Human rights groups detail ‘war crimes’ in Nagorno-Karabakh

Human rights organisations have raised the alarm after the emergence of videos of torture, beheadings, and other abuses, much of it shared over social networks, from the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh.

In a report on Thursday, Amnesty International said it had authenticated 22 videos from the conflict that depict extrajudicial executions, the mistreatment of prisoners of war and other captives, and desecration of the dead bodies of enemy soldiers.

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Amnesty said it had digitally verified videos showing decapitations and the desecration of corpses, although it stopped short of identifying many of the victims or the circumstances of their deaths. In particular, the report documented the execution by decapitation of two Armenian civilians and the cutting of an Azerbaijani border guard’s throat and urged both countries to investigate what it described as war crimes.

“The depravity and lack of humanity captured in these videos shows the deliberate intention to cause ultimate harm and humiliation to victims, in clear violation of international humanitarian law,” said Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty International’s research director for eastern Europe and central Asia, in the report.

Earlier, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting how Azerbaijani forces had subjected Armenian prisoners of war to physical abuse and humiliation, including beating and slapping, in videos later shared online. Those cases had been verified with family members identifying the victims. Videos of the beheadings had been harder to confirm because they had been stripped of metadata showing where and when they were taken.

An Armenian human rights lawyer said that the country had taken more than 80 cases of mistreatment to the European court of human rights, and that the body of at least one captive was returned bearing signs of torture.

The report came as Azerbaijan celebrated its victory in the conflict by staging a major military parade in central Baku, with thousands of soldiers parading past the president, Ilham Aliyev, and Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who supported the country in the war. Also on display were Turkish Bayraktar TB2 armed drones that played a key role in the war.

In a speech, both Erdoğan and Aliyev indicated that the two countries would continue to press their territorial ambitions in the region.

“Azerbaijan’s saving its lands from occupation does not mean that the struggle is over,” Erdoğan said during the parade, according to a translation provided by France 24. “The struggle carried out in the political and military areas will continue from now on many other fronts.”

The latest war over the disputed territory ended one month ago in a Russian-brokered ceasefire that granted considerable territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. Both sides reported more than 2,700 soldiers killed, although the actual number may be higher. Russian peacekeepers have been deployed to the region, which had been run by an Armenian-backed local government since a bloody war in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.