On the morning of 28 October, their daughter Gohar called them at 9am to ask how the night had been. Gohar said that she and her husband would come to the village later in the day to collect her parents, whether they wanted to leave or not – it was getting too dangerous. Eduard said everything was OK. But he had no idea that Azerbaijani forces had already entered the village. Fifteen minutes later, Gohar’s husband, Vladik, called again to urge them to pack, but a stranger picked up the phone, speaking in Azeri. “Who are you?” Vladik asked in the same language. “I’m Azerbaijani and this is Azerbaijan,” the man said. The phone went dead.
“Their soldiers just ran into the house with those big automatic rifles, pointing their weapons at us, shouting, threatening us,” Arega said. “I started crying, pleading with them not to hurt us, but they twisted my husband’s arms behind his back and led him out of the house. Then they pounced on me. I screamed, I tried to resist, I was telling them I won’t go anywhere but they were yelling and pushing me, so they forced me out. I begged them to at least let me take some warm clothing, but they did not.”
Azerbaijani soldiers took Arega and Eduard to a house higher up in the village, whose owner had fled, and kept them there for the night with two other local residents: Sedrak, a nearly blind neighbour in his seventies, and Baghdasar, another neighbour about ten years younger. In the morning, the soldiers took the four detainees to another abandoned house in the village and put them in a shed. At night, Baghdasar managed to dislodge one of the stones from the shed’s wall and escaped through the hole. The other three didn’t have the strength to follow.
“We spent all night in that shed, with no food, no water,” Arega said. “It got cold and I was shivering in my thin gown. My husband and Sedrak dozed off at some point, but I couldn’t sleep. I was too scared. I just sat there shivering and crying.”
The next day, the soldiers took the detainees to a logging site in the mountains nearby. More soldiers were present. One of them punched Eduard several times and kicked him with his boot, yelling that he had surely taken part in the war 30 years earlier and this was his punishment for killing Azerbaijani people back then. Another soldier, hearing Arega scream as she watched her husband being beaten, tried to reassure her: “Don’t be afraid, Granny, it’s going to be OK. You’re old. No one will kill you. Just bear up – and after a while, you’ll be released.”
The detainees were forced to climb on to the back of a truck, on top of logs, and travelled for hours. No one told them where they were going. They were hungry, thirsty, cold and frightened. Late that night, the truck arrived in Baku. Their captors locked them in a room in what seemed like a private house, without letting them use the bathroom or giving them any food or water.
In the morning, men in military uniforms blindfolded them, put them in a vehicle and took them to what their family later learned from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was SIZO-1, a pre-trial detention facility in the settlement of Kurdakhany in Baku. On arrival in the prison yard, the guards untied the blindfolds and allowed the detainees to drink water from a tap. They briefly saw another civilian from their village, Maxim Grigoryan, “a younger man” who later disappeared. His family still has no information as to his fate and whereabouts, Gohar sighs.
Those few minutes in the yard were the last time Arega saw her husband alive. Shortly after their arrival, the guards took Arega to a cell already occupied by another older woman, Azniv.
In early November, Gohar heard from the ICRC that her parents were in prison in Baku. When the hostilities ended on 10 November, the family thought they would be sent back soon. On 5 December, a man called Vladik, Gohar’s husband, from an Azerbaijani number and said, in Azeri-accented Russian, that he would put Arega on the line. Gohar snatched the phone: “Mamma, are you already here? They brought you back?” But her mother was crying and mumbling incoherently. “Mamma, please pass the phone to Daddy!” Arega started sobbing uncontrollably, then the line went dead. Three minutes later, the unknown man called again from the same number: “Your mother was trying to tell you that your father died. I’m sorry.”
That morning, before the phone call, the guards had opened the door of Arega’s cell and told her that Eduard had died in his sleep and they were there to take her to his cell, so that she could view the body. She was in a state of shock and does not remember much about those awful moments, except that her husband’s face was black and blue. Sedrak and another cellmate also told her that Eduard had gone to sleep and did not wake.
Eduard’s family pointed out that he had asthma for many years and had to take medication three times a day. In detention, he no longer had access to his medications. “Mamma had a stroke years ago and suffers from high blood pressure, so she had to take prescription medicine every day,” Gohar says. “But in prison, they would not give it to her, and no doctor examined her, despite her requests. It must have been the same for Daddy, and the stress of the captivity also took its toll.”
On 9 December, the Azerbaijani authorities returned Arega and several other detainees to Armenia. Eduard’s body was also supposed to be returned on the same flight. However, the next day when the family saw the body that had been on the flight, they realised it was another man – younger, with a scar on his face. At first, the Azerbaijani authorities denied they had sent the wrong body. Finally, on 28 December, they shipped Eduard’s body to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, and the family buried him. On his death certificate, issued by the Armenian authorities following an autopsy, the cause of death is listed as blunt brain injury, brain swelling and acute disorder of vital brain function.
Clutching her hands, Arega stared from beneath her black mourning kerchief. “At least, they finally returned his body,” she says. “And I now have a grave to visit.”
Sasha and Arsen
On 7 October, the women and children of the Gharakhanyan family fled Hadrut, a city in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani army was advancing, and it no longer felt safe to remain. But 71-year-old Sasha Gharakhanyan would not hear of leaving his home. Sasha’s 44-year-old son Arsen, who had lived in Moscow for several years but came to visit his parents shortly before hostilities began, could not bear to leave his father all alone. So, he also stayed.
On 10 October, Arsen was in the centre of Hadrut when he saw the first Azerbaijani soldiers in the city. He rushed home to collect his father, hoping there was still time for the two of them to flee. But when he entered the house, it was already full of Azerbaijani soldiers – at least 15 of them. His father watched helplessly as they pounced on Arsen, tied his hands behind his back and led him away.
Arsen’s sister Marine had last spoken to her father and brother on 9 October. When their phones stopped working a day later, she and the rest of the family feared the worst. On 9 November, they had the first glimpse of hope: a video began circulating on social media with Azerbaijani soldiers forcing Sasha to kiss the Azeri flag and repeat the phrase: “Karabakh – Azerbaijan”. At least he was alive. Ten days later, the ICRC told the family that their representatives had been able to locate and visit Sasha in a prison in Baku, where he was being held in a cell with five other civilians.
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Tanya Lokshina | Radio Free (2021-03-12T06:00:05+00:00) Survivors of unlawful detention in Nagorno-Karabakh speak out about war crimes. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/12/survivors-of-unlawful-detention-in-nagorno-karabakh-speak-out-about-war-crimes/
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