742:("Ağdaban faciəsi", with "faciəsi" being translated in every dictionary I checked as "tragedy", not "massacre"). Further, that entire BBC Azeri article is relaying information from the website of the local government. "Kəlbəcər İcra Hakimiyyətinin saytında bildirilir" machine translates to "It is reported on the website of the Kalbajar Executive Power" or "the website of the Kalbajar Executive Power said". Similarly, "Rayonun icra hakimiyyətinin saytında qeyd edilir ki" machine-translates to "It is noted on the website of the district executive power" or "According to the website of the district executive power". Granted, I'm using machine-translation here and don't speak Azerbaijani, but the only place I can find that talks about this event is the one BBC Azeri reporting on the local government's website.
354:
Baku-based BBC Azerbaijani
Service source still is an Azerbaijani source, so the original complaints for the prior deletion still stands. Even the BBC Azerbaijani Service source itself is largely based on and repeating the district Azerbaijani government website, by its own admission. Context matters, and BBC generally having a consensus of being generally reliable, doesn't mean it is reliable here or in every context; Critically there is no consensus on the BBC Azerbaijani Service being reliable, let alone being reliable on Armenian affairs. Nor is there any such consensus that Azerbaijani district government websites are reliable sources. With just these two Azerbaijani sources the article fails
391:- I've scoured the internet and gone through all the English-language mentions of Agdaban I could find. There are no reliable sources attesting to this massacre. Remarkably, the BBC Azerbaijani piece has the hallmarks of being falsified. It may even have some sort of dubious connection with an editor of the Azeri-language Knowledge. I'm shocked at how untrustworthy and heavily biased the article appears to be – I'd thought that foreign-language BBC World Service output would be held to a reasonable standard. In the interest of not swamping the rest of the discussion I'm going to collapse the wall of text that details my breakdown of the evidence.
654:
occurring in the same time period in
Nagorno-Karabakh turn up plenty of literature. The article's photos appear to be inaccurately attributed, it includes anti-Armenian revisionist claims popular in Azerbaijan that have been debunked by historians (again, see my notes above for specifics) and the tone is tabloid and free of expert voices... as a Brit who firmly supports the BBC, I'm utterly dismayed to come to this conclusion, but it appears to be a blog-like nationalistic piece designed to celebrate Azerbaijan's conquest of the region and demonise/delegitimise Armenians in the region.
250:. This article is heavily padded with background and aftermath information for the war as a whole that has nothing to do with the article topic. There are only two sources claiming the massacre happened, and both are Azeri sources (BBC Azerbaijani Service is not a neutral source or even a reliable one). That means out of the 31 sources in this article, only 2 of them make any sort of reference to a Agdaban massacre at all. There are no reliable third party sources that give this subject due weight to have an article.
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journalistic standards would ensure that it validates the claims it publishes) was exactly the same as mine, until I looked closely at the article in question. I'm now of opinion that, shockingly, this is not the case for BBC Azeri – it seems to have escaped the rigorous oversight that I'd expect of the BBC (perhaps this is a broader problem with budget cuts at the BBC World
Service, while writing a complaint to the BBC about this article, I noticed that the BBC
457:. It's worth noting that according to our own article on Cornell, which cites a pair of European human rights/anti-lobbying NGOs, he leads an institute funded by a lobbyist organisation of the Azerbaijani regime. A reviewer of his work is also quoted as saying he's "generally pretty pro-Azerbaijan"; however, these criticisms may be more recent than the 1999 report. Agdaban is mentioned once in the 162 page document, on page 31:
496:"tit-for-tat massacres that decimated populations on both sides: 130 Armenians were killed by Azeris in the Kirovabad pogrom in November 1988; the Garadaghly Massacre in February 1992 left as many as fifty Azeris dead, twelve of them children; more than forth Armenians were killed in the Maraga Massacre on April 10, 1992. ... All 130 houses in the village of Agdaban were burned and the Azeri residents driven out
434:). The account of the alleged massacre provides no evidence, experts or authority, claiming "more than 30 residents were killed, hundreds were tortured and taken prisoner." The image supposedly illustrating distraught villagers from Aghdaban is attributed to the local Azeri authority ("Kalbajar Executive Power" – did this organisation even exist while the region was occupied by Artsakh?) yet it was
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442:, who marked it as their own work. This user made a single edit to the English Knowledge in 2015, then reappeared last October (in the middle of the 2020 war) with a flurry of nationalistic, reverted edits. However, they've been mostly active on the Azeri Wiki, creating articles on Azerbaijani soldiers who died in the war, as well as
415:, which also provides the article's quoted number of deaths. It has no author byline, and, going off Google Translate, is a soft-news feature piece on the history of the region following the Azeri reconquest in the 2020 war, playing up its mineral reserves and downplaying its Armenian history with a nod to
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per Jr8825 - this appears to be a nationalist hoax as presented. The BBC Azeri article doesn't claim it verified anything, it simply says that some website in
Azerbaijan claimed a massacre happened. The official Azeri communication to the UN claims that a museum to Ashug Gurban was burnt, I believe
746:
we're going to have an article about a "massacre" based on that source. See also Jr's thorough analysis above. Lack of any hits in GScholar or GBooks is a massive V failure for a 1992 event and I think a sign of hoaxing. This should be creation-protected due to the repeated re-creation; we need solid
686:
The article's picture is from 1993, per its summary on wikimedia. From other sources
Agdaban was rather attacked/captured in March 1993, which aligns with the picture, rather than April 1992 (See the Melkonian or HRW sources which I have since removed as irrelevant to this event in April 1992). This
640:
I firmly disagree, a critical examination of the BBC Azeri article raises valid and serious questions about its trustworthiness. Did you take the time to read through my break down of the sources above? Your reaction (the BBC would never publish an article of clear nationalistic bias/inaccuracy, its
473:
published in 2000 by
Routledge which cites the same paper (for completely unrelated statistics about territorial control) describes it as an "unpublished paper in the author's possession". It's nowhere on the internet and nowhere in print and I can't find any other mention of these numbers. The
353:
The original issue leading to the deletion has not yet been resolved. It was originally deleted because it relied only on
Azerbaijani sources; This article still is being supported now by only two Azerbaijani sources. It should be deleted because the original issues have not been resolved. The
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reliable sources backing up BBC Azeri's claims – what strikes me is that the BBC's extraordinary claims are not repeated anywhere else, other than obviously unreliable Azeri news sites – this is a historically recent massacre that is not mentioned in academic literature, while other massacres
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aren't possible. There's also a significant risk that a horrific case of ethnic violence, unfortunately commonplace in the region at that time, has been purposefully blown up into a massacre for propaganda purposes, given the regurgitation of unsubstantiated claims in jingoistic, non-rigorous
493:
in The
Sewanee Review (an American literary journal), which, while not an ideal source (it's not a specialist history journal), was the only academic summary of ethnic violence in the region which included a mention of Agdaban that I could find. It describes
247:
It is important to be aware that the quality of the sources is more important than how many of them there are, and those arguing to delete have made a compelling case that the sources used here are of a poor quality and/or not relevant to the subject
358:. The lack of third party foreign sources is telling. The BBC Azerbaijani Services only dedicates one sentence (or two if you pushed it) to the actual event; How are we creating such a large article from just one sentence of an Azerbaijani source.
244:
This article was previously deleted after an AfD dicussion back in 2012 and was speedily deleted in
December of last year. Now it has been recreated for a third time, and yet it still has the same issues that caused it to be deleted first place:
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makes the article even more confusing; The
Armenians capturing the town in March 1993 is missing, and what would have happened between the first capture 1992 and the second capture 1993 is not exactly clear.
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459:"From early February onwards, the Azeri villages of Malybeili, Karadagly, and Agdaban were conquered an their population evicted, leading to at least 99 civilian deaths and 140 wounded"
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includes a sentence mentioning that in 1992 the entire village was burnt down by Armenians and the Azeri population was forced to flee, citing this source as the best that can be found.
649:– something unimaginable for English-language BBC output). I encourage you to look through my notes above, machine translate the article and read it yourself, and see if you can find
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outlet automatically unreliable, as the nominator states on the article talk page, is so ludicrous that I question whether the nominator should be bringing articles to AfD at all.
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I followed the trail in search of hard evidence to support the claim that a number of civilians were massacred at Agdaban in 1992; there's nothing at the end of it. There are
461:. For starters, this isn't significant coverage and there's no mention of 'hundreds' of civilians being taken captive and tortured. The statement is supported by the footnote
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and seems like a hoax, IMO. Human Rights Watch does not make any mention of this "massacre", AFAICS. Neither does the BBC Azeri or any other BBC AFAICS. What BBC Azeri says
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645:(11/02/2021) a correction apologising for using an offensive world for homosexuality in an article written by BBC Persian, that had remained online and unquestioned
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Noting that a day after making the above comment, SolaVirum, the creator of the article, was topic banned from this topic area, following an AE report. See
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Just as with the previous article, the vast majority of cites here are supporting contextual information about the region or conflict. Setting aside
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Easily. The BBC Azeri article is certainly a reliable source and so is Human Rights Watch. The contention that simply being in Azeri makes a
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and official statements, the only source of note (and one of only two cites in the paragraph actually describing the alleged massacre) is
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A search of my university library's catalogue yielded no results. Google scholar returns no results. JSTOR returned no other results.
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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below.
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is reliable or not, then this is not the correct place for it. It's a confirmed
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The only result I found on JSTOR for 'Agdaban' was a passing mention in a
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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate.
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directly editing the Azeri-language equivalent of this article
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to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
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to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
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The Human Rights Watch source does not refer to the event.
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sourcing for an article about a massacre, war crime, etc.
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two days before the article was published by a user named
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Yunusov, Statistics of the Karabakh War, op. cit., p. 9.
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Articles for deletion/Agdaban massacre (2nd nomination)
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593:Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,
563:Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,
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97:(AfD)? Read these primers!
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