Talk:Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh (1988-1994)

Unreliable sourcing and POV-pushing

This article seems to be entirely an Azerbaijani propaganda piece, especially considering the words "Karabakh genocide" appears in zero of the sources mentioned on the page. One of the main reasons I believe this page is disingenuous at best and propagandistic at worst is the usage of Azerbaijani state media and linked organs as sourcing for many of the claims, 17 of the 41 are either directly from the Azerbaijani government or are from Azeri state-linked media such. Several regions (Qubatli, Jabrayil, Fuzuli, and Zangilan) all are noted to not have had any massacres against Azerbaijanis, although hundreds of thousands were displaced. In the HRW piece on these regions, the word genocide is never used to describe the displacement of Azerbaijanis, and the Demoscope link only leads to the 1989 USSR census, and the numbers given in the Wiki article are only the additions of how many people (ethnicity is not mentioned) lived there before the war, not how many were displaced during it. The Western World section of the article also reads like WP:ESSAY, and throughout the article there is scant mention of the Armenians that were deported and killed in Nagorno-Karabakh during the first war. Jebiguess (talk) 17:20, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

1. No, "the article is not propaganda". The artiucle already mentions that there were almost no reports on the mass killings that happened in Karabakh, which is the reason your so called "reliable sources" are less than your so called "non-reliable sources". Also, the article mentioned that the Armenians specifially targeted Muslim Kurds, Azerbaijani Turks and Meskhetian Turks. Now if you use your brain, you can probably know what number of people were displaced when you look at those demographics if only the Kurds and Turks were displaced, right? Is it that hard? And the ethnicities were indeed mentioned. Te part where the Western World is mentioned isn't WP:ESSAY either because I have given sources for the claims and the same thing is mentioned in another article that was NOT written by me. With that logic, calling a dictatorship a "dictatorship" would also just be an opinion, which it is not.

2. It is a genocide: The term of a genocide is "a crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."

2.1. Intent to destroy Turkic and Muslim people in Karabakh: As already said, the Armenians targeted mainly Azerbaijani Turks, Meskhetian Turks and Muslim Kurds, all three are Muslim and two of the groups Turkic. The Armenians were also committing crimes as "revenge" for the 1915 genocide in Anatolia. An example here in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/azerbaijan/comments/l8oxqb/this_video_makes_every_armenian_proud_armenians/. The Armenians are chanting "Revenge is done, Turks are killed, houses are burned, misht hay!". This video of Armenians chanting about killing especially Azerbaijanis (Azerbaijanis are referred to as "Turks" by Armenians in an insulting manner) that their goal was to kill ALL THE TURKS in Karabak has revenge for 1915. Also this video (and also this: https://www.reddit.com/r/azerbaijan/comments/kz40ph/karabakh_armenians_burn_a%C4%9Fdam_after_capture_of/) shows the Armenians burning down and destroying the city of Shusha (and Aghdam), which would be cultural genocide and also add up to the argument that these events themselves were a genocide. 40 to 65 AZERBAIJANI (again, targeting Azerbaijanis) mosques, a major theatre, 3 big academies, 2,000 exhibits, 19 museums and monuments and many other Azerbaijani heritage were destroyed in a way of targeting Azerbaijanis and their culture and heritage in the region. Another argument for Armenians intending to remove the Muslims and Tzrks from the area is them targeting also Kurds.

2.2 The Kurds in Karabakh were displaced and expelled just like the Azerbaijan, with the Armenians finding no difference, same with the Meskhetians. The Armenians aldo, after destroying the mosques, started building illegal churches in the area such as the St. Hambardszum Church in Lachin which was illegally (according to international law, building monuments on illegally occupied territories is not aloowed) built without the permission of the Azerbaijani government, again an act of cultural destruction and replacement of Azerbaijanis.

2.3 In conclusion, the Armenians were intending to destroy the Turkic and Muslim groups in Karabakh, whic his by definition considered a genocide.

3. If Srebrenica, where 8,000 people were killed, is considered a genocide (which it is), then how aren't multiple mass killings, massacres, executions and expulsion (16,000-30,000 people killed; 724,000-1 Million people expelled; 613 killed in one massacre alone) over a 6-year-span considered a genocide. Both pass every step to be considered a genocide, and Khojaly (and therewith the opther events together with Khojaly over 6 years) are recognized as a genocide by 7 countries.

4. I've looked through the sources and these sources call it a genocide:

20) "They committed an act of genocide by killing civilians"; "They did not only commit genocide in Agdaban"; "According to the specifics and nature of the Agdaban tragedy, it fully complies with the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948. Therefore, this tragedy is considered an act of genocide under international law. should be assessed and this massacre perpetrated against the peaceful population of Agdaban village should be recognized by the world community as a crime of genocide."

27) "the Armenian detachments of Arabo and Aramo nevertheless captured Garadaghly and committed genocide against the civilian population there"; "Some time later, the Armenian Arabo troops committed genocide against the civilian population of Khojaly"

4.1 So the events are referred to as genocide 7 times

5. Why should be there a mention of the Armenians that were killed or deported when their numbers were way less and this article specifically talks about the Azerbaijanis and not Armenians. Still, the expulsion of Armenians was mentioned, although id didn't have to. With that same logic: Why isn't the killings of Turks mentioned in Armenian genocide? Why isn't the killings of Japenese mentioned in Nanjing Massacre? So many examples, with your logic, all of them just propaganda and falsified.

6. The events aren't "exaggarated". Just like every article on any massacre, mass killing or genocide, it obviously mentions that those events were infact brutal and bad. Why hsouldn't it be the same with this one: Should I add "The Armenians killed the Azerbaijanis, but meh it's war, something like that happens, not too bad"? Viceskeeni2 (talk) 18:37, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Also I just added information about the further expulsion of Armenians too, like you requested, which technically isn't needed at all in an article talking about what happened to Azerbaijanis Viceskeeni2 (talk) 20:38, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

This must be one of the most pathetic attempts to push an agenda on this site I have ever seen.

1. You can't just explain away the fact that nobody outside of Azerbaijani state-controlled publications takes these claims seriously with "there were almost no reports". There is enough source material out there to get a good picture of what happened during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War; and if there weren't, this would not excuse the use of publications by the Azerbaijani government. But who am I telling this to; this should be obvious to anybody editing on Wikipedia, along with the fact that these publications are in fact unreliable gobbledygook and nothing else.
2. Genocide is not just any crime, it is a legal term codified in the UN Genocide Convention. Wikipedia is not the place to hypothesise about the Armenian Armed Forces' intent to destroy the Turkic element of Karabakh. 2.1a Your first "source" is an intentionally mistranslated video posted on Azerbaijani Reddit of all places. Not only does it translate the Turkic yoldaş ("comrade") as "subhuman" (obviously to make a propagandistic point), it later attributes wrong lyrics to the quite famous song Գինի լից ("Pour the Wine"; about Soghomon Tehlirian's assassination of Talât Pasha, one of the main architects of the Armenian Genocide). 2.1b The quotes you attribute to it are completely missing in the clip, so I guess you just believed what the caption of a Reddit post told you. Even though there is, again, no trace of it in the footage, "Turk" wouldn't even be an insult in this context. There is no mention of an intention to "murder all Turks for 1915", nor is the topic of the aforementioned song even close to such a message. 2.1c Now to the second, sigh, Reddit post you linked to. A video of a guy driving through a war-torn city in shambles is not "proof" for the charge of cultural genocide. For the rest of your claims here, how about providing actual sources? 2.2a There is no indication of any intentional campaign to destroy cultural artifacts in the surrounding regions. The legality of the construction of a church is unrelated to this question and nothing but a red herring. 2.3 In conclusion, random uncommented clips uploaded on Reddit are not a source and your arguments do not add up to your conclusion.
3. Intent for the Bosnian Genocide was proven in court, such proof does not exist in your case. High civilian casualties during armed conflict do not imply the intention of one group to exterminate another. Up to 635,000 German civilians were killed during the Allies' strategic bombing campaign in WWII; over 100 thousand Iraqi civilians died during the Iraq War. But let's dissect these figures based on the sources within the article. 3.1 While about 8,400 Bosniak men were murdered during the Srebrenica Massacre, the total number of Bosniak civilians killed during the conflict was much higher, approaching about 33,000. 3.2 The lower bound for the number of civilian casualties during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War stems from Jessica Atwood's 2007 article Civil Wars of the World: Major Conflicts since World War II, although it notes "more conservative estimates" within the same article. It seems to cite a 2005 article titled Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths by Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch. I was not able to find any mention of such figures for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in that article. The upper bound stems from a Reuters article that mentions no sources. 3.3 Regarding the number of displaced "Azerbaijani Turks, Muslim Kurds and Meskhetian Turks", the source used for the lower bound within the article is a rather obscure Viennese daily newspaper that, again, does not reference any sources for its claims. The number 724,000 supposedly includes Azeris [sic] from the former Armenian SSR, when the present article does not make such a distinction and only covers the Karabakh region. The figure "over 1,000,000", usually exclusive to the most exquisite of Azerbaijani government propaganda, is cited from the aforementioned Reuters article. That number however, includes all people displaced during the conflict, including - Armenian refugees from the Azerbaijani SSR, - Armenian IDPs displaced from within the Armenian SSR as well as - Azerbaijani refugees from the Armenian SSR. Thus, none of your figures (or even an approximate range) are backed by sound sources and every single one of the latter is misrepresented by this article. 3.3a According to the Soviet Census of 1989, the last one conducted before the outbreak of the war, 40,688 Azerbaijanis lived within the NKAO in that year. According to the same source, a total of 201,016 people (overwhelmingly Azerbaijani but including other minorities) lived in the regions surrounding the NKAO under full Armenian control from 1995 to 2020, while 220,710 (ditto) lived in the partially Armenian-controlled regions. The number of Azerbaijanis displaced from the Karabakh region must thus have been less than about 460,000. Since the article also claims that tens of thousands of these died during the war, I wonder where the remaining 600,000 or so are supposed to have came from. 3.4 That 613 Azerbaijani civilians died during the Khojaly Massacre is a mere claim by the Azerbaijani government, so again no WP:RS. How many Azerbaijanis perished during that event is not only controversial, but the exact role and responsibility of the Armenian Armed Forces there is also disputed. Not that state recognition determines whether a historical event was a genocide or not anyway, but I do not think the fact that Azerbaijan itself, its two staunchly anti-Armenian allies Turkey and Pakistan, as well as three countries in Latin America (note: the source material for two of them is at best shaky) recognise the massacre as a genocide, is worth anything, to be frank. Since the "Estonian recognition" you must have included in your count stemmed from the aptly titled Estonia-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Friendship Group and not the government or legislative branch of the Republic of Estonia, it's actually at most five countries if you do not count Azerbaijan itself. To quote the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention: "[T]here has never been an independent fact-finding mission allowed into the area and no independent scholars can verify the facts and arguments offered by Azerbaijani state authorities and state-supported researchers."
4. You picked out two sources from the article that call the events a "genocide". The first one is a .gov.az domain, so a literal government statement, that does not contain a single source itself. The second is an interview of an Azerbaijani soldier merely alleging (again, unsourced) that the events constitute genocide in an Azerbaijani media outlet controlled by the state. I do not think it is necessary to comment on this any further.
5. The articles you referenced do not contain similar statistics because they are about utterly asymmetrical conflicts/events that are in no way comparable to the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The number of displaced Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the years 1988-1994 was approximately in the same range, that context is necessary to avoid pushing the exact twisted narrative that is being brought forward here.
6. As I have demonstrated in the points above, the entire article is not only a gross exaggeration of the events that actually took place, but either uses direct government info or twists the available independent source material to push a revisionist agenda. It's an amalgamation of age-old debunked talking points, that have no place on a platform like this.

AlenVaneci (talk) 04:01, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

1. I never said that nobody outside Azerbaijan has sources, I just said the Western sources are limited because a specific diaspora group tried everything to stop all of the reports on the mass killings in Karabakh. Also yea, there is enough source material, which is why only 17 out of 41 are Azerbaijani sources, while 24 are other sources. Also, there is nothing wrong with using publications of a government when there are no other reports on it. I tried to use as many western sources as possible but because a specific diaspora group had to prevent them from getting to Western countries I also had to use many Azerbaijani sources. Also aren't Ukrainian government sources uses for the Ukraine war? Or is that different because there isn't a specific diaspora group preventing the events happening in Ukraine to get to the public?

2. Oopsie, then that was a small mistake I made, sorry for that. However, the targets of the Armenians in Karabakh still were Turkic and Muslim groups. And there is dozens of other proof, destroyed mosques, destroyed theatres, destroyed museums, destroyed villages etc. that shows the Armenians committing cultural genocide against Azerbaijan. Those videos are only showing HOW they were doing it. Or is that just "overexaggarated propaganda" which is how a specific diaspora group calls it? And yes there is. Did the 40-63 mosques get destroyed accidentally? Did the theatre in Aghdam get destroyed so hard that only the gate at the front was left of it accidentally? Were whole villages and cities get destroyed, burned down and abandoned on accident? I don't think so.

3. Yes, the Bosnian genocide was proven in court because the Bosnians didn't have a specific diaspora group against them preventing any information about the crimes in Karabakh from getting to the public. However, I've already proven that what happened in 1988-1994 was indeed a genocide, it fits all criterias. There were a bunch of mass killings and massacres towards two specific groups and cultural destruction of the monuments and villages of that same specific group. And just like in the Bosnianwar: 8,400 Bosniaks were killed in Srebrenica, 33,000 in the whole war. 613 Azerbaijanis in Khojaly, 16,000-30,000 in the whole war. But do you know why the crimes against Bosniaks are considered a genocide by you and those against Azerbaijanis arent? Exactly. Because there wasn't a massive specific diaspora group in the West that was spreading misinformation, pushing their agenda and preventing any crimes against Azerbaijanis from being documented calling them "propaganda, fabricated and exaggarated", exactly what you do right now. The 724,000 from Armenia too was my mistake, I'll immediately change it then.

4. It was proven that the Armenians committed the Khojaly massacre, and although there is a bit of doubt, it is still proven by HRW that indeed Armenians committed the massacre. And because of the fact that casualties are disputed, I said that it ranges from 500 to over 1,000, while the official number given by Azerbaijan is 613. And if 613 was propaganda, then why didn't Azerbaijan just say that 1,000 people died like some say? And I listed the number of the countries recognizing it because that further proves that Armenians were committing genocide. Yes, some states recognizing it doesn't directly decide anything, but further proves that there was a genocide. And if there never was an independent mission in Khojaly, then how did HRW prove it? Is HRW suddenly an Azerbaijani propaganda machine now?

5. Yea I pointed out those sources because you said there was no source calling it a genocide.

6. The number of DISPLACED was but the number of KILLED wasn't. The number of displaced is around same but the number of killed isn't, 5,000 and 16,000-30,000 are numbers with a pretty big difference.

7. "Gross exaggaration" so writing an article about a genocide, multiple mass killings and destruction of culture is exaggaration now? Hmmm, what does that remind me of... Ah exactly! The exact words a specific diaspora group in the West was saying about the events. And I'll admit, I made some mistakes in the article however I didn't "purposely twist the points" and exaggarate anything. I already told another guy who was talking about the article, if there is something wrong with the article then I'm sorry and to please report it to me so I can change it. I want to be critisized for any mistakes I made so I can fix them.

8. Knowing this won't get anywhere and the article maybe get deleted if I don't change the name, because of the influence of a specific diaspora group, I'll change the name of the article to "Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh", although the word "Genocide" also fits Viceskeeni2 (talk) 10:01, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I've redirected this newly created article "Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh (1988-1994)" to here as the user who created it doesn't have the required privileges of WP:XC to edit Aremnia-Azerbaijan articles, per WP:GS/AA. I've also given the user appropriate warnings. Additionally, as @Jebiguess noted here, a large part of the article was sourced by partisan non-reliable sources, among other issues. And the infobox for example mentioning "200 to 613 killed (Khojaly)" for Deaths already has its own article (Khojaly Massacre), so this is just a heavy POV fork too. I think the redirect wikilinks such as "Karabakh genocide" and "Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh (1988-1994)" that are basically result of Viceskeeni2 editing should be deleted too, but I couldn't do that, so I just redirected the whole article. I think the talk page should be deleted as well. Could any of the admins help? @ScottishFinnishRadish @Rosguill would greatly appreciate it if you have spare time to help. Vanezi (talk) 12:40, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I've deleted Karabakh genocide as an ECR violation. Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh (1988-1994) has significant edits from EC editors, so I've left the redirect in place. WP:RFD is the place to go to handle that. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:45, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

@ScottishFinnishRadish many thanks. Vanezi (talk) 12:47, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Sure no problem with the first article because that was a redirect and the mai narticle was already renamed but there is no reason to delete the actual article Viceskeeni2 (talk) 12:51, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

This article is a heavy WP:POVFORK of articles like Khojaly massacre and Refugees in Azerbaijan, violates WP:NPOV, among other issues already mentioned. Redirect links should be deleted, and you should consider carefully reading the warnings on your talk page, especially for contentious topics which are not only restricted like AA, but are also subject to stricter moderation. So be mindful of that if you plan to edit AA topics in future, especially considering the type of tendentious editing you did. Vanezi (talk) 13:00, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

How is it Wikipedia:POVFORK? Can you explain it? Is saying that a genocide and multiple massacres against another ethnic group is bad suddenly not neutral and taking a side? Viceskeeni2 (talk) 13:04, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

@ScottishFinnishRadish one more inquiry if you don't mind; I don't think I ever nominated a redirect link for deletion, so I just used the standard Twinkle feature and this was the result [1]. Is this the correct format if I want to nominate "Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Karabakh (1988-1994)" link for deletion, or did I mess up? Vanezi (talk) 13:14, 27 August 2024 (UTC)