Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Agdaban massacre (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Stifle (talk) 14:27, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Agdaban massacre
AfDs for this article:


 * – ( View AfD View log )

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: 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 anyway. 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. Steverci (talk) 04:13, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose. If you want to question if BBC is reliable or not, then this is not the correct place for it. It's a confirmed WP:RS if you like it or not. — CuriousGolden (T·C)  07:41, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose if you think that BBC is an unreliable source, then you should open a thread in the WP:RS/N. Though, there is a consensus on it being generally reliable. --► Sincerely:  Sola Virum  08:39, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 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 User talk:Solavirum/Archive 3. Levivich harass/hound 21:30, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete 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 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 WP:UNDUE. 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. Maidyouneed (talk) 09:35, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I note Solavirum has been since topic-banned with regards to discussions relating to Armenia and Azerbaijan Maidyouneed (talk) 01:59, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete - 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 Wikipedia. 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.

Just as with the previous article, the vast majority of cites here are supporting contextual information about the region or conflict. Setting aside Azerbaijani media and official statements, the only source of note (and one of only two cites in the paragraph actually describing the alleged massacre) is the BBC Azerbaijani Service article, 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 a revisionist theory ("the region is rich in gold and chrome deposits. Industrially important mercury reserves are located in Shorbulag and Agyatag" "There are many historical monuments of the Albanian period in Kalbajar. The most famous of these is the Khudavang temple complex..."). 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 two days before the article was published by a user named, who marked it as their own work. This user made a single edit to the English Wikipedia 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 directly editing the Azeri-language equivalent of this article.

I had a thorough look for sources elsewhere. The only reasonably respectable source brought up at the previous AfD was a 1999 report published by Uppsala University and written by Svante Cornell. 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: "From early February [1992] onwards, the Azeri villages of Malybeili, Karadagly, and Agdaban were conquered an [sic] their population evicted, leading to at least 99 civilian deaths and 140 wounded". 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 Yunusov, Statistics of the Karabakh War, op. cit.[98], p. 9., which is where the trail goes cold. Although Arif Yunusov (a well-respected human rights activist) is probably a trustworthy source, a book on conflict in the Caucasus 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 Azeri-language article has completely different figures: 67 killed, 779 civilians tortured (!), 17 burnt alive (!) and 2 missing.

The only result I found on JSTOR for 'Agdaban' was a passing mention in a 2014 article on genocide in the Caucasus 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 "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. There's no mention of killings, torture or captives at Agdaban. I suggest that the stub covering the village 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.

A search of my university library's catalogue yielded no results. Google scholar returns no results. JSTOR returned no other results.


 * TL;DR: 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 no WP:RS, so WP:V or the establishment of WP:N 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 Azerbaijani-language media. Jr8825  •  Talk  10:15, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   12:20, 21 February 2021 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk) 14:15, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep 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 BBC World Service 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.   Eggishorn  (talk) (contrib) 17:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * 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 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 recently published (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 since 2018 – 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 any 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 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. Jr8825  •  Talk  19:07, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * 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 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.Maidyouneed (talk) 03:30, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The Human Rights Watch source does not refer to the event. Maidyouneed (talk) 01:53, 5 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete and salt — it fails WP:V 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 is that it is the Aghdaban tragedy ("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. YGTBFKM 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 sourcing for an article about a massacre, war crime, etc. Levivich harass/hound 21:42, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete and Salt 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 this means az:Aşıq Qurban. power~enwiki ( π,  ν ) 22:30, 9 March 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.