Portal:Azerbaijan/Selected biography

Chingiz Mustafayev (Çingiz Fuad oğlu Mustafayev); 1960 - 1992) was one of the most noted 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 the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, documented from the front lines ultimately at a 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 Genocide showing hundreds of dead bodies strewn across snow-covered fields. The pictures are accompanied by the sound of Chingiz’ – no stranger to the sight of corpses – sobbing uncontrollably as he filmed. His film was the irrefutable evidence that there 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.