What Colour is Genocide?

Based on the true story of the Khojaly Genocide

As an internally displaced child from Karabakh, I was seven when I learned that colours could disappear. I learned about that event at school. But children my age had lived through it firsthand.

Everything lost its own colour in Khojaly on February 25, 1992. The sky was darker than it was; the air was leaden grey; the snow was red; the faces were ghostly white.

On February 25, Ahmad’s birthday was. But for days, the city had been under siege, and his family could not celebrate. His father, mother, three older brothers, and little sister simply wished him a quiet, happy eleventh birthday. By eleven o’clock, they were already in bed. At this time, they heard a roar. Ahmad’s elder brother, Murvat, opened the door and saw sparks in the sky. The screams wafted through the air. Ahmad’s father gathered the whole family without a word, and they fled the house. On the road, they joined other villagers and moved toward the Katik forest.

After answering the call, Chingiz decided to go to Nagorno-Karabagh. It was said that Armenian forces and the Russian 366TH CIS Regiment besieged the town of Khojaly. Before being a journalist and operator, he felt it was his humanitarian duty to go there. He left the studio 215 KL, visited his family, informed them and left the house, taking his camera.

It was minus fifteen… maybe eighteen degrees. Everywhere was white… All were in the forest to escape from the enemy. The forest was their only escape.

Ahmad watched everything around him as he took a step. On the one hand, he was freezing; on the other, he was afraid of the sound of bullets flying. He couldn’t ask anything as if he swallowed his tongue. His eyes were wide open like the other children next to him. Suddenly, he felt something touch his shoulder and raised his head. What he saw scared him so much that he flinched back. A woman had been hung from her hair from the tree and was swinging. He tightened his brother and went on his way. They aimed to cross the river Gargar and enter another town.

After going for some hours in the forest at night, most of the children couldn’t bear it. Their feet were already frozen, and they couldn’t walk. The mothers took off their coats, wrapped their children, and walked by holding them. One of the women’s babies began screaming. Though she was hungry, her mother was unable to feed her. In addition, the enemy could find them because of the baby’s voice. So the mother made the hardest decision of her life and hugged her child so tightly to her chest that she would remain silent forever. On the contrary, all people with them would be in danger.

The morning took people’s hope too. As the sun was rising, they saw the snow red. They heard deafening laughter. The enemies surrounded them. Two men were grinning in a UAZ. The other two of them were on land with the guns on their shoulders. They ordered people to stop and took them to the village of Askeran.

Another group of people crossed the Gargar River and reached another town. As most of their feet were frozen, they were taken to the hospital. Chingiz's destination was the hospital. He moved slowly through the corridors, filming faces that had lost their colour, hands that trembled, eyes that no longer looked at anything. Some tried to speak to him; others could only watch in silence.

At times, his hands lowered the camera. He helped carry the wounded, adjust a blanket, or simply stood beside someone who had no one left. Then, after a pause, he raised it again.

He was not just recording what had happened. He was holding on to it — so that it would not disappear, as colour had.

When they arrived, Ahmad saw so many people who had been captivated there. The enemies pushed them with the buttstocks of their guns and gathered them into a house. They squeezed into a corner of the room. Ahmad noticed an 8-year-old boy pinned against the wall. The blood was dropping from his head, and he was dead with his eyes open. He also heard the screams of girls from another room. In the other corner of the room, two soldiers were beating two men with a long stick. After they finished hitting, one of them took the pliers and began to look for a gold tooth in their mouth. He removed one of the men’s gold teeth using pliers. As the other one had no gold tooth, the soldier pulled out his fingernails. Ahmad was watching what he saw in horror.

One of the Armenian soldiers said, “Now we will kill you one by one,” and grinned.

Ahmad whispered in a lower tone, “Please, don’t kill us. Today is my birthday.”

“So, I will not kill you”, said the soldier, “but I will give you such a present that you will never forget for the rest of your life.”

He called Ahmad and made him sit on the chair at the table. Then he shot in his palm. Despite Ahmad’s screams, he opened the samovar and held Ahmad’s hand under the hot water. His mother fainted because of his son’s screams.

Ahmad was suffering from pain in his hand. At the same time, he couldn’t take his eyes from the child on the wall. At that moment, the door of the room was opened, and two women were pushed out of the room. They were half-naked, and their hair was scattered across their faces. Both of them were holding the front of their torn dresses without raising their heads. During that day, Ahmad saw so much violence that he never forgot.

When Chingiz was informed of the place where wounded people were taken to the helicopter, he went there. He was shocked by the scenery. The surface of the snow was filled with injured elderly people and children, with their scalps torn, and many of them shot. While he was filming the scene, he was also helping the wounded to get on the helicopter in tears. He stopped filming for a moment. But the memory did not stop…

If you ask me what colour genocide is, I will tell you this: it is the red of snow, the grey of air, and the white of faces that never lived to see colour again.