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The Successes of the Spin Doctors:Western Media Reporting on theNagorno Karabakh ConflictThomas GoltzPublished online: 31 Jul 2012.

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The Successes of the Spin Doctors: Western MediaReporting on the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict

THOMAS GOLTZ

Abstract

All propagandists by definitionwant their side of the story to be the first draft of history,and then to have that first draft used as footnotes for the rest of time. By equal defi-nition, all propagandists want to de-legitimize anything that contradicts theirversion of events. This is the job of a spin-doctor, and such an individual (or insti-tution) cannot be ethically ormorally blamed formeeting their job description. In spin-ning a story, they are merely doing their job. In contrast, journalists covering a crisisare supposed to be wary of dramatic press releases and partisan reporting, balloonstories and disinformation, as well as blatant lies. Sadly, this was not the case formuch of the Western reporting on the Karabakh “story” of 1991–1994. The sheerweight and availability of reference material for student or scholar looking intothose events today remains lopsidedly in favor of the Armenian version. In thispaper we will analyze how the Armenians won the Karabakh war of informationhands-down, defining what happened in terms of where, when and why. Arguably,of even greater importance, how they managed to define the basic terms of referencethat are used to frame the conflict. Indeed this demonstrates the efficiency withwhich the Armenian spin-doctors achieved their informational aims and by thesame measure how inefficient the Azerbaijanis were in achieving theirs.

Introduction

“Truth is the first casualty of war” runs the classic line about war correspondence. That iscertainly true about the bulk of reporting of the yet-to-be-resolved Armenian–Azerbaijaniconflict over that part of western Azerbaijan known as Karabakh. This is most apparentbefore the spilling of the “first blood” in the conflict in 1988, during which took placethe escalation into real war between 1991 and 1994. Even after the cease-fire of 1994that turned Karabakh into the so-called “frozen” conflict that pertains today, it is nearly20 years afterArmenia’s occupation of some15%of internationally recognizedAzerbaijaniterritory.

Indeed, after working as a journalist for over a decade in Turkey, the Middle East, theBalkans—all areas where just about everybody accuses everybody else of partisan report-ing and promoting agendas—one might have assumed that I was sufficiently toughenedup and prepared to face the fusillade of seesaw “spin”, balloon stories, disinformation andout-right lies, that emerged from the on-going Karabakh tragedy, but I was wrong.

The Karabakh war of information/disinformation topped anything I had ever seenbefore, or have seen since: Abkhazia (1993), Chechnya (1996–1998), Kosovo (1999)and South Ossetia (2008); not to mention the on-going conflicts in such places asAfghanistan, Iraq and now the Arab world, which I follow more distantly in the guiseof an academic. The key concept in all these conflicts is the “war of information”, and

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 2, June 2012

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I shall be referring to that general concept with specific references again and again, as it isthe essence of this paper and a key to understanding the conflict.

Spin Doctors, Terms of Reference and “N. K.”

All propagandists—and I mean that in the most general sense of the word—by definitionwant their side of the story to be the first draft of history, and then to have that first draftused as footnotes for the rest of time. By equal definition, all propagandists—again, neu-trally stated—want to de-legitimize anything that contradicts their version of events. Thisis the job of a spin-doctor, and such an individual (or institution) cannot be ethically ormorally blamed for fulfilling their job description. In spinning the story, they are merelydoing their job.What makes the Karabakh case unique and interesting is the difference between how

efficient the Armenian spin-doctors were in achieving their informational aims, andhow miserably inefficient the Azerbaijanis were in achieving theirs. This starts with themost basic terms used to define the Karabakh status:

Nagorno Karabakh, the disputed ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan…

This is the standard formulation found in virtually all English-language media, diplo-matic documents and even intellectual conversation to describe the subject of Karabakhin quick summation, and there is so much wrong with that sentence that it is almost notworth counteracting, aside from a few cantankerous nitpickers such as this researcher.To begin with, Nagorno is nothing more than a Russian adjective meaning “mountai-

nous”, and has a widely used equivalent in all the languages of the world, including Arme-nian, Azerbaijani and English. Sometimes it is accurately relabeled “upper” as analternative to “mountainous”, but the point is the same: if there is an “upper” anything,logic demands that there is also a “lower”. If there is a “mountain”, one presumes there isalso an associated “valley”. But when the non-Russian language speaker hears theRussian adjective “Nagorno” appended to “Karabakh”, that part of western Azerbaijanbecomes mystified into something quite different than the geographic reality of aregion made up of both mountain and valley, and in terms of the awful conflict thatraged particularly between the years 1991 and 1994, it was in the valley—lower Kara-bakh—that most of the human suffering occurred.Upper or lower,mountain or valley; these are the terms that need to be usedwhen speak-

ing or writing in English in order to understand the geography of the protracted conflict—and these are the terms that are consistently missing from the western media reporting onthe same. To repeat, almost without exception, the English-language reporting in theNew York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Manchester Guardian, Irish Times—in addition to news agencies from Reuters’ to the Associated Press—all employed andcontinue to employ the mysterious term “Nagorno”, either by engrained editorial habit,or because they actually like mystifying the subject. Using “Nagorno” when discussingthe Karabakh conflict is about as useful and logical as insisting on using the Russian adjec-tive “Churney” when speaking about the ancient Euxine Sea in English or Turkish. Bothlanguages contain perfectly good cognates for the adjective or the concept of “black”.

Enclaves and Exclaves: A Part of Your State or Mine?

Much more important than that semantic obsession of mine is the second error in thatbasic descriptive sentence that is still consistently repeated by virtually all Western

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media when describing the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict, because it is geographic innature. Specifically, this alludes to describing Karabakh with the emotionally loadedword as being an “enclave”. The last time I looked up a standard English-language ency-clopedia for this reference, an “enclave” is defined as either a state or part of a state com-pletely enveloped by another. Lesotho, for example, is a true enclave because it iscompletely surrounded by South Africa. Swaziland, in contrast, is not, as it hasborders with both South Africa and Mozambique.

Real enclaves are geographically rather rare, because they tend to get eaten up by thesurrounding state. A quick list of real enclaves today is limited to the aforementionedLesotho, San Marino and the Vatican (which are both surrounded by Italy) as well acouple of geographic British Indian Raj Era oddities inside Bangladesh. Native Americanreservations in the USA, First Nation homelands in Canada and Aboriginal reserves inAustralia could qualify for enclave status if one chooses to regard these last entities asindependent states. A further stretch would include Switzerland, Andorra and Liechten-stein if the European Union (EU) is regarded as a single state, but clearly not if individualEU states’ borders are used as lines of delimitation. West Berlin was perhaps the world’smost famous enclave with every claim to the emotional sense of being surrounded by aninimical power, but lost that status with German reunification. With the shift of the WestGerman capital from Bonn to Greater Berlin, one could argue that the erstwhile enclavethen gobbled up East Germany, which is rather like what happened to the Apartheid-era“Bantustan” enclaves scattered around South Africa prior to the demolition of the Apart-heid system under the leadership of President Nelson Mandela.1

As suggested, real enclaves are few and far between. A somewhat less geographicallyrare alternative to being an enclave is to be an “exclave”, meaning to be part of a statethat has no contiguous borders to the main state. This is often confused with being an“enclave”, but it is not the same thing. Some refer to Kaliningrad as a post-SovietRussian “enclave” on the Baltic Sea whereas it is not so. Rather it is a true “exclave”,as is Alaska, which is also clearly not an American “enclave” in the northern Pacific,because it is not surrounded by Canada.

Sometimes, it is possible to be both an enclave and an exclave at the same time. Theaforementioned Camp Zeist2 was both a legal part of territorial Scotland with no contig-uous borders with the mainland and completely surrounded by Holland. The erstwhileWest Berlin was a more dubious case of being both enclave (which it certainly was)and exclave at the same time: until German reunification, it was technically underAllied occupation, and thus not “part” of West Germany per se.

In terms of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict, for the geographic record, I would liketo point out that there were territorial enclaves and exclaves associated with both republicsduring Soviet times: three Azerbaijani enclaves/exclaves in Armenia, namely Barxudanli,Yuxari Eskipara and Karki, which were more or less large villages inside Armenia butlegally part of Azerbaijan, and one true Armenian enclave/exclave (Artsvashen) insideAzerbaijan.3

As for Mountainous “Nagorno”—Karabakh—it could never claim the status of beingeither “enclave” or “exclave”, let alone the much more emotion-stirring combination ofboth. To be an enclave, it had to be either an independent state surrounded by anotherstate or an Armenian exclave surrounded by another state (in both cases, Azerbaijan).Mountainous “Nagorno”—Karabakh—never qualified for either of those geographicallydefinable categories, neither in history nor in today’s understanding.4

This may come as a surprise to many readers, and is due quite simply to the success ofthe Armenian side in defining the linguistic/geographical terms of discussion in order to

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garner sympathy and support. How can even the hardest geopolitical heart not melt alittle when considering the fate of plucky and proud people, engulfed and under siege?Turning the mountainous part of internationally recognized western Azerbaijani territoryinto the mysterious “enclave” of “Nagorno Karabakh” in international discourse hasbeen a great success for Armenian spin-doctors, and is largely due to the fact that theArmenian propaganda machine worked, while the Azerbaijani machine did not. Theworld spoke and continues to speak in Armenian-elected terms, while the Azerbaijaniside continues to play a catch-up game, ham-strung in trying to explain its perspectiveand the correct status.5

Getting out the “True News” Blues: Reporting on Khodjali

I received my first full blast of Armenian information-packaging competency and Azer-baijani in-competency in connection with the Khodjali Massacre of February 26/27,1992. Khodjali, a small, isolated town—“an enclave within an enclave” to use all thewrong terms—inside Mountainous “Nagorno”—Karabakh, had become the primetarget for Armenian retribution and revenge for the so-called Sumgayit “pogroms” ofFebruary 28, 1988, which many increasingly think of as a set piece of media manipulationdesigned to make the Azerbaijanis look like blood-sucking barbarians and thus set thestage for the “need” for Karabakh to secede from Azerbaijan, lest the barbarians runwild there too.6

The only thing extraordinary about this was that the Azerbaijani state did not see itcoming, nor did they make any moves to prevent the inevitable. Khodjali controlledthe only viable airport in Mountainous Karabakh, and control of it was an obvious mili-tary goal. Had I been an Armenian military thinker, I would have thought the same thingand given the same command: take it! And they did just that on the night of February 25/26, 1992, and in a particularly brutal fashion.I was not there at Khodjali that night, but living in Baku and completely clueless about

the horrors of Khodjali until tipped off by a contact that something very bad had hap-pened in Karabakh, I then decided to pursue that tip by taking the first car I couldfind to a town called Agdam, arriving around noon on February 26th. There I ran intothe first trickle of shocked survivors, a trickle that soon swelled into a Tsunami wave ofexhausted and terrorized refugees, whose related stories of butchery and sadism wereso hair-raising that my initial reporter’s impulse was to disbelieve them all. Maintaininga healthy dose of skepticism is essential in the journalism trade, particularly in areas andsituations beset by trauma and extreme despair—war zones, in a nutshell.Then, fortuitously and perhaps fatefully, I started running into people I knew amongst

the survivors, both civilian and military, from previous visits to the forsaken town. Whilethe commander of the tiny Khodjali garrison, Alef Khadjiev had been killed defending thewomen and children (many of whom died anyway) and was thus not available forcomment, his wife, several of his men and diverse others filled me in on the sordid,bloody details in a factual, if not obviously emotional manner.The basic data reads as follows: on February 25, 1992, Armenian forces, backed by the

Russian 366th mounted infantry unit stationed in Stepanakert, surrounded the town ofKhodjali, telling civilians they would be allowed safe passage if they evacuated. As thou-sands left the town, Armenian troops opened fire. By next morning, 613 innocent civi-lians had been murdered, including 63 children. Another 1,000 people were woundedand 1,275 taken hostage. To this day, 150 people remain missing and Khodjali hasbeen turned into a horrible symbol of terror.7

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Putting Doubts to Rest: An Unusual Armenian Source

If any more evidence is required in this regard, I would like to cite an extended passagefrom the biography of one of the most celebrated Armenian fighters in the course of theKarabakh conflict. It is a loving account of the life and times of Monte Melkonian, anAmerican from California, written by his brother, Markar Melkonian.8

Perhaps a little context is needed. Monte was a star student at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley, USA, who threw away a full scholarship to Oxford to study archeology inorder to go to Beirut and become an assassin associated with the Armenian Secret Armyfor the Liberation of Armenia, or ASALA, in 1979 and early 1980s. After killing a Turkishdiplomat and his daughter in Greece, he got shot in Rome and ended up in a Paris jail in1985. Rather than being extradited to the United States, however, he managed to havehimself sent to the then “friendly” land of South Yemen in 1989, from where he madehis way to Soviet Armenia via Bulgaria in 1990 on false passports. He then joined inthe “good fight” over Karabakh, rose through the ranks to become the commander ofthe fedayeen units around the town of Martuni and the Fizuli front, eventually becomingone of the most feared and thus fabled commanders in the Armenian forces before hisdeath on June 12, 1993 outside Agdam.9

I relate this all to underline the point that there is no reason whatsoever to doubt ordisbelieve his brother’s account of Monte’s life, drawn from multiple interviews, on-site inspection and the use of Monte’s diary, in which he kept exacting notes on eachand every event in his life, and particularly during his time as “Commander Avo” in Kar-abakh. The passage relates to fighting in February 1992, and it does not make for prettyreading. The most interesting part is the clear admittance that while Monte was a majorplanner for the Khodjali “operation”, what he wanted in fact was to ethnically cleanse theplace, yet was unable to prevent the massacre of its Azerbaijani inhabitants by his ownmen, a fact which he freely admits, and with what appears to be genuine remorse.

The section starts outside a place called Karadaghli on February 17th or 18th, 1992,with a massacre of over 50 Azerbaijani POWs:

By five in the afternoon, the detachments had achieved their military goals. Onlyone fighter had been killed on the Armenian side that day, while two of theenemy lay dead and forty-eight captured Azeris were herded into the bed of atruck. The captives would be transported to Stepanakert, where they wouldbe held until they could be exchanged for Armenian hostages in Azeri hands.It appeared as though Karadaghlu, the first battle Monte had officially beencharged with commanding, had proceeded smoothly to its conclusion.Soon, however, things changed. Arabo andAramo fighters shoved thirty-eight

captives, including several women and other noncombatants, into a ditch on theoutskirts of the village.10 One of the captives in the ditch pulled the pin from agrenade concealed under a bandaged hand and tossed it, taking off the lowerleg of one of his captors…The Arabo and Aramo fighters there had alreadybeen hankering to “avenge” the death of another comrade the day before, so assoon as the grenade had gone off they began stabbing and shooting their captives,until every last one was dead… by the time Monte came across the ditch on theoutskirts of town it was a butcher’s scrap heap.Monte had given strict orders that no captives were to be harmed. The veins on

his neck stood out like braided hemp, and he hollered until he was hoarse, but theblack-turbaned Arabo captain didn’t even shrug as he turned away…More than fifty Azeri captives had been butchered at Karadaghlu. But it was

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not the butchery that damaged Monte’s reputation among the Karabagh moun-tain people… rather (it) was the fact that the butchery at Karadaghlu had takenplace against his orders…Monte realized that if he ever were to exercise authority in Martuni, he would

have to gain that authority not by decree in Stepanakert, but on the battlefield.OnFebruary 22, he led a successful lightning attack against Azeri positions on thestrategic heights of Vesalu. But a few days after the victory at Vesalu, he facedeven more brazen insubordination, with even bloodier results than Karadaghlu:on February 26, he stood on a slope near Khojalu (Khodjali), the site of his firstrecon operation three weeks earlier, and surveyed a trail of bloody shawls strewnacross the brown grass and snow.As soon as he had arrived atKhojalu in responseto reports of fighting, he had begun piecing together the story of themassacre thathad just wound down, perhaps only an hour before his arrival.At about 11:00 PM the night before, some 2,000 Armenian fighters had

advanced through the high grass on three sides of Khojalu, forcing the residentsout through the open side to the east. By themorning of February 26, the refugeeshad made it to the eastern cusp of mountainous Karabagh and had begunworking their way downhill, toward safety in the Azeri city of Agdam, about sixmiles away. There, in the hillocks and within sight of safety, Mountainous Kar-abagh soldiers had chased them down. “They just shot and shot and shot”, arefugee woman, Raisha Aslanova, testified to a Human Rights Watch investi-gator. The Arabo fighters had then unsheathed the knives they had carried ontheir hips for so long, and began stabbing…11

Combating Persistent Denial

After testimony like that, lovingly written by his brother about Monte Melkonian, theArmenian national hero and Karabakh martyr, I defy anyone, anywhere to questionwhat really happened at Khodjali that night.And yet, even as I attempted to convey to my editor in Washington the shock and

horror literally etched into the bleeding faces of survivors with their own fingernails,and the lines of mourning family members attempting to register their dead in thelocal mosque to imperfectly comply with the Muslim need to bury their dead within24 hours (the last I checked before filing my story, the death toll stood at about 477),the Armenian disinformation machine was floating a “balloon” story claiming that theywere the ones under a massive Azerbaijani attack. A Reuters’ correspondent travelingwith me and my Turkish wife kept up a steady stream of updates via an early versionof a portable telex sent by satellite. She was amazed to find all her reporting eitherdiluted down to nothing, or mixed with reports coming out of Armenia for “balance”and loaded with qualifiers she had not written, such as “allegedly” and “reportedly”.Armenians—or sympathetic foreign reporters in Moscow with Armenian friends or

translators—were watering down the Khodjali story.12 Finally, some three days afterthe horrible incident, Baku decided to open the story to Moscow-based foreign journal-ists, and flew down a plane-load of reporters on a grisly inspection tour that at leastproved that a very large number of people from Khodjali had been killed. Major mediaoutlets covering the story in the following days described the massacre with horror.The Sunday Times reported the atrocity with the headline “Armenian Soldiers MassacreHundreds of Fleeing Families” (March 1, 1992). Newsweek magazine reported: “Manywere killed at close range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others

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were scalped” (March 16, 1992). The New York Times also described beheadings and actsof scalping (March 3, 1992). Time magazine called the actions against Khodjali “grimand unconscionable, reporting that many of those killed had been mutilated” (March16, 1992). The Washington Times wrote that video footage backed accounts of the slaugh-ter of women and children (March 3, 1992).

And yet, to this day, most Armenians continue to deny that they were responsible, orturn the facts on their heads and somehow suggest that the Azerbaijanis slaughtered theirown for political gain—namely that the then opposition Popular Front of Azerbaijan wentout and killed 613 of their own citizens in order to unseat the last Communist Party leaderof late Soviet Azerbaijan, Ayaz Mutallibov.13

This outrageous charge, initially augmented by grossly irresponsible statements madebyMutallibov after he fled Baku toMoscow (but now denied by him) continues to poisonthe truth about Khodjali in circles reaching to the very top of the Democratic party of theUnited States. A few years ago, Samantha Power, known in US foreign policy circles as“the genocide chick” for her work on Darfur and other places of mass slaughter, lookedan Azerbaijani friend of mine in the eye and made the same outrageous accusation attrib-uted to Mutallibov and still being spread by Armenian propagandists.14

I would like to note, however, that not all Armenians tow this line, and that even thoughbelatedly, some have come to confirm the outline I first reported back in late Februaryand early March 1992 that was alluded to in “My Brother’s Road”.

An Anglo-Armenian guy, a member of my admittedly small “fan club” in Yerevan, hassent me periodic “reviews” of my chapter on Khodjali as it appears in my book on post-Soviet Azerbaijan.15 On the whole, the reviews are “favorable”. He also once sent me adraft short-story by an anonymous friend, also Armenian, which, while not namingKhodjali by name, dealt with the post-traumatic remorse and stress of an accidentalkiller-of-children in a Khodjali-like environment. The piece was entitled “After thePrayer”. Another friend, a Russian–Armenian academic, informed me that accordingto his research, the Armenian forces surrounding Khodjali broke down after losingseveral key officers. Such individuals, alas, are in a distinct minority. The majority ofArmenians and their backers continue to claim that it was the Azerbaijanis who hadkilled their own people.

After Khodjali, the disinformation story went on and on, but might be summed up assuch: a cease-fire would be declared to allow for negotiations in a given location—Tehran, Sochi or St. Petersburg perhaps—and the ever-eager international press wouldstart to predict a “breakthrough”. Then the Armenians would announce an Azerbaijaniviolation of so-called cease-fire and make ominous noises of a massive new offensive,which needed to be thwarted. The international media, usually reporting fromMoscow, would then duly report “the facts”. Time and time again, the next day wouldsee another “defensive” Armenian victory over the Azerbaijanis at Susha, Lachin, Kelba-jar, Fuzuli and then Zengalan, until the prospective map of “areas of traditional Armeniansettlement” had been pushed out to the new cease-fire lines.

The Kurds’ Inconvenient Revolt

The cleverest move by the Armenian ForeignMinistry at the time, however, was injectingthe “Kurdish Question” into the debate in both the conquest of Lachin and Kelbajar,both Azerbaijani territories between the legally defined Mountainous “Nagorno”—Karabakh Autonomous District and Armenia itself. In both cases, Armenia floated astory about Karabakh forces merely aiding local Kurds in revolt against vicious (Azerbai-

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jani) Turks. Yerevan would then flood the newly conquered area with (temporary) YezidiKurds from Armenia and only then invite international observers in to inspect.16

As for Kelbajar, it fell on April 1, 1993 to a pincer movement, with one claw underMonte Melkonian’s command coming from Karabakh, and the other under a FrenchArmenian named Shishko (“Chubby”) from Armenia itself—a fact vigorously deniedby Yerevan because it would prove direct Armenian involvement in the conflict, whichhad always been heretofore denied.17 The human result of the assault was a stream ofsome 50,000 new internally displaced people (IDPs) from Kelbajar into the amazingshrinking state of rump Azerbaijan, with many freezing to death while escaping overthe 9,000-foot (3,000-meter) Murov Mountain pass.The international community remained largely unaware of this crucial development in

the conflict because the government in Baku had declared martial law throughout thecountry in response to the Kelbajar catastrophe and that in turn became the news fromAzerbaijan as filtered through Moscow that day.18

Conclusion

Today, 20 years after the Khodjali Massacre and other “news” from the Karabakh con-flict, Azerbaijan continues to play catch-up pool with the Armenian propaganda machine.Not surprisingly perhaps, the Azerbaijanis are even trying to copy the Armenian successat portraying themselves as international victims. The events of Khodjali, for example, arenow usually framed as “genocide”, while other events leading up to the open conflict(Sumgayit in 1988 and Black January of 1990) are dismissed as Moscow-driven conspira-cies against Soviet Azerbaijan that it happened out of the blue. This is similar to the factthat Armenian nationalists maintain that the events of 1915 happened when theOttoman-Turks simply went crazy with blood-lust one fine day with no provocationwhatsoever to commit the “genocide”.All that said, I often wonder what the Karabakh war would be represented as, if e-mail,

let alone cell-phones, FaceBook and Twitter had existed at the time. Those of us report-ing on it did so the old-fashioned way: collect your multiple sources, digest the infor-mation, write out a report long-hand, revise it, find and use a telex if it worked, orbook a call to dictation and revise, revising the report again and again while waiting forthe operator to make the connection.

Those days, alas, are gone.

NOTES

1. The most curious enclave in recent history was Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, which legally becameterritorial Scotland for the duration of the 1999–2002 Lockerbie trials against the Libyan suspects ofthat catastrophic act of air terror.

2. Ibid.3. Karki had the unique status of being an enclave/exclave of the Azerbaijani exclave of Naxjivan.4. One could argue that it achieved temporary “enclave” status around January 1992 when the Armenian

majority (all legally citizens of Azerbaijan) declared independence until in May of that same year. Thatwas when it became physically connected to Armenia via the so-called Lachin Corridor to Goris andthus lost its enclave status. With the conquest of Kelbajar to the west of Karabakh in April 1993 andthen Zengilan on the Iranian frontier in August of that year, the claim of “enclave” status by the separa-tists and their supporters for Karabakh became not only redundant but also nearly obscene.

5. Most recently, the government of Azerbaijan has attempted to impose its own terms of discourse,insisting that Karabakh be referred to as “occupied territories” as opposed to “disputed territories”.

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Bolstered by four United Nations Security Council resolutions on precisely this issue—that Armeniaimmediately cease its occupation—the muchmore ambivalent “disputed” is still in common use in theWestern press.

6. See the forthcoming English translation (from the Azerbaijani side) of “Sumgayit 1988” by AslanIsmayilov who was the prosecutor in the 1989 trial of seven of the thugs arrested on charges ofrape, murder and general mayhem. The gang was led by an Armenian by the name of EduardRobertovich Grigorian. While the “Sumgayit Events” of February 28/29 1988 received wide coveragein the Soviet and international press—largely because of apparently pre-position video cameras—thetrial itself received virtually no attention whatsoever. Ismayilov demanded the death penalty forGrigorian, but the defendant was basically given a slap on the wrist and allowed to serve hisminimal term in Russia before being released to Armenia, where he disappeared. Throughout hisdamning book, Ismayilov maintains that he was set up to fail by local Azerbaijani authorities onorders from Gorbachev’s Kremlin, which was deeply infiltrated by a long list of Armenian advisors.He writes: “At the apex of the pyramid was of course (Georgi) Shakhnazarov himself, Assistant/Special Advisor to Secretary General/President Mikhail Gorbachev. Next came (Karen) Brutents,Deputy Head of the International Department; Mchedlov, Deputy Director of the Institute ofMarxism-Leninism under the Central Committee; Karagozian, Director of the Ideological Depart-ment of the Central Committee and Onikov, Organizer in charge of the Ideological Department ofthe Central Committee. This hierarchical system at lower levels consisted of Arzumanyan G.G.—Director of the Section of Social Sciences of the Presidium of the USSR; Kuzachian L.S.—DeputyDirector of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences; Momchian Kh.N.—Presidentof the Sociological Association of the Soviet Union; Petrosian Y.A.—head of Leningrad branch ofthe Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and chairman of theResearch Board on Conferring Scientific Degrees.

Shakhnazarov also had a well-organized team of academicians and associate members of theAcademy of Sciences of the USSR, who were all well connected. This team consisted of the FullAcademicians Ambartsumian, Osipian, Demirchian, Bagdasarian, Enikolopov, Knuniants, Chayla-khian, Sandakhchiev, Takhtajian, Aganbegian, Khachaturov; Associate Members of the AcademyMergelian, Mikaelian, Babaev, Sarkisov, Agajanov, Babaian, Mirzabekov, Geodakchian, Sarkisian,Fanarchian, Choylakhian, Sitarian and others. The work of this group was simplified by the factthat Yevgeni Primakov who had various relations with the Armenians directly interacted withShakhnazarov. The number of high-ranking Armenians who had a strong influence on the country’s[USSR] politics had never been as large as under Gorbachev since the time of Lenin and Stalin. Allthose who worked in those years at the “Old Square” confirm that Shakhnazarov had a specialstatus in the surroundings of Gorbachev, exerted influence on the Secretary-General in the formationand execution of his policy and that this influence grew day by day.

7. In the most shocking admission of culpability, Armenia’s then-defense minister (and currentArmenian President) Serge Sarkisian was quoted as saying “Before Khodjali, the Azerbaijanisthought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hands against the civilianpopulation. We were able to break that [stereotype]”. Quoted in Thomas de Waal, “The BlackGarden”, New York, NY: NYU Press, 2003, p. 85.

8. Markar Melkonian, My Brother’s Road, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.9. Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral, including then-Armenian president Levon Ter-

Petrossian, and he is now buried at the highest point in the Armenian-equivalent to Martyrs’ Lanein Baku and regarded as a national hero.

10. Presumably, Armenian volunteers from the Diaspora in the Arab world and Europe.11. Melkonian, My Brother’s Road, op. cit., pp. 211–213.12. This allegation is of course almost impossible to prove, aside from a weird “feel” throughout the years

about just how many assistants and other second-tier people in the foreign news organizations inMoscow in the 1990s (when I was active in the Caucasus) were Armenian. The most specific I canget on this ambiguous subject was when the London-based Institute of War and Peace Reportingasked me to solicit a piece from Mehrdad Izadi, the Iranian Kurdish editor of the New York-basedKurdish Times on the assault and ethnic-cleansing of the Kurdish area of Azerbaijan called Kelbajar,detailing the disinformation campaign put into action in April 1993. The IWPR people promptlygave the submission to some London-based Armenian “experts” on the Kurdish Question, whopromptly killed it because it pointed a finger at Armenian manipulation. Izadi later told me hewould never stand in a protest line with anti-Turkish Armenians ever again. Personal contacts arewith Izadi, circa summer 1997.

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13. An interesting recent spin on this theme happened during a lunch-turned-confrontation between theArmenian Ambassador to France, H.E. Vigen Tchitechian and the internationally known photojourn-alist Reza Degati in 2010. Reza had been asked by the municipal government of Paris to show a 30-year retrospective on his work in the Luxumbourg station of the Paris metro. In it, he included aniconic image of a woman from Khodjali wailing with grief after discovering her son and husband inan Aghdam morgue with their eyes torn out. Now, almost two decades after the Khodjali Massacre,the ambassador asked Reza to lunch to chat about “other things” before first asking him to take downthe caption associated with the Khodjali picture, then trying to convince him that it had not beenArmenians involved in the massacre but rather Azerbaijanis or possibly “Afghanis” until he finallyuttered an oblique threat to Reza: “You are only one man here in France, while we are 500,000”.Soon thereafter, “unknowns” began to scrawl graffiti over the “offending” Khodjali caption. Later,someone came and ripped it off the wall. Interview with Reza, Paris, October, 2011.

14. Conversation with Elin Suleymanov, then a student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA, now Azerbaijani ambassador to the United States.

15. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Google it on Amazon.com to seesome rather interesting “reviews”.

16. My source on this is a best anonymous Armenian diplomat I met at the “Association for the Study ofNationalities” (ASN) conference vodka session at Columbia University in New York, circa 1996.

17. Markar Melkonian, My Brother’s Road, op. cit.18. Lawrence Sheets, Little Pieces of Empire, New York, NY: Crown/Random House, 2011, pp. 119–128.

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