New Book on the Khojaly Massacre Raises Questions about Who's to Blame and the Involvement of the International Community

    LOS ANGELES, CA, June 03, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Internationally recognized author, Raoul Contreras brings to life a little known war tragedy, the Khojaly massacre, with his recently published novel, Murder in the Mountains: War Crime in Khojaly and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict.

The horror of this particular tragedy, the brutal invasion and ethnic cleansing committed against the town of Khojaly in Azerbaijan, has been intensely compounded by an aftermath of misconception and denial, and the resulting and ongoing failure of the international community to demand tangible justice and closure for the victims. There is international consensus on the event and the identity of the victims, and yet the known perpetrators continue the same occupation, through this day. It began on a bitterly cold February night of 1992, when the Armenian government ordered its troops to destroy an innocent town of 6,000 people in the Caucasus Mountains. The town was Khojaly in Azerbaijan's Karabakh region. Surrounded on three sides by Armenian troops and their allies, the town was destroyed in less than three hours by bombardment, tanks and hundreds of attackers on foot.

For the first time in his novel, Mr. Contreras opens up the complicated regional history and explains the international community's lack of engagement on this issue, and how this lack of international outcry has perpetuated and broadened the scope of injustice for thousands of innocent people. With the recent events occurring in Azerbaijan and related news dominating the current media, Mr. Contreras sheds lights in his book on the current conflict from his perspective as an expert on terror and war crimes. His deep knowledge on international affairs along with his distinctly American viewpoint around freedom and liberty are infused throughout the book, offering the reader a relatable and matter of fact source on the conflict and how it connects to the broader issues within the region, the Middle East, and terrorism.

"We live in the Age of the Tweet, and in a nation and world with the attention span of a hummingbird. Conflicts near and far command great attention then suddenly disappear down the memory hole. In Murder in the Mountains, journalist Raoul Lowery Contreras takes readers to little known Azerbaijan and Armenia in fierce conflict for centuries...he charts the conflict and its aftermath, providing documentation for human rights violations...here is the evidence of the ongoing struggle of memory against forgetting", said Lloyd Billingsley, author of Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield and Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry.

Human Rights Watch called this mass killing of innocent people of Khojaly "the largest massacre in the conflict" between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Khojaly was one of the first atrocities of the war waged by Armenia against Azerbaijan in the early 1990s, eventually resulting in the illegal military invasion and total ethnic cleansing of twenty percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory. The Khojaly Massacre represents a conflict frozen in time; a conflict that has no international outrage pushing for a solution. Khojaly was only the beginning of many years of attacks and terror. The story must be told, so that such inhumane brutality is never again repeated.

About the Author
Raoul Lowery Contreras is internationally recognized for writing for The Hill, NY Times Syndicate, Fox News Latino, and various other publications across the globe. He has a passion of finding untold stories that can foster change in our world. Being a former United States Marine, the story of the Khojaly massacre resonates with him as a story of terror and crime that needs to be told.

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