31st Anniversary of the Maraghaya Massacre: Artsakh Foreign Ministry

On April 10, the 31st anniversary of one of the most tragic and horrifying pages of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War—the Maraghaya massacre—will be commemorated. This was stated in a declaration issued by the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Artsakh.

On April 10, 1992, after a long and intense shelling, the armed forces of Azerbaijan invaded the village of Maraghaya in the Martakert region of Artsakh and subjected the local civilian population to a brutal massacre. More than 50 innocent civilians were brutally killed and tortured, while dozens of villagers, including women and children, were taken captive, some of whom were cruelly killed in captivity, and the fate of 19 individuals remains unknown to this day.

Two weeks after those horrific events, the settlement was attacked again, and residents who returned to bury their loved ones fell victim to new atrocities by the Azerbaijani armed forces.

The Maraghaya massacre was a continuation of the massacres and deportations carried out in Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, and other settlements of the Azerbaijan SSR, as well as against the Armenian population of Northern Artsakh, aimed at stifling the legitimate claim of the Artsakh Armenians for self-determination, as well as depriving them of their homeland through ethnic cleansing and forced deportations.

Despite the fact that the atrocities in Maraghaya have been thoroughly documented by the international community—including by human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—the lack of appropriate political assessment of this crime by relevant international bodies and the resulting impunity have paved the way for further aggression by Azerbaijan, continuing and reinforcing its leadership's anti-Armenian and genocidal policies.

As a result, confident in its impunity, Azerbaijan subsequently unleashed two more large-scale wars against the Republic of Artsakh in April 2016 and September 2020, committing new atrocities and military crimes against the Artsakh Armenians, as well as gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, while occupying new, larger territories of the Republic of Artsakh.

Today, disregarding the UN International Court's ruling to immediately halt the blockade of Artsakh, Azerbaijan continues to carry out its criminal and genocidal policies before the eyes of civilized humanity, keeping the population of Artsakh under illegal blockade for 120 days, depriving them of basic living conditions, creating a humanitarian crisis, and pursuing its criminal agenda of depopulating Artsakh through terrorist actions.

We again call on all international actors to take practical and effective actions to put Azerbaijan into a legal and constructive framework, urging its authoritarian leadership to respect international law and its commitments, and to cease the crimes committed by the Azerbaijani authorities, ensuring they do not remain silent witnesses or even accomplices.