Today is the birthday of Azerbaijani National Hero Chingiz Mustafayev.
Chingiz Mustafayev, born on 29 August 1960, was one of the most noteworthy independent Azerbaijani journalists, granted the state order of the National Hero of Azerbaijan posthumously. Although the corpus of his journalistic work spans slightly over a year, with no formal journalistic training, Chingiz created a video anthology of the early stages of Nagorno-Karabakh War, documented from the front lines ultimately at the cost of his own life.
He was the man behind the TV camera, who filmed the scene of Khojaly Massacre in 1992. To make the footage Chingiz had to travel on an army helicopter, and despite coming under fire he managed to film the evidence of the Khojaly Massacre showing hundreds of dead bodies strewn across snow-covered fields. Azerbaijan’s official media had covered up the fact that the town had been wiped out and women, children and the elderly had been slaughtered. But his film was the irrefutable evidence that there had had been a full-scale massacre, with the perpetration of which Human Rights Watch and Russian Memorial society blamed the Armenian forces.
In the course of eight months, Chingiz shot 18 documentaries about the war in Karabakh, leaving behind a substantial historical archive. Chingiz was known for his patriotic work and was considered to have risked everything to expose the truth.
Today flowers will be laid on the grave of Chingiz Mustafayev and his relatives, friends and colleagues will commemorate him.
News.az