presented a newly launched website that it says proves false about two dozen photographs earlier circulated in public domain about the events near the village of Khojalu during the 1991-1994 Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Karabakh.

Xocali.net (presented by Initiative Against Xenophobia) says that Azerbaijani propaganda is actively using false materials through the press, in books and online that have nothing to do with the part of the Aghdam military operation (which took place near the village of Khojalu on February 26).

Eighteen years ago the defense army of Nagorno-Karabakh took control of the Azeri place of arms located 10 kilometers to the west of Karabakh capital Stepanakert. It was the place of location of a notorious Khojalu airfield through which mercenaries from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Russia’s breakaway province of Chechnya had been arriving to engage in the Karabakh war on the Azeri side. The seizure of the locality was a major strategic objective for the Armenian military that shifted the subsequent course of war.

Azerbaijan has tried to portray that operation as ethnic cleansing against the civilian population. The Armenian side has insisted that Azerbaijan distorts the events and accuses Azeri military of using civilians as a shield against their offensive despite the fact that Karabakh forces had given the Azeris time to evacuate the area before they launched attack.

As Azerbaijan’s then leader Ayaz Mutalibov confirmed on numerous occasions, Nagorno-Karabakh authorities had informed the Azerbaijani side about their plans still before launching the operation, but Azeri authorities never allowed the evacuation of the civilians in the village that stood in the way of the Armenian military. Later Mutalibov also admitted that it was Azerbaijani military who opened fire on the column of Azeri civilians on the approaches of Aghdam district’s borders. Mutalibov linked that action with the plot to topple his presidency in which the opposition laid the whole blame on him.

Now, authorities in Azerbaijan lobby for recognition of the events of Khajalu as “genocide”.

The website Xocali.net, available in six languages: English, Russian, Azeri, French, German and Farsi, mainly targets a foreign audience. The authors used the spelling of the place name used by Azerbaijanis (Xocali, not Khojali), so that a website presenting the Armenian perspective be available online under numerous website with similar names (using the Azeri spelling).

According to Armenian information security expert Samvel Martirosyan, they first revealed Azeri falsifications during the time when the Azerbaijani side presented the photographs of Georgian soldiers killed as a result of the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 as footage relating to the Khojalu events. Martirosyan says that further studies revealed, however, that “in reality there are an awful lot of lies.”

Initiative Against Xenophobia NGO chairman Armine Adibekyan presented the photographs of wounded children that Azerbaijanis often present as photographs from the Khojalu events. She says that, in reality, those photos had been made three years before the events, after a bus explosion. According to the authors, the photo of a mourning mother near the dead bodies of her children has no relation to Khajalu either, as it was made in Turkey in 1983, after a deadly earthquake. Azerbaijanis very often present a photograph made during the Balkan conflicts as one the was made during the events of Khojalu.

According to Martirosyan, Azerbaijan resorts to falsehood in order to hide its own crimes.

“Raising noise around Khojalu, they are trying to obscure the Sumgait pogroms [of Armenians],” says Martirosyan.

The authors of the website have also revealed lies in the lists of the dead. The Armenian side, they say, is also conducting serious work in this direction. The staff that runs the website will continue to make research in order to “present the true story of Khojalu to the world.”