I

t has already been 20 years. The people of Khojaly, a small town in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, lost their land, homes and loved ones on the dreadful night of Feb. 25/26, 1992, when Armenian troops destroyed their village. Yet the international community has done little to heal their suffering or to bring the perpetrators of this act of genocide to justice.

In an effort to raise awareness about the suffering of Azerbaijani Muslims in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azerbaijan Embassy in Jakarta organized an event as well as a photo exhibition to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Khojaly Massacre on Monday at the Pribadi Bilingual Boarding School in Depok, West Java.

“We would like to inform our Indonesian brothers and sisters about this genocide. We want the international community to put pressure on Armenia to find a peaceful solution to the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Azerbaijan Ambassador to Indonesia Tamerlan Karayev told The Jakarta Post on Monday on the sidelines of the commemorative event.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia were part of the former Soviet Union.

In 1992, on the night of Feb. 25, Armenian troops with the support of troops from the former Soviet Union’s 366 Regiment attacked Khojaly from all sides and mercilessly killed hundreds of unarmed men, women and children. “It was a genocidal massacre. Armenian troops killed 613 people, including 106 women, 63 children and 70 old men,” Ambassador Karayev said in his speech at the gathering, which was attended by schoolchildren, teachers, activists and diplomats. Human Rights Watch has described the Khojaly tragedy as “the largest massacre to date in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict”.