Background

By April 1992 the front in Nagorno-Karabakh had stabilised into trench warfare in the south but remained mobile in the north, where the lowland approaches to Stepanakert ran through the Armenian villages of Martakert district. Maraga was a village of about 400 households on the plain east of Martakert, near the Sarsang reservoir; its proximity to the front and its visibility to artillery on the Azerbaijani-held heights made it indefensible. Most younger men had left for fighting positions further south; the population at the time of the attack was overwhelmingly elderly, female and child.

The attack came in the wake of a successful Azerbaijani local push that retook several Armenian-held positions in the Martakert district. Azerbaijani forces, local OMON and Popular Front militia, entered Maraga in the late afternoon of 10 April 1992.

The event

The Cox/Eibner field investigation by Baroness Caroline Cox and John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International, conducted within five days of the attack, documented through interviews with survivors and the local Armenian authorities a pattern of close-range execution, decapitation, and the burning of bodies. The investigators photographed corpses and partially burned remains. They documented 45 dead by name and reported approximately 50 villagers, predominantly women and children, taken hostage. The village was looted and burned.

Casualty figures from later Armenian sources have run higher (up to 100), reflecting both subsequent deaths of the wounded and additional names recovered from displaced persons contested. de Waal's narrative reconstruction broadly endorses the Cox/Eibner range of 45–50 confirmed dead and notes that Armenian forces retook the village within a week, allowing some survivors to return, though the position was lost again later in the spring offensive.

Aftermath

The hostages were held in Azerbaijani custody for several months; some were exchanged through the Russian-mediated Kazimirov channel that operated throughout the war, and a small number were repatriated through Iran and through the ICRC. Several remained unaccounted for years afterward.

Diplomatically, Maraga was reported to the OSCE Minsk Group then in formation (the Minsk mechanism) and to the European Parliament. Lady Cox's intervention in the House of Lords in May 1992 brought the case to international attention; she remained the principal voice in Western politics raising civilian victimisation in the war over the next decade.

Memory and politics

Maraga is commemorated annually on 10 April in Yerevan and in the Armenian diaspora; the village itself fell to Azerbaijani control in the 2020 war and remains uninhabited. In the symmetry of war memory, Maraga is to Armenian commemoration roughly what Khojaly is to Azerbaijani, though the international visibility has been substantially asymmetric, owing both to scale and to the diplomatic mobilisation around Khojaly that has had no Armenian equivalent editorial.

The case is unusual in the war's documentation in that the contemporaneous photographic and survivor record was preserved abroad, Lady Cox's archive, the CSI files, and the de Waal interview record, at a time when most of the war's atrocities went undocumented in any Western-language source.